squirrel is the human word for nutcreature

There's something about lazily studying Mandarin Chinese that's made language learning seem far more approachable. It would be cool to be fluent one day, but I've always been clear with myself that I don't have an actual goal with this besides maintaining a streak in my language app for a certain amount of days. I can quit whenever I want, which is remarkably good at making me not quit. Sometimes I study Chinese for hours because I'm having a good time, but mostly I'm lazily plucking at this language for sometimes literally a minute. After a year of doing this, even though Chinese is so difficult and different from English, it turns out I can still get from knowing absolutely nothing to knowing slightly more than nothing in a pretty short period. An incredible jump in knowledge with not that much work. In fact, the gap between English and Chinese is so vast that microscopic progress feels incredible. When I have to write out literally any pinyin by memory, and I get 75% of the letters and none of the tones correct, I feel like a genius. Today I almost spelled 音乐会/yīnyuèhuì correctly on my first try, and I wanted to call everyone over to see how I effortlessly nailed two-thirds of it.

Round 3:

Tie break poll: