The Ink-Pot and the Palette

In my Mandarin class tonight, the organizer announced that our next course, starting in September, will include beginning writing!

So far, with a combination of Pimsleur recorded lessons ("Learn like a spy. Pass for a native."), the occasional foray over to Chinesepod, and this class taught by Real Chinese Teachers from China, I've collected a working vocabulary of perhaps a couple hundred words, which I'm able to swap around into some basic conversational sentences.

But the writing! It's as opaque to me as the spoken language was a few months ago, and I'm really excited about piercing that veil, even just a little bit.

Tonight we learned a nursery rhyme song (complete with little kindergarten ice-breaking game) that I'd like to share with my flist.

Translated, it goes something like this:

"Look for, look for, look for a friend. Now you've found one good friend, salute once, shake hands, and say 'You are my good friend.'"

I had a wonderful dream the other night in which I was attending a wine tasting in a banquet hall of the sort you'd expect in a castle. There was a dais, along which a Last-Supper-esque table was arrayed, with a frankly Christ-like figure at the center dispensing the wine samples.

( Seriously, I dreamed this. )

For the synchronicity: a consultant I'm working with is German and speaks no Mandarin. His wife is Taiwanese and speaks no German. They communicate in English, their common language, and their children are trilingual.

Which is cool in itself. But this consultant overheard me discussing the Pimsleur language-learning method with another coworker today and offered me the use of his Pimsleur Mandarin CD set. These babies cost $250 per level, and he's got three levels that he's willing to share.

I'll drink to that.

Wow. Just drove home in a haze following two hours of intensive intro to Mandarin. The talented instructor, a Taiwanese woman named Tian, didn't let up for a moment. I sat there with my mouth gaping, mimicking everything she said, feeling both confused and wide-open. My of delight at getting a simple sentence right and hearing Tian say "hěn hǎo" took me straight back to an unremembered infancy. I found myself laughing and clapping my hands just like a little kid.

We learned the basic consonant sounds. We learned the basic vowel sounds. Some of the consonants are very much like in English. Some are really, really not.

We had a little conversation--hello, may I ask your name? My name is.... I am from America. We learned six personal pronouns, two interrogative particles, yes and no, a boatload of everyday words in simple conversation sentences. We had drills. Tian erased the board and we had to, you know, remember stuff.

Then we started in on the tones--those utterly-foreign sounds that make a single syllable mean four different things. The homework is to learn how to say a little tongue-twister. Without the tone markers, it looks like this: Ma ma qi ma. Ma man. Ma ma ma ma. Properly pronounced, it actually means "Mother rides a horse. The horse is slow. Mother scolds the horse."

Apparently, creating miles of new neural pathways in the brain actually burns calories, 'cause I was starving when I got home. Learning something totally new and different is hard work.

Hěn hǎo! Very good!