Wednesday, January 2, 2013

#Reverb12 Day 29: My Word

For the month of December, I'm working on doing the daily series of Reverb prompts to help me reflect on the prior year and hope/plan for the upcoming year. If you're interested, join in; I found this to be a very useful exercise when I did it two years ago.

#reverb12 Day 29: Have you heard your word?

What word did you select to be your travelling companion in 2012? What gifts did this word bring?

What word will you choose to guide you through 2013? What do you hope it will bring into your life?

My word for 2012 was "zhong guo"!  China Country!  Chinese is such an interesting language, one of the things I like is the concept of radicals or root words.  Guo means country or state, and zhong means center.  So to say China country, you literally say center country.  To say the US, you say meiguo, or beautiful country.  But now even when I want to say "China" in English, I like to say "China country."  Learning a bit of Chinese brought me many gifts in 2012 -- new friendships here as I tried to learn the language, smiles and friendliness when I got there and people realized I was trying. 

The ability to communicate a tiny bit was so valuable in China, I almost wonder if I should work on German for 2013, but I think I'm going to leave that to my husband.  He got some German CDs for Christmas, so he can work on it, and I'll focus on Italian -- my husband speaks so much better than I do, and I should brush up before we see his family.  While they speak dialect mostly, at least I can make myself understood and hopefully sound somewhat intelligent and well-spoken.  I haven't seen his family since April or May of 2011, and back then I was studying Italian at least once a week, so I should work on getting back to that level. 

My word for 2013 is going to be SPEED.  I hope it will bring a drive to push myself to run more and faster, and will finally bring me that dream marathon PR in Berlin. 

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