"My biggest problem was discipline"

This is a great article, except that you notice the writer criticises Beijing for not honoring its commitments...ironically she commits to a 3 month course to learn Mandarin and completes only a third of it.

That said, I also gave up learning Korean during my 4 years there. This was due to in part to a lack of faith that even with enough discipline, the enunciation is a nightmare. The other aspect was that I was there to teach English, not to learn their language. Are you buying any of these excuses yet? Okay, I was downright lazy!

clipped from www.timesonline.co.uk I say tomato, they say xihongshi; they say tudou, I say potato. If any one issue has risen above the smog at these Olympics as the biggest hurdle to a jolly encounter with the Chinese, it is the Chinese. The language, that is, not the people. One of the bold pledges made seven years ago when Beijing won the Games was that all taxi drivers would be fluent in English when 150,000 Olympic tourists rolled into town speaking loudly and slowly as they asked for the nearest McDonald’s. So when training manager Jon Gilbert claimed I would be “virtually fluent” after 150 hours of their software-based course without much effort, I was sceptical. But I’ll give anything a go once. so I donned my headset on May 8 – exactly three months to the opening ceremony. So I never did the 150 hours. I only completed the first of three units. My biggest problem was discipline. The obvious time – the Tube journey to work – posed logistical challenges: