January 10, 2015

Drinking real China tea
from little porcelain cups
learning Mandarin

     When I visit foreign countries I like to pick up a few of the words in the language of that country.  When I visited Kenya, I was quite pleased with my ability to pick up Swahili and all the Kenyans were very helpful with supplying new words for me.  Not so in China.  For some reason I had a terrible time getting my tongue around their vowels.  And if I'd try a word in Chinese, the person I would be talking to would immediately respond in English. For some reason I had a much harder time with Chinese.  Maybe it was all those vowel combinations having a different sound, or perhaps the x sounding like an s, or the z sounding like ds.  But the zh sounds like dge as in hedge.  See what I mean?  Next time I go to China, I'm going to invest in a language program before I go.  So all I learned was xiexie for thank you and nihao for hello.  I think Disney needs to do a movie about a Chinese animated character using lots of Chinese words, maybe that way I'd learn more words.  Hey, it worked for my learning African words. Jumbo, akumba metata.