no spring chicken

i spent the last few days cramming for my final exam. after the end of this term, i should have learned just about all the chinese grammar. from here on out, it's a matter of building a better vocabulary and learning a whole bunch of idioms from thousands of years of chinese history, i think.... i met some students who've studied here for a year already. after one year, they've finished with the textbooks and have moved on to reading newspapers and chinese literature. i'm halfway though my year and i hope i can be as far along as they are in another six months.

i did a quick estimate of my vocabulary base. for our final exam, our teacher gave us a vocabulary list with 13 pages, each page with 40 words, roughly 500 words. removing duplicates, maybe about 450. from last term, maybe about 350. in total, there are something like 800 words that i am supposed to be able to read, write, and say. my head hurts just thinking about that.

this evening i spent about three hours going through the vocabulary list, picking out the characters that i had no idea about at all. maybe about 10% of them i had to practice writing again. it reminded me of the time i was in fifth grade and spent two or three months memorizing words for the spelling bee. pure memorization was hard enough then. now, my head is already full of other junk, my eyes are far worse, my hands are more stiff... in other words, i'm goddamn old, hahaha.

having an engineering education hasn't been helpful for my memorization ability either. the lovely thing about engineering is that if you understand the idea, you can just forget everything, conjuring the equations at will. language doesn't work that way at all. for instance, if i start programming in a language i haven't used in a long time, i have to google syntax for almost every line of code until it comes back to me, yet if i see a sophomore year circuit analysis problem, i think i could still solve it without a textbook (maybe)...

but, being old and slow is compensated by being old and stubborn. as long as your stubbornness is directed to growing and not directed to opposing change, i think things turn out fine.

i've sort of been out of contact with my friends back home since i came here. i wonder if they're seeing the same thing. i've noticed a definite difference in the last half year. i don't know if it's because i've been out of work for a year, if it's because i'm throwing myself at a new language, if it's because i worked so hard before, or if this is simply the way things go. where's the textbook on growing old?