PSA

We interrupt this normally scheduled evening of study to bring you two important announcements:

ONE: After hours of banging my head over this article in Chinese, I flipped to the end in frustration for about the billionth time (if here you'll accept "billionth" as an approximation for "seventh or eighth, maybe") and realized it had been translated from an English article. I looked it up on Jstor, and began reading it in English. I no longer feel foolish at all for having struggled with the Chinese. I am sad that academic pretension translates so thoroughly.

TWO: www.nciku.com is my savior this semester. It is a chinese-english dictionary where you can input english, pinyin, or copy-and-pasted characters.

That said, I'm going to continue trying to comprehend academia in Chinese. Right now I'm reading an article called 中华民族的多元一体格局，which means something like: "an overview of the many components of Chinese minority culture." I think.

EDIT: DUDES. I just read like three lines of text without having to look up a single word. I am a rock star.