I find that it's quite jarring for me to switch from English to Mandarin on the fly, especially when I'm not expecting it. I need some kind of ramp up time in order to start speaking Mandarin a bit more fluently. Not that it's fluent at best, but it's even worse when I'm still "booting-up" so to speak.

I was at Jurong Point today and my aunt was looking to buy a PSP charger. I followed her into a game store and was just looking around casually. One of the staff members approached me and asked something to the effect of, "你找什么？" (what are you looking for?)

Although I understood his question, it had been a while since I've tried to speak in Mandarin, so I was completely caught off guard. After a longer than normal "啊..." (ah....) I somehow forced out a very weak "我在看。。 在看看。。" And by weak, I mean super weak. Nevertheless, he left me alone after that without any further questions. But I'm not sure if it was because he actually understood my response, or if he couldn't understand a single thing I said and just left as confused as I was embarrassed.

I think that I find the same thing happens if I'm speaking in English trying to describe certain things that happened to me that deal with my experiences speaking Mandarin. When I need to repeat a phrase that I said or that was said to me, the transition from the English dialogue to the Mandarin quote always comes out extremely rough.

I've actually almost stopped using my Mandarin all together these past few months. When ordering food, I'll revert to English, except when they don't understand my English (rare?).

The last time that I was forced to use it was on vacation with my family, as one of my cousins' grandparents that came along always speaks Mandarin. So the couple times that I was alone with her trying to get around, I had to cough up some Mandarin in order to communicate.

I'm going to register for another non-credit Mandarin course back home this coming fall. I think I've improved a bit over these months in Singapore. But I'm on the verge of losing any progress I've made just due to lack of constant exposure.

Case in point, Hong Kong was a really neat experience interacting with the Hong Kong friends we made there. Since then, I've had very few full exchanges in Mandarin with people.

But it's been a while since I've been dropped into such an environment where it's sometimes necessary to use Mandarin.