United States of China
Late last semester, my friend Paul approached me and asked, "Hey, would you like to take Chinese 101 with me?" I had already taken seven years of Spanish so I was a bit reluctant to attempt to become trilingual. However, I decided learning Mandarin would be a great tool for business, and I signed up for the fall semester of 2006.
I was a bit nervous, initially, but after the first week of classes I was pretty confident that learning Mandarin would not be as difficult as I expected (or as hard as everyone told me it would be.) The second week went by and things began moving at a faster pace, but I still maintained a positive attitude that I would succeed. Fast forward to last week and my outlook has made a drastic turnaround. Chinese 101, as I had seen it five weeks prior, had become my hardest class of the semester. Between speaking Chinese and writing the endless amount of characters, I was beginning to regret my decision of enrolling in this class.
Today, I happened to read an article in The Wall Street Journal about how much of U.S. businesses China will own by 2015. The basic gist of the article was that Chinese culture will become more and more prevalent in the United States over the next ten years. Therefore, my decision to take Chinese 101 this semester may not have been such a bad idea after all. The way I see things, I am getting a head-start on my future business competition, and it will be an excellent skill to list on my resume.
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