School

I am enrolled in a class to learn Chinese and a little about some cultural traditions in China. I go to my language class every day from 9-11:30 and then in the afternoons we have different "arts and crafts" as Daniel calls them.

I go to class at Xiamen University. Here is the campus.

Here are my text books:

Learning Mandarin Chinese is very hard. "硬极"

It's like learning 3 new languages:
1. New pronunciations  - "bai" is pronounced "buy" and "bei" is pronounced "bay", "de" is pronounced "duh", etc.

2. New meanings - the new words for new things, which have no Latin or Germanic based similarities. Just new words for new things - "hei" is black, "bai" is white, "nan" is hard, etc. Plus you then have to say it with the right intonation.
There are 4 tones (actually 5 when you count the neutral) and to
1. - flat and high
2. / rising
3. \/ a scooping tone that goes down and then rises
4. \ short and downward, with a sound of finality to it.
If you say "ba" for instance it is
-ba = eight
/ba = to pull
\/ba = target
\ba = dad (it's actually \baba with the second syllable being the neutral toneless one, like a staccato)

So if you say the wrong thing you could get dad apples instead of eight apples. Fun huh?
Then you have the character. Which are CRAZY! They supposedly make sense, but I haven't reached that point yet.

So if you take "ba" again here are the characters for each one:
-ba = eight = 八
/ba = to pull = 拉
\/ba = target = 靶
\ba = dad = 爸爸 which is a pretty cool character I think - like swords protecting a house

So there you go, Chinese in a nutshell.