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Apologies for the double post. 967 text spoiler translation from Spimer at DCTP: No break next week!

Sorry if I came off like that, but discrediting people's efforts wasn't my intention. I'd been looking into SAT subject tests for both Chinese and Spanish, and it struck me that the distance I still had to go with Spanish was far greater than I'd thought. Comparing the thought process I have for the two languages really put that into perspective, and my post was written to reflect a "what-if" scenario where I didn't have Chinese as a marker for "fluency". Being bilingual has always been a prevailing factor in my life because my internal "voice" "speaks" (yay tons of quotation marks) in both languages. English may be my primary language now, but there was a period in my life when I could actually feel the "voice" shift from being Mandarin-centric to English-centric, and as a small child, it was very hard to adjust. (I'm still very fluent in Chingrish.) Despite being a Spanish student of 6 years (though I didn't really learn much in the first 5), I can't imagine ever having the same problems I do with being a English-Mandarin speaker, and thus, in a sense, that same level of fluency. Perhaps I'll one day be able to communicate in Spanish in a conversational setting, but this sort of proficiency won't have some of the defining traits of bilingualism that I feel with Mandarin. With Mandarin, it's completely without thought, while with Spanish, I'm forced to procure a written form of the audio clip in my head, translate bits and pieces, then rearrange it to better accommodate for my English-orientated mind. It's a long and arduous process, and exactly what I've been telling my parents not to do for all my life, only that it's me who's now struggling to find a more efficient process and realizing there are none. Again, I'm not trying to brush off languages students in the classroom. It's quite the opposite really--I probably understand the laborious efforts too well.