About you reaching your goal. The one of learning languages. It seems you are already really great. You really have awesome intensity. I can only just imagine. I agree with what your grandpa said. Perserverance is needed.

Thanks for the good words about my site. Yours is quite good and unlike mine yours is updated regularly. Keep up the good work.

I’m wondering, what was your inspiration to learn Japanese and Chinese?

I never knew either of my grandpas, but I was very close with my grandmother, so I relate with your sense of loss.

An aside, I had a good friend in college who also entered early. She had no trouble absorbing the material but lacked the discipline to get her work done and getting to class and such and ended up dropping out too (although she went back to school and is about to get her degree soon). It’s a tricky situation though. She was getting way bored in high school that it would have been an academic jail sentence to keep her there for two more years, but she was not ready for many aspects of college…

She was a way bad influence on me. I remember this one semester where we just hung out all the time and did no work, at the end of the semester, neither of us had finished our papers. I flew to St. Louis to spend Christmas and part of January with her family. We ended up having a great time, but I didn’t get all my papers done until just before the New Year. She never got all her papers done. I didn’t know it then, but I think that was the beginning of the end for her.

However, once she dropped out and re-enrolled at a different school, it’s like she’s got a new purpose, and she did very well indeed. I’m happy for her now, but it’s a high price that she had to pay.

I think the dreams may be from the opposite reason. I’m not very satisfied with my Chinese skills and I think I have been relying too much on my English. I’m using English at work, I’m blogging in English, etc… Once I’m done with this job, I’ll probably need years college to get my Chinese up to par.

My wife — the psychologist — is in total agreement.

I got the impression that your Chinese is coming along pretty well. Maybe you’re realizing this and you’re getting some sort of closure about that last conversation.

Getting into college early showed everyone you have the brains. Dropping out may have made you want to show you could do this since, “Perseverance will matter a lot more than brains will.”.

(The above, possibly crap, thoughts came from me. My wife would probably roll her eyes about me trying to be an unlettered psychologist… again.)