| Lately I feel like I need and want to learn Chinese. For the past 21 years, it's been my mom telling me how important it is and how China is growing economically. But now I REALLY want to learn it!! Learning Chinese seems overwhelming, especially b/c I want to be able to read and write well. Well, here are some things that happened lately that make me want to learn Chinese: 1. An Afternoon with Ben's mom: the other day I went to make Chinese meatballs w/ Ben's mom (Ben is one of my good friends since we were in 6th grade). The night before, I was still fretting about spending a whole afternoon alone w/ his mom, but I also asked the Lord for opportunities to share God w/ her. The last time I saw here, 3 years ago, she and the rest of Ben's family were Buddhists/non-religious. As we started talking I put in a few comments about God to test the waters. Suddenly I realize that she had become a Christian sometime since I last saw her! I asked her to share her stories about how that came about, and we had a great time. 7 hours flew by so quickly and smoothly. The story of her conversion is really amazing. The abridged version: one day she was depressed and after praying to all Buddhist gods with no response, she just cried out: "God, if you really exist, please help me". Suddenly she heard like an audible voice of God telling her to get a Bible. She had a copy given by a friend, but she never opened it. God began to show her specific passages about happiness in proverbs and other places. Another story was that she had a dream where she found herself in heaven. She sees this man in white and long hair. He has fire in his eyes and reaches out to her. She's really ashamed and tries to avoid him. She woke up but the image was so vivid she couldn't erase it from her mind. It was like no other dream she's had before. When she told me that, I was like "That's Jesus described in Revelations". And she nodded, "yeah, I read that scripture four months after I had the dream and then I understood it." (btw, it's in Rev 19) Anyway, she hasn't been to any church though b/c her husband is against it. But her faith and passion were really genuine. She was really hungry for God and was asking me about chinese churches I could recommend to her. So I asked her, "Besides these two God-incidents, how else was she getting strengthened in her faith and learning about God since she wasn't in contact w/ a church?" Ok, so this is the part that made me want to learn Chinese. She showed me this website called GoodTV, that has lots of Christian resources in Chinese. As a sample, she showed me Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer's daily programs that are subtitled in Chinese!! So far that's where she's learning more about Christianity. She was so into these online teachings/sermons that I told her she should check out the website of my last church in California b/c they had the sermons in Chinese online. And to my surprise, she also knew about that website and listens to River of Life sermons every week. We even started talking about how much we like Pr. Tong. I was able to tell her that in person he's just as real as in the preaching!! I was so excited just how God orchestrated that afternoon… I was totally hesitating the whole meatball-making thing at first (I even got mad at Ben for telling his mom that I wanted to eat meatballs and having her buy the ingredients), but God opened doors for me to talk to her and we had such a great time (and I learned to make Chinese food, hehehe)!! After this, I just began to see how the internet could be such a great tool for evangelism and ministry in places like China and India!! I had heard about the role of internet in the great commision at a conference already, but became so real to me when I saw how it played out in Ben's mom's life. There are so many resources, teachings, books in English that could be translated and then diseminated via internet… really cool! 2. Speaking at Chinese churches: last Sunday, Katia and I were asked to share our testimony at our church. Besides the testimony, I ended up giving a message (that I felt like God was putting on my heart during that week) since they asked us to talk for about an hour. Aparently it was really impacting, b/c I saw several ppl crying. Afterwards, I wanted to talk to ppl but they only spoke Chinese, and my Chinese is so basic I couldn't really say what I wanted to say. Later on, Katia told me we were asked to speak again at a church that is made up mostly of recent Chinese immigrants. I was like, "No!! K, why did you say yes?" She totally ignored my hostile comment and said, "I felt like God had told me before coming back to Brazil that we'd be ministering to chinese people." her answer caught me by surprise. I didn't want to speak at the other church b/c it meant cancelling a trip that I had planned w/ my friends, but after what Katia said, I decided to go along w/ it… So, we spoke at the young adults gathering this Saturday. It was really awesome… But I really wish I didn't need to have my message translated b/c it doesn't feel natural and loses ppl's attention and makes it super long. Also, afterwards, the Chinese ppl came up to talk to us, but it was so hard to have a real conversation w/ them… I was so upset w/ myself, I so wished I had learned Chinese diligently when I was younger *sigh* There was a third reason, but I can't really remember right now… My past experiences learning Chinese: - Took Chinese classes every Saturday afternoon from ages 7-14. Most of the time I had headphones on. Sometimes I cheated on tests. One semester, I was absent more days than I attended. It was such a waste of time. My sisters and cousins also took the classes with me, so we were super silly and didn't learn anything. I was just being rebellious b/c I wanted to be doing something more fun on Saturday afternoons. I was already doing Kumon (a nerdy math class), piano, and tennis on weeknights, at least I wanted a break on weekends.
- My parents started to pay for private lessons every Saturday morning for 2 years. That went a bit better. B/c the lessons were expensive, at least I put in some effort. But some mornings, we literrally rolled out of bed when the teacher rang the doorbell and had our lessons w/ morning breath, hahah…
- At Cornell and Stanford I was surrounded by ABC's. Granted we rarely spoke Chinese, I think I picked up more Chinese from that, than any of my previous classes.
- Our family went to Taiwan last year. My sisters and I spent a week without our parents, so we learned how to order good food, ask for directions, and ask for discount =P!!
- After reading Heavenly Man (about this guy in China and the underground church), for some reason I decided to enroll in the Arlington Adult School this past January. I enrolled for Mandarin II, but I stopped going b/c the class was really slow (i.e. we spent half a class pronouncing the four seasons).
Anyone know any good place to learn languages in the DC area? Or an online course? Or a good self-teach Chinese textbook? |
