Language learning is not an easy thing. I've got enormous respect for the foreigners running around here who speak excellent Chinese, and for the Taiwanese who speak excellent English (and who've never lived abroad...loads of people have great English because oh, they were raised in the States or UK or what not). Personally, I struggle with learning languages. The grammar structure, memorizing how verbs are conjugated or what the heck these characters look like/mean is the easy stuff for me, because that's the memory and the sequencing/structure/logic - i.e. the stuff left-brained folks thrive on. And I am super left-brained. (artsy? musical? Um no...not so much) The actual listening and being able to hear the language is a problem. This is a problem in any language, but now we're talking about a tonal language. Good lord. What this means is that any single word can have at least 4 meanings depending upon how your voice raises or falls. Aye.
I'm not sure if it's a learned skill or inherent, but my learning by hearing is exceptionally weak. I became super aware of this in college (lectures were really pointless and had very little effect on how I did AND on what I learned) and it's pretty obvious in learning languages. For example, I can read a book in Spanish (or emails or facebook posts!) , but I struggle greatly with listening/hearing. Some of this, I know is just practice. It's easy to just go around speaking English, because it's almost always everyone's second language. I can't tell you how many times I have had the thought "I am so lucky to have grown up in an English speaking land" enter my head. So conversations continue on in English, everywhere. Other issues are that I can be a bit of a slacker sometimes with studying, and teaching English never bodes well for helping you to learn another language. A lot of teachers here drop their hours to put more time into studying Chinese, if they decide to pursue that route. Priorities.
So Chinese learning. I've been doing some character memorizing/writing and have probably about 50 characters or so memorized. I'm not sure they're all the most useful ones, but it's a start and it's something I can do in my own time. The beautiful part of Chinese is if you learn one character, you can often apply it to other words. For example the character for machine is used in camara, plane, etc (things that are essentially, machines). Plane is a character for fly and a character for machine. So fly + machine = plane. I love the the language is so literal. haha.
So in my head right now I have characters memorized in their full meanings, but some I know how to saw aloud and others I would probably butcher terribly. Then I have some characters that I know and the sound they make in Chinese if I see the character so I could say it, but I have no idea what it means. Then, there are some words that I only know orally and could say and know what I'm saying but have no idea what they would look like if I saw them nor could I write them. All in all, it's mostly a jumble of new information in my head.
Ironically, it's inspiring me to study Spanish again, so I'm loosely working on Spanish vocabulary and have a grammar book for it as well. I think it's because it's something I can actually DO and with confidence that I know what I'm doing when it comes to the Spanish language.
Side note, I'm doing 1-2 hours of Chinese a week with a tutor and some other guys at my school. There's a thought to taking some more serious classes at one of the language schools at some point in the future. I particularly want to take a pronunciation class (which is often the first class you would take at places) as I missed that entire section of the books we're using with my tutor because they guys started a couple of months before me.
I'll post some of my beautiful character writings later.
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