Friday, 13 July 2012

Opening up to an old new world

There´s no point in denying it: I´m a morning person. This is the reason why I chose this time of the day to learn Mandarin Chinese.

Sometime ago, I bought "Talk Mandarin Chinese", a course for beginners covering the basic everyday language, and have now decided to use it at home.

Just in case you´re wondering, I´m not learning any Chinese characters; the manual presents the language using pinyin - the official system of using roman script to represent Chinese sounds.

The truth is that knowing how to read and write Chinese characters isn´t my priority - I´m more concerned about being able to talk to people in everyday situations.

When I first started listening to those truly daunting tones, I thought that I was wasting my time - I would never be able to understand them nor repeat them. A couple of days later, I realised that I was making progress - I was starting to recognise and use very basic constructions!

The learning process is now very enjoyable. The question is - will I have the opportunity to practice these skills in real-time?

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