a moment of clarity

The wife and I trade languages. Monday is English, Tuesday Mandarin etc. Last Tuesday I had a moment of clarity. "Look" I said "This isn't working. Constantly hearing Mandarin that I have to guess the meaning of doesn't teach me anything and frustrates the living fuck out of me. We have to slow the whole thing down. I need to actually hear the words you are using, and either because I already know the words or because the context of our interaction make it obvious, know what they mean. You will need to repeat things slowly at first and then the same thing quicker after I've got it. I need to be able to say what I want to be able to say and I need to be able to say it correctly. I need you to correct my pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary choices. You should try to remember what I've learned recently and look for opportunities to use that vocabulary again. I will want to tape record a lot of this. Later I'll transcribe some of it into Pinyin and put it somewhere that I can review it. We can't 'just speak Chinese together' all the time because if we do that I often won't know if what I heard was what you meant or even if what "I" said was what "I" meant. For that we will need to translate and even though we just communicated the whole thing in English we will need to do it again in Chinese so that I can learn it. Seriously, this is important to me. I want to improve and if you want to help me you need to completely understand what I just said. We can relax and live but these basic things you gotta get OK?"