So one of the upsides for you, my fans, to this lack of work on my ”plate” is that I can regale you with various insights into my amazing life. As insights go this one is a real cracker so sit down, get out the popcorn and listen to my views on…learning Mandarin!
Through a friend of a friend I have managed to bag a very good ”older lady” teacher who is a native speaker of that rap we know as Mandarin but they know as Putonghua, or common language. One thing to remember is that China is so vast that there are many dialects within the one country so they had to pick one one language for the honkies to learn lest China isolates itself even further. So Putonguhau was chosen by The Man and it’s that which I am learning. The way to learn is via the PinYin system which is a system of assigning roman characters to Putonghua sounds. You’ve seen them before, all those X’s and Q’s in names and places but not sure how to say it. The problem is that Putonghua sounds attached to each Roman character letter has no oral resemblance to the letter it references – for example Q isn’t Q but pronounced cheeee. Simple. In my western mind I want to say Q as a reflex but you have to stop this instinct.
So a couple of lessons in and I would say that learning the lingo is going to be very very tough. I’m stuck on Hello and Good Morning Mr Gao. I can say ‘thank you’ which written as Xie Xie but pronounced as Cher Cher. You see how tough this is? I’ve been practicing at work and will, thanks to my v generous employer, be able to give you regular updates. That is until they give me something to do.