Lostintranslation

Hi!, I've been far too busy lately and just now saw your reply. In terms of my level: I'm planning on taking the HSK near the end of the semester, but according to my professor i'm between a level 3 and 4. I don't exactly know what level I'm aiming for. I never really thought about that, because it was kind of not an issue given how much more of my education I had ahead of me. I didn't think about what my plan was after my first year of uni. I'm afraid to quit, because that's the first step to forgetting everything and abandoning all the work i've put in already. At the same time, I can keep it up until I graduate, but if my first job doesn't include speaking Chinese daily, I will lose it pretty quick anyway. Just because we do less speaking and listenting in university, my speaking skills have started to deteriorate dramatically. My prof here is much more grammar-focused, so I'm just now starting to reliably execute certain sentence patterns I've worked on since year 2. But without the constant listening practice I'm far, far worse than I was six months ago. Moreover, since we don't read longer texts in my new class, I found myself struggling to read a lesson from more than a year ago, simply because I haven't read aloud in forever.... felt like my tongue was heavy all of a sudden, the same way I feel at first when I speak Swedish (I'm fluent because my family is bilingual, but living in the US/Canada means I don't practice it much and I'm always a little rusty the first few days when I visit Sweden).

I've been lurking for a while but decided to create an account & post just because I'm wondering if there's anyone else who can tell me they're feeling similarly. Short background: Grew up Bilingual, (English/Swedish) and learned French 7th to 12th grade. I also spent 5 of those years learning Mandarin from a fairly inadequate high school program and now one year of university. I dreamed of learning Chinese since grade school, and was incredibly excited to take it starting in grade 9. There was one teacher for all classes and levels, and she was a pretty poor teacher for many of reasons (including problems that were her fault, like not caring very much about students with no background, and some problems that were not her fault, like a lack of funding). I told myself this would be worth it if I stuck with the language, pursued it into University and got into a better environment. So. I'm now halfway through my first year at University, having taken one semester of Chinese and started the second (our language departments require that you take a language for both semesters, not just one.) I considered quitting over christmas holiday until I realized that I couldn't, because of those administrative requirements. Basically, I'm feeling thoroughly discouraged. I don't feel like I'm improving anymore, or if I ever was improving at a rate that was significant. My prof this year is very, very old and, besides being a tough grader, has the same standard set of flaws I saw in my high school teacher. Moreover, she teaches the advanced levels, so there's no new prof for me next year either. I could detail all the things I hate about this prof and her class, but It would be pretty unproductive. Basically, I'm frustrated with my progress. I'm frustrated with the profs I'm getting, even at a world-class institution with one hell of an endowment. I'm frustrated with basically everything and am wanting to give up. Who else has taken a language (any language) for more than 5 years without actually going to the country? Does anyone out there feel my pain? I should mention i'm (probably) going to major in linguistics and minor in east asian languages...or comp sci.