So far in my Chinese challenge, I got delayed in my start due to being extremely busy making the preparations for the trip. No matter! With a week to go before I head to China I've still got preparation time!

I'm still continuing on! I printed out a list of my Chinese conversation connectors from Fluent in 3 Months! To help with my rusty Mandarin, I'm using the Pleco app to decipher the characters for each of these connectors and then looking at the equivalent phrases in English to make sense of it. Sometimes it's a painstaking effort to write out the characters on Pleco as the Chinese font on my conversation connector pages is really small.

I'm using my Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebook and "A Complete Handbook of Spoken Chinese" to help with being able to say basic phrases over in China as well as refreshing what I already learned in my Chinese courses in college.

I'm planning to combine these basic phrases with the conversation connectors using the TPRS (Total Physical Response System) on myself to remember it not only quickly, but in a fun and memorable way.