Learning Chinese

While Amy has been reveling in her one-day workweek (all but two of her classes are comprised of freshman, who do not begin classes until October), I have completed my first week of classes. I receive twenty hours of instruction a week in Listening, Intensive Reading, Oral Chinese, and Characters. Most of this week has been spent repeating the various sounds of the language and practicing tones. For those of you who do not know, Chinese has several tones that change the meaning of a word depending on the tone used. For example, the word ma can mean horse, mother, linen among other alternate meanings depending upon the tone used. It is a tricky business. But I do enjoy the experience-my teachers are great, and my class resembles the UN General Assembly, with American, German, Russian, Swiss and Korean students.

My favorite class is Chinese characters. While the class's application may be more limited than my speaking and listening classes, I figure that a working knowledge of characters relating to food will at least reduce the likelihood of further culinary suprises while eating out. In addition, I find character writing to be extremely relaxing (it also happens to be an area of study where I can measure my progress a little more tangibly). There is one problem--Chinese characters were designed to be written by right-handers, and poor handwriting is deemed to be a sign of a morally deficient character.

The character above is wo, and means "I" or "me." Seems awfully complicated for such a common word, doesn't it? Believe it or not, there is a system. Strokes are written from left to right, top to bottom, with specifically prescribed number and order of strokes. In the absence of an alphabet, characters are organized in dictionaries by the number and types of strokes used in making the characters. Presently, I estimate that I can read approximately 100-120 characters, allowing me to read the average newspaper after I have acquired mastery another 2900. As you can see, there is some work to be done.

Amy will shortly be able to resume her normal posting when her life slows down a bit. Hehe.