Attending language school is the reason we are here and we have settled into a routine. Mike goes over to the school and is learning Chinese characters from 8-10 am. Then the 2 other students join him for conversational lessons from 10 am – noon. Mike is really enjoying learning about the characters because his teacher tells him the history behind the symbol and learning that helps him to remember it. Then Mike comes home, has lunch with us and goes in the bedroom to work. It’s very awesome that he can work remotely from China and that is what allowed us to be on this adventure.
My tutor Kiki comes to the apartment from 10 am – noon. She is really nice and just adores Nadia. Nadia sleeps through most of my lessons, but has been getting up from her nap about 11:30ish. Kiki asked me if I wanted to learn the characters and I told her not right now, I would rather focus on learning the tones and vocabulary. The only real problem with that is that I can’t read anything when we are out and about. That is the most disorienting thing for me since I am such a reader.
Monday – this was a good first lesson because it was all stuff I was familiar with. She told me I did a great job and I was a good student. I told her not to get too excited since that stuff was all familiar.
Tuesday – at one point I almost broke into tears because I knew as I was saying some of the words that the tones were coming out wrong. I tried and tried and couldn’t get some of the letter combinations correct. And of course I got frustrated because tones are the whole basis of the Chinese spoken language.
Wed. – This was a good day. She moved me onto some longer sentences and of course in the beginning I got all jumbled up because of the odd letter combinations. It’s just so different from English or Spanish (or any romance language for that matter) and my mouth wants to pronounce things like you would in English. But I did much better on my second tone practice which was what I had all the trouble with the day before.
I think this is a great way to learn the language because you need to be in the middle of it, but the key is going to be to practice a lot when we get back to the states.
Here is a photo of Kiki and Nadia.
Nadia and I took a walk tonight and went all around Leisure Garden near our apartment. She wasn’t really sleeping, but the photo was cute of her being silly.
