Language.Exchange

I’ve worked in engineering (aerospace electronics). I worked for more than 5 years as a court stenographer. I worked for “a few years” for Kaiser Permanente Health Management Organization as a teacher. I’m considered a professional user of the English language.

Overall, about 7 years involvement with Mandarin Chinese language learning, including a couple of years Confucius Institute at Univ of Hawaii

I have very small competence with conversation. The problem is consecutive sentences. Short sentences I have some, but not much competence with. Medium to long sentences I have very little competence with them. My focus -- what I strive to learn -- is sentence structure/patterns, the mechanics of how the language works. English and Mandarin are different; it’s almost as if one is upside down from the other. So I struggle. Pronunciation. I think my competence is kind of medium here, and I don’t really trust it when people say I sound good; I think people are just being nice to me. That’s not what I want. I want to sound as competent as any native speaker speaking Standard Mandarin--- that’s my goal.

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