Study Study Study
School has started (a little over a week ago) and there is definitely no shortage of homework!
Most of the classes are pretty easy, as my Thai language is relatively more advanced than this semester requires. BUT, this is not so for everything!! WOW! One class seems to be a full year ahead of the rest of the classes! Just to try reading and understanding ONE page of my most recent homework assignment of 5 pages, took me 2 hours!! And even at that, i wasn’t sure of some things. I asked a couple of Thai friends about them and one of them said they didn’t understand it well either! The other said they understood it, but had no way on earth how to explain it. The language is regarding Buddhist/Cultural practices and can be very formal and complicated.
I am often so exhausted with studying that I crash at anywhere from 8 to 10 p.m. And anyone who knows me at all will know that I must be pretty wiped out to sleep that early!! I wake up somewhere between 4:30 and 7 and do more homework before heading back to school…
Thank God for Google’s translation page!! It has probably saved me hours of searching the dictionary. But the dictionary also gets plenty of use when I don’t have internet available.
Ok… back to the books!
Hi Dale – Thanks for the update. I have been praying for you regarding your studies knowing that it would likely be quite a challenge. Will send email soon….Miss you, Love Mom
Thanks Mom. I guess any study can be a challenge. I don’t know why it is that when I study language sometimes it feels like I can literally feel my brain undergoing physiological changes! Yep, it definitely has its challenges, thankfully so, otherwise it would be boring!
You can do it Dale!! I still remember when you ambitiously took up Greek studies!! Well, try to hang in there, and think back to the days before the Tower of Babel when all of mankind spoke the same language. How easy communication was in that era! In time you will decipher this new language and culture too.
Thanks Angela
Babel seems appropriate… it sometimes feels like that’s all I’m doing is babbling :p
Thank you fro letting us know how you are doing. You are in our prayers. Love, Ed and Patti
Thanks for your note!
It’s been a while. I’ll try to give you a ring sometime soon… or you can try me. My Magic Jack is on almost anytime I’m in my room.
Thanks for the updates. Hope school is going well. It’s great to see the Lord’s provision and plan unfolding in your life.
I’ll be in China next month so I purchased an app called Jibbigo for $4.99. It’s a translator that you download (by language) so you don’t need to be online to use it. It may not be as good as Google but handy when there is no internet to be had. Here is the website if you want to check it out.
http://www.jibbigo.com/website/
With prayers from the Nichols family,
Christine
Wow! Great! What part of China will you be in? The program of study I’m in is populated by 90+% Chinese students. And you sure can tell that they came up through a system of competition to get where they are!!
Maybe someday! 
Have you been to the particular place you are going to before? Two of my classmates are from Kunming and one from Guizhou. All of the others are in other classes and I haven’t met many of them yet. The Chinese, Korean, Japanese and French classmates that I have all use an app that looks like this one you mentioned. But I think I am the only one on the entire university campus that doesn’t have a smart phone… so I can’t take advantage of such awesome study tools
Thanks for letting me know about it! And thanks for your prayers!
We just sent you an email as our response would be too long to post here!