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I don't think wushu is useless. I myself have made a vow that someday I will fly over to China or something and learn it. It's cool because if you are good at it, you can kick butt and look good doing it. Or, if it's just impractical to add flipping into a fight, you can do it for demos and at least just look cool. Looking cool comes in handy!
--m

As someone who's been training Shaolin Kungfu since she was 3 years old, and been training a lot of other martial arts.

Please don't confuse "kungfu" with "wushu". (I am chinese, I know the terms.) If you've been training at a kungfu place and a wushu place and they are identical, then the shifus are most likely scammers that have traveled abroad just to take peoples money, pretending to be martial artists.

Please remember that 80% of all the kungfu and wushu clubs in the west world have scammers as founders or are run by them.
I know what you think.
Some of the clubs are run by western people that really believes they know their stuff, when they have been fooled to think so. In reality they only know a fake martial art or about 40% of the real, and use it in the wrong way.

This must sound really negative, but that's how it is. I have been training at the shaolin temple and at various places but stick to one master (my master's master is a shaolin monk and I met him at the shaolin temple I trained at), so I am sure that my club is allright. But I do know that the other seven clubs in my city are fakes.

Please don't say "how do you know that? you can't know that!". I know I may sound aggressive.
Everytime I visit a country, I also visit all the martial arts clubs I can find. And since I have a lot of friends in other countries, I ask them to go check on clubs for me and send me clips and interviews.

I did a research on this for a 80 page essay for my P.E. and Culture class. (the two classes made one "common".. is that the right word? assignment/project work.)

Like someone said on the first page: if the martial art is useful in combat or not, depends on the skill and "imagination" of the one who's doing the fighting.

Please exuse my bad english and bad temper (had a really bad day).