Week 4- May 22, 2012

What’s good everyone!

Another week down, 5 more to go before I take off for Taiwan!
The language has been getting a lot better. The teacher said that after a month your learning and understanding of the language skyrockets and this definitely has been true. When we go teach the investigator I can understand like 75% of what he is saying. So yeah it’s gotten so much better. They don’t teach you the Chinese characters during class time, but we have an hour a day of doing language software stuff. So for about 15 min a day I’ve been learning the Chinese characters on that! It’s so cool. I can read the Book of Mormon table of contents in just Chinese characters (like I can read the characters in the table of contents that say the book of 1st Nephi, 2nd Nephi, and so on for all of the books in the Book of Mormon).  It’s crazy though how Chinese is. Like if you say - zhidao. If you say zhidao in a high voice during zhi and then an angry voice during dao, it means “to know.”  But if you say zhidao going low voice to high voice during zhi and then with and angry voice on dao it means “guidance.”  So yeah it’s crazy. The same word spoken with different pitches means something totally different. So it’s good that I’m learning to talk with these different pitches, it'll help me to speak louder and to pronunciate more!
We got a new teacher this week. Our old teacher was a Brother that served his mission in Taichung, Taiwan last year. But our new teacher is this Sister that moved here from Beijing, China and served her mission on temple square in Salt Lake City, Utah. So starting yesterday she has been teaching us Chinese during classroom time. She is really good because this is her native language.
Tomorrow around 30 new mandarin missionaries (mainly going to Taiwan) are all coming in. They will be in our zone. This means we live at the same place, have classrooms in the same building, have sacrament together, and have pretty much the same schedule, so it'll be interesting to see how they are.
We take off on June 26th for Taiwan, but then our brand new mission president flies in on July 3^rd.  So it'll be interesting to see how that goes and how the transition is.
Last Tuesday, Elder L. Tom Perry came and spoke to us about the importance of the Book of Mormon. He talked about helping people know how they can find out for themselves if it is true. It was a pretty cool talk. The Provo temple president spoke on Sunday to us.  It was really good too.

Love you guys,

Jordan