Taking Chinese at UVA has been quite a pleasant experience for me for the past year. I was raised in a totally Caucasian style upbringing, despite being half Chinese, so I never got much intense language training. My mother always said that her greatest regret with raising me through high school is that I hadn't maintained my Chinese language skills. I say "maintained" because I had actually gone to Chinese school for a short while when I was very young, but before this year, I remembered NOTHING. One great help for me in learning Chinese has been my experience as a musician. As Chinese is a tonal language, I found it easiest to approach as if I were singing it. I had developed a close to perfect sense of pitch from playing the cello for 13 years so identifying tones at the start was not terribly difficult. I have definitely struggled with the multitude of characters which had to be learned in conjunction with pronouncing the words themselves. My biggest difficulty is with actually comprehending full meanings of a spoken text on the first time. I usually need to hear a sentence repeated multiple times before the translation finally clicks in my head. I am pretty comfortable with learning how to write the characters with the proper stroke order, as the rules we were taught early on were very straightforward. I just hope that I can remember everything this summer so that I won't be totally rusty when I return to live in the Chinese Language House in the fall.