My Chinese now is pretty poor and when I was in country, I never felt fluent. I could get through the day but I wasn’t going to have any intelligent conversations about politics or current events in Chinese. And if I was trying to do something especially complicated, I usually asked one of my students to come with me to help translate.
At the risk of sounding completely ignorant, what is an LPI? I’m thinking "Language Proficiency . . . " something. If that is a test you have to pass as a volunteer, we did not have that when I was in (93-95).
Oh, it’s Language Proficiency Interview. It’s not really a test, it’s just a way of measuring your progress in the language. Now that you mention it, I think they instituted it in 1996.
It was the greatest experience of my life and I have done a lot of stuff.
I was stationed in Micronesia on an island a mile long by 70 yeards wide, and we (the islanders and I) had contact with the “outside world” about once ever three months or so. I built a school, trained two teachers, taught in the school. I also designed and helped the locals build a water catchment system for the island, all this while wearing a loin cloth and living in a thatch hut.
But the stuff I got out of it was so much more. I loved it. It was super hard to be sure. But that’s part of what made it valuable to me. I am told that these days they are not letting volunteers be as isolated as my assignment was. This is too bad, because that was part of the thrill and danger that made it valuable.