Mandarin

A few quotes and idioms I’ve collected. 顿悟之前砍柴挑水，顿悟之后砍柴挑水——吴力。 Dùnwù zhī qián kǎnchái tiāo shuǐ, Dùnwù zhī hòu kǎnchái tiāo shuǐ. –Wú Lì Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water; After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. –Wu Li Note: Enlightenment does not relieve one of the details of daily life. 摸着石头过河——邓小平。 Mōzhe shítou guòhé. –Dèng Xiǎopíng Cross the river by feeling the stones. –Deng Xiaoping Note: We may not see exactly how to get there but we will pragmatically find our way; we will learn as we go. ...

I finished Mandarin Tuesday III this past Spring. There’s a lot going on at work and I must admit, I didn’t put in the same level of effort as I showed in Mandarin I and II. I believe anyone who is learning a foreign langauge will concur, class is a bitch when you’ve not put in the requisite study time. Nevertheless, perseverance pays and I crawled my way to the end. I have “completed” the entirety of “Practical Chinese Reader Book 1” but I still babble like an idiot when confronted with native Chinese speakers. So, what to do? Sign up for the next course! Pain? Haha! I laugh. I have known pain in my time. The mild embarrassment and frustration of language school is nothing. NOTHING! Bring it. ...

I stumbled across an article on lostlaowai.com www.lostlaowai.com/survival-chinese which lead me to poke around the site a bit. At the above URL, I noticed that some of the combining diacritical marks (tone marks) used in writing pinyin were not rendering properly. I had not seen this problem before. It didn’t make sense. Things that don’t make sense bug me. And being something of a character geek, I couldn’t let it go. So I tried to reproduce the problem in a test example. I couldn’t. That’s when I discovered a quirky Mac OS X copy+paste issue. I sensed there was a problem but the truth was elusive. You can’t see that copy+paste changes the string characters unless you look at a binary dump of the file (which I did). ...

Let me tell you. Learning Chinese is damned hard. The character set, the tones, the pinyin phonetic alphabet (which uses latin characters but the characters rarely correlate to English pronunciation), the grammar… In comparison, learning German was a snap. And German is no snap. I can babble like an idiot in German but I’m understood. I’ve found Germans, Austrians and the Swiss quite accomodating of my linquistic struggles. Perhaps its because they already speak English and can decipher my grammatical gymnastics, translate my mangled vowels, forgive my nouns’ gender jumping. Perhaps English is a piece of common ground. ...

My Tuesday dancecard is filling up. The first mandarin course has ended and I’m now registered in the next chapter of Mandarin. Beginning Chinese II “This course is the second of a three-quarter sequence of beginning Mandarin Chinese. It is designed for students with little knowledge of Chinese. With an emphasis on conversation, the course will focus on the acquisition of basic communication skills for travel, business, and everyday use.” ...

It’s confirmed. My Tuesday evenings are booked till December. I’m building a study group to meet once a week out of class. All students in either the Monday or Tuesday class are welcomed to join. (Which suggests we won’t meet on either Monday or Tuesday) Introductory Chinese Language and Culture “With an emphasis on conversation and an introduction to reading and writing Chinese characters, it focuses on the acquisition of basic communication skills for travel, business, and everyday use.” ...

I take Mandarin classes at the Language Studies Institute. While studying Mandarin is fun, I wouldn’t say it’s easy. I’ve opted for the conversational track. We aren’t learning the characters; we use pinyin (romanized tranliterations) and focus on speaking. I bought the CDs recently which correspond to my textbook and ripped them to iTunes. Once a week in class isn’t ideal; listening to the CDs really helps. ...