I learned a new word. It is perhaps the best word in the whole entire language of Mandarin. Behold:

馬馬虎虎

That's right, friends. Mamahuhu. It's ma-ma hoo-hoo. Literally it means horse-horse tiger-tiger. But that doesn't mean anything, so it actually means so-so, passable, or messy. This word has revived my hope in the Chinese people.

Otherwise, however, I admit that the studies this semester are not going extraordinarily. I'm studying, but it seems like I've been bombarded with new words and grammar in the past two weeks, and there is almost no down time at all.

The good news is that I have a tutor with whom I will be meeting twice weekly this semester. She is a senior at my school and a Biology major. She's only doing research this semester, and so she has no classes, just to be in the lab when the cultures are mature enough. She's nice, but I have yet to think of a clever pseudonym for her. We met today. She will be teaching me about character formation and the radicals and whatnot. Her father is a professor of classical Chinese, and I think she knows a lot.

Lately I've been doing some studies on my own time about things less directly related to Chinese. It's interesting to say the very least.

T