February 19th, 2013

The language is coming Man(4)Man(4)Lai(2) (slowly slowly come) basically bit by bit or one step at a time. I have decided that from now on whenever I email in Pinying (the English-alphabet phonetic representation of Chinese), I'm going to do it as I just did there. The numbers represent the tones you should use while speaking the words- it really matters a lot. We didn't have any major problems with translations going wrong this week, just trouble with trying to say things we don't know the words for. We should get to do curbside pickup of new missionaries this week (tomorrow), which will be fun. We should be getting our own travel plans in the next day or two, and we should get our full Chinese missionary name tags by the end of this week.

I try to run a mile every morning in gym, evenings is harder because I usually get a cramp from dinner, but I run at least a half every gym time now.

We lost one of our investigators, the teacher is going to one of the new districts coming in tomorrow, so we get hsiao laoshi instead.

Our other (practice) investigator is finally starting to get it into her head that what we are teaching is important, it only took about 8 lessons. PS, having them act on Moroni's promise on the spot with you is about the most terrifying thing ever. It worked out well, but I was terrified she would drop us if she felt like we were pressuring her.  The promise works when you are honestly seeking an answer, not when you are going through the motions to be compliant. We were concerned that if she was doing it for us, then she wouldn't get an answer.

I have escaped having to give a sacrament talk up to this point, all I need to do is survive this next Sunday, then I'm in the clear, because the last one is aFast Sunday, and we can give it in English or Chinese as we so desire.

Love you all, Wo(3) Zhi(1)dao(4) Zhe(3)ge shi(4) zhen(1) shi(2) de.

Jacob