On trying to learn Chinese...

As many or most of you may know, Chinese (Mandarin) is a tonal language where words that look the same in Pinyin have completely different meanings depending on the tone you use. The easiest example is "ma." It can mean "horse" using one tone, "mom" using another, and I think it can also mean to scold someone. I've been using flashcards to learn Chinese characters, and each card has a phrase to showcase the use of the character. It's been a slow process but I am picking up on some Chinese and am able to recognize more and more characters all the time. I can't piece them together into anything coherent, but I'm working on it.

One thing that helps is having three native Chinese speakers in the English office. Good for me, but perhaps bad for them as I think I'm actually driving one of my co-workers, Linda, rather batty by practicing Chinese phrases on her in my terrible monotone, American dude trying to speak Chinese, accent. One of my other co-workers, Min-hsien, has spent a lot of time around foreigners and so she can understand what i'm trying to say pretty easily. Linda, however, just looks at me with an incredulous look that says "what the hell are you trying to say?" What makes things so difficult is the fact that when she repeats the correct pronunciation back to me, to my untrained ears, it really doesn't sound so different. This has also happened in a couple stores where I have actually asked for something in Chinese and they just give me a blank look. When I finally say it correct enough to understand, they repeat it back to me in what pretty much sounds like exactly what I just said. In response to this, I have learned the Chinese equivalent to "That's what I said."

"Na shi wo shuo de."

I'm sure I butchered that, but what more can you do when trying to learn a language? The tonal subtleties are definitely going to be the biggest mountain to climb in my Chinese language acquisition, but I've definitely been enjoying trying to learn it.

While it's going to be a long process, I guess when I can finally start passing the Linda test I'll know I'm on the right track. Wish me luck, because it is not going to be easy.