This Great Work

The Champion brand is one of the more commonly pirated brands here in China.  Check out these few examples of 'wannabees'.   There are many others.   It all makes me think about the difficulty of language learning.   I don't fault any Chinese person for not being good at English, I know full well how difficult it is to learn the other language.  But it does cause me to understand more deeply how important it is to pay attention to details while learning languages.  'Chimptwo', 'Decameter' and 'Ckemqairm' (or whatever that one says), and the others simply do not say 'Champion'.   Thankfully over the years, I've had the blessed opportunity of learning the language of the Spirit.  It also is an upward curve.  Details need to be attended to.  It takes lots of experience and lots of practice. But it's a beautiful, rewarding journey.  I love the phrase President Eyring used about this process in his October 2023 confer...

 I've been asked on occasion how my Chinese is coming.  Let me show you instead of tell you.  These images are screenshots of my attempts to speak into Google translate to try to get the tones right as well as to have the Romanization to make practice easier on my brain (One of my lessons is only audio and I need visual help too).  I have no idea what I was suppose to be saying, but clearly it wasn't any of these things! The last one is hilarious because Wang Jian is our driver so this makes total sense, but that was NOT what I was practicing to say!  I was trying to say something about some street in Beijing. (The lessons are often as confusing as the language!) But I am trying.  I work on it every day on a couple of different apps, with a teacher and with a book.  I wish I could report more progress, but I can't..... I'm just slow. And old!