Chandler, my friend from China, and myself swapped our first set of sound clips this evening. I sent him a blog about the television show Heroes, and he sent me an article about the NBA written in Chinese. As expected, we both are having trouble writing transcripts of the recordings because neither of us has highly developed listening comprehension skills. However, that is the stated goal of this project – to improve vocabulary yes, but mainly to improve listening comprehension.
Tomorrow I’m waking up early to start work on my paper for East Asian history. This will be the first historical analysis I’ve written about a novel, so I’m nervous and unsure of how to go about it. I think that if I spend enough time on it, though, I will produce a quality essay of which I am proud.
This afternoon I went to the weekly table tennis club meeting. I was surprised at how well I played today, since lately my strokes have not been precise. I think I finally figured out the forehand block, which helped tremendously against some of the more aggressive players. So far these are the strokes I’ve developed:
Forehand push
Forehand block
Forehand chop
Forehand slam
Backhand push
Backhand block
Backhand chop
Backhand slam
My coach said that the rubber on my paddle is not good enough for him to teach me the loop stroke, but I disagree. The loop is an incredibly versatile and therefore important stroke that I think should not be omitted from a player’s repertoire. Maybe I will ask someone to show it to me before I go to China.
That’s all for tonight. It’s about bedtime. My friend taught me a phrase in Chinese similar to the English idiom ‘Early to bed early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.’ It goes:
早睡早起身体好
Roughly it means Sleeping early and waking early makes good health.
I think that sums up my nocturnal inclinations.
