Learning to speak Chinese...

November already! I can hardly believe it's almost 2006. Goals for next year: 1) finish paperwork, 2) transform the office into a nursery 3) learn to speak (some) Chinese and 4) bring Kavanna home!! Well, we're almost finished with our paperwork and our plans for the nursery are moving forward, so...... it's time to tackle a new language. Since our new daughter will know only Chinese (and we're gambling that she'll understand Mandarin, not Cantonese) it will be nice to be able to actually communicate with her. Languages are not my thing at all (unless the ability to curse - mildly - in five different languages counts?!!) so we anticipate a huge challenge. We don't expect to be able to read the language - we'll be happy if we can speak and understand basic Mandarin by the time we're in China.

Some facts about the Chinese language:

It is the oldest written language on record, believed to date to the 2nd millennium B.C..

Over 1.2 billion people speak some form of Chinese - the dialects include Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese and other regional dialects based on these main languages. Writing found on turtle shells from the Shang dynasty (1500-950 B.C.) are the same as that found in modern China.

Chinese is written with characters - each one represents a syllable of spoken Chinese, but also has a meaning. Each character is comprised of between one and 64 strokes. The writing system is open-ended, so there is literally no limit to the number of characters. The largest Chinese dictionaries include about 56,000 characters, but most of them are archaic and/or obscure. To read most magazines or newspapers, you need to know about 3,000 characters. To read literature, you need to know twice that. To increase literacy, the government has simplified about 2,000 characters.

Spoken Chinese is also challenging. Mandarin has about 1700 possible syllables, as compared to over 8,000 in English. Therefore, many sounds may sound the same but have different meanings.


再见 玩得高兴
(goodbye, have a nice day)