Chinese is frying my brain

My days are starting to take shape. Fuzzy until 8:30PM, then 1.5 hours of intense Chinese on the phone with mom followed by a headache and an inability to concentrate on anything except for surfing the web. It's been exactly a week since I started this Chinese regimen, and I'm starting to feel stuck. The first three days were great because I went from nothing to something (you can't get a steeper learning curve than that). Now I'm frustrated by my five year old's vocabulary and absolute ignorance of Chinese grammar. Mom says that the grammar is easy: subject-verb-predicate. Right. Considering that I almost never follow that standard structure in English, I tend to have incorrect word ordering in Chinese.

On the second day, I realized that Chinese grammar really was simple. That doesn't mean that I'm any closer to understanding it, just that there are no articles. It's very strange for me to formulate a sentence without all of the little words in it. In Chinese, it would be something like 'I formulate sentence feel strange'. I can see how difficult it must be to go from Chinese to an alphabet-based language. My sentences feel so bloated and unwieldy. I keep on inserting random blips when I attempt to speak Chinese, and they definitely shouldn't be there.

The last time I touched a foreign language seriously was...never. High school French taught by non-French speaking teachers doesn't count. I also haven't done anything seriously English/Liberal Arts related since high school, causing signficant parts of my brain to atrophy. In general, I can say with confidence that my grasp of language is not wonderful. Today, I spent the hour and a half talking about the Olympics and mostly Fe er pu si (Phelps). I summarized his technical excellence and dominance in freestyle and butterfly. Then I gave some air time to Lochte and his prowess, though not his unhealthy love for McDonald's. I predictably ended by blabbing about the Longhorns. Having not won eight gold medals each in Athens, they don't have online dictionary entries (which apparently can translate Bilbo Baggins but refuses to give me the Chinese characters for Zhang Ziyi), so my speech went something like this: *broken chinese* Peirsol *long string of broken chinese* Hansen *short string of ugly broken chinese* Crocker *gave up on chinese completely*. At least my mom knows a lot now about the US men's swim team.

Having completely neglected Chinese for practically my entire life begs the question: What the hell was I doing? Math, the universal language. Or English, destined to become one of the universal languages at the very least. Today I was humbled in the post office while buying one cent stamps (When did stamps become 42 cents?). Two Chinese girls came up to me and asked me to translate some Chinese written on a piece of paper. The words were fairly common, but I still couldn't read most of them. I should've just said that I wasn't Chinese when they approached me, but I wanted to see if I had learned anything. Apparently not. In this age of instant gratification, why can't I learn a language in a week? Or is google searching the only skill I have left?