Chinese Language

My chinese has degraded after so many years of not reading. I am still using mandarin on a daily basis - with some of my colleagues and also when i speak to my family but i seldom come into contact with proper chinese articles until today.

Recently, our Corporate & Communications team compiled some of the newspaper articles published in both Hong Kong and Taipei due to some highly broadcasted conferences held throughout Asia. The team translated all the chinese articles to english beautifully for us to read and pasted the original copy above the translated ones. Snoopy me decided to read a randomly picked article from the Taipei papers and to my disgust, i realised i couldnt recognise some of the words and i couldnt even read aloud the first paragraph smoothly.

I think this can be quite scary....i'm slowly losing a skill that is vitally important to me. I remember i used to be able to write a piece of chinese essay quite easily and my reading speed was fast enough, i could finish one xiao(4) shuo(1) within 3 days. I doubt i can do these now. I can only converse comfortably in mandarin for daily trivial issues but when i come to serious business talk with my dad, i couldn't explain most of the terms/things i wanted to say. To me, it is a very big hindrance for a good communication. For all reasons, I HAVE TO REVISE and start polishing up my chinese.