Two days ago was my first day of class at the East West Healing Arts Institute. Things went very well, and I got to meet a lot of very nice people. Most of my classmates are amazing individuals, and I greatly look forward to spending more time with them. The teacher, Dr. Xiping Zhou, is very eccentric, but at the same time very kind. I can tell right now that this class isn’t going to be easy, but it will be very rewarding. I now need a study partner with which to practice outside of class. I want to pair up with one of the people from the class in order to review our textbook lessons and (most importantly) to practice our techniques on each other. If I pair up with a classmate rather than practicing on someone else, they can be much more critical of me and tell me what I am doing wrong and what I must improve on.

At this time I already know German, but am quite rusty at speaking it, so I currently plan on brushing up on my German skills. After that I would really like to learn another language, but I am not sure which one. To be honest, the language that I would enjoy learning the most is Japanese, but it wouldn’t be the most practical for me. Rather than Japanese the foreign language that would be the most useful to me is Mandarin Chinese. The school that I am going to be attending is based off of the Chinese healing arts and the founder and primary teacher (as well as some other faculty) are Chinese. There is also a decent population of Mandarin Chinese speaking people in the area, but few Japanese as far as I know. In that sense, Chinese would be the natural choice, but Chinese culture just doesn’t fascinate me the way that Japanese does. Perhaps I ought to learn Chinese, and then afterwords go about learning Japanese. In a few months, I am going to be having the option of living in China for a month, and if that is the case then I would really like to know the language before going there. Before I go about making any decision reguarding this, I will take some time to brush up on my German, then I will make my decision. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind learning both languages, but it would take a lot of work (and learning just one of these Eastern languages would be difficult enough for a Westerner like me)!