These are Madelene (the baby girl), my Chinese teacher Lucia (the baby's mother), and myself with redish face and eyes 'cause I had just arrived from a chilly and damp weather outdoors. Lucia is originally from Taiwan and has had the chance to live in many other countries such as Thailand, England and France.
I take Chinese lessons on Fridays. I've already learned how to sing a few traditional Chinese songs, how to greet and count till 1000, besides "drawing" the corresponding ideograms for those words and phrases. This is the first time I've ever tried to learn officially an oriental language. I guess I can say that I nail some Japanese for having worked at a Japanese restaurant for 4 1/2 years. There, I dealt with Japanese boss and co-workers. Learning some Japanese was quite a need. Now, it's Chinese time.
As I'm pretty honest, I can't disguise that I did better jobs while taking Spanish and German in the past. French was another language I've already studied but that one wasn't so easy either. I really had a hard time pronouncing those 'RRRRR's and writing with all those "apostrophed" contractions. These things made me insane for I gave up learning it at once. As a matter of fact, I happen to think that drawing Chinese ideograms are a lot simpler.
Now, frankly speaking, Chinese pronunciation is way damn difficult for me. It is made up out of vowels mainly and my mother tongue, which is Portuguese, is pretty much consonantal. Consequently, I have no parameters when trying to blurt some phonemes.
I have never thought of the true reason why I decided to start taking this language as it is quite difficult for me. But I wonder... Maybe it is because I needed to get in touch with a whole new ball game, as it'd be a challenge for myself. Even though it is an utter difficult thing, I'm so doing well with it.
You are a linguist. You have a love for languages. Perhaps if more people were like you, the world would have less conflict, because you humble yourself to learn a new language. Like a baby you learn to speak again. It takes courage. More people like you - that's what I would like to see :)
ReplyDeleteGosh! I'll type this comment on large font and print it out. I'll stick it on our school cork board... and of course, giving you, Rain, the credit. It's just precious what you've written. All my students must know that they are courageous individuals!
ReplyDeleteGood on ya. I'll never know how someone can learn another language. I have enough trouble w/ english, then ya got me draggin hawaiian into the mix. Yikes.
ReplyDeleteStudy hard!
Aloha!