Okay, after 4 months here, I really should know a little more than ní hǎo. So, I've decided to become serious about it and a colleague (Mike) and I hired a tutor to teach us. Her name is Zoe and she comes to my house twice a week.
We spent the first few weeks literally learning tones. Mandarin has 4 tones: flat, up, down/up and down. The meaning of a word differs dramatically depending on the tone. For example these 4 words all mean different things:
Mike trying to get his head around the tones.
We spent the first few weeks literally learning tones. Mandarin has 4 tones: flat, up, down/up and down. The meaning of a word differs dramatically depending on the tone. For example these 4 words all mean different things:
mā mother
má hemp
mǎ horse
mà scold
It's very easy to get the tone wrong, and sometimes a bit dangerous too as we might say inappropriate words.
Having covered the tones and basic vocabulary, we are now learning small dialogues. It's very hard to get it right and have any sort of fluency in our conversation but with practice...
I have a few friends here who have studied Chinese for about a year and they can get by okay. This is not going to be an easy language to learn for me but I'm determined to try!
Obligatory: Chinese is *REALLY* hard. Harder than English! A buddy of mine majored in Chinese and his (Mandarin) is pretty good by this point, but even he admits it's tricky. He found this article once on how cracked out Chinese is, it's interesting reading.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
(Also hello Amanda! I hope China is treating you well!)