More approvals!

We got our I800 approval last week! Hopefully, we will get our cable by Friday. Thursday would be ideal, but I try not to hope for things to go faster than normal these days. With everything that can go wrong and cause delays, I am quite happy with normal :)

It's getting closer now. Odd to think that we are down to only a few more steps. I'm not sure I'll know what to do with myself once there are no more boxes to check, papers to notarize, and dates to obsess over. How will it be to just...be?

Something very cool happened last night. Kevin and I got called out in our Mandarin class on our pronunciation. Our teacher, who is a native speaker from Shanghai, had us get up in groups of two and read a dialog. Obviously, Kevin was my partner and we got up and read our script, which boiled down to having a mutual friend and going out for Korean food after class. A couple groups had gone before us and were told they did a good job. We sat down and our teacher basically said, "Ok class, I want you to pay attention to them because their pronunciation is very good."

After we gave each other some discreet high fives, we talked about how happy we were about the comment. The thing is, we are about 80%+ self-taught. We began listening to pod casts, watching movies, and spending a lot of time saying things to each other like, "I think it's more of a wide sound. Like you're talking with a retainer. Like Shelly from South Park."* We spent a lot of time stumbling through and hoping we were doing it right. During the 3 years we've been working on it (and, oh man, we are still nowhere near passable after 3 years) we have spent a total of 9 evenings in class, only 4 of which have been with a native speaker. So, yes, being told that we are doing well is a huge boost.

Here's hoping the rest of the week is this good.

*Yes, this is actual dialog that happened. The X in Chinese makes a not-quite "sh" sound. If you smile wide while saying "sh" (or pretend you are Shelly saying a "sh") you've got it. Now end it with the back part of "cow". You've just said xiao (small)!