Fun with Jack and Jane

Lets talk about chinese. The more i absorb this thing by osmosis the more i love it. Not the most luxurious of languages like italian, or the most velvety like french, and definitely not full in the mouth like spanish. The columns of air totally dispersed differently, and the most difficult thing about it is discerning when you sound like a four year old, and when you're actually saying what you mean to say. I suppose the best way to describe it is..irregular beats..it is a very strange pattern of inflection that spoken mandarin produces, its not hilly with emphasis at the end like Italian. I would say, its more...like a typewriter. You can almost hear each spoken word corresponding to a click or two, and then to a sentance, and then to an indent. Its funny because chinese grammar is very basic. It is without tense, plurality, conjugation, or gender. And yet somehow, it unites the most people in the world linguistically. Oh yeah, and i can speak it, kind of. The most difficult thing about learning Chinese is that it is all by ear, anything ive learned written has been in pin yin ( the phonetic romanized way of pronouncing Chinese characters) So really, the only good way for a westerner to learn Chinese is by ear and through conversation, otherwise, id say you're effed, you're really effed in the a. Another thing i realized is that if you know a good amount of chinese characters, you can actually choose which way you want to write what you mean...soo..for instance...you could use the original mandarin character, the simplified character, or...you could spell it phonetically with characters replacing the syllables of western words. ( ie. Jie Xi for Jessy) Gah this crazy language keeps surprising me, i love it i love it. Other things...it is possible to be able to read mandarin without speaking a word of it...cool right? because the characters are ideograms(representing concepts), pictograms ( representing things) and hybrids of the two. Something even more fascinating, because the characters repeat themselves to create other characters ( ie. the character for "tree" printing twice means "forest") it is possible even to infer what the characters mean without having any previous knowledge of it. The symbol "ren" for "man/person" literally looks like a person walking on two legs. Gah this thing is so cool.

Anyways...now to bitch.
I have no idea what im doing, when im doing it, and how the hell am i gonna pay for any of it.
On the upside...i have some good travel lined up for a while.
I am past the point of becoming, and just am, overwhelmed thinking about it all. Really, its awful, so i throw myself into work (studying mandarin) and hope that i can sink into it and something in me will budge to the point of decision.

Today Natlie threw a fit in the living room so I told her to go away that i didnt want to talk to her when she was mean. So she sat pouting on the floor when jack came over to her and asked in chinese..."why is she ignoring you?" natlie answers " I dont know" to which i piped in " you know why!" and then realized....holy shit i can understand Chinese...and so did jack apparently because he looked at me like i had just spoken in tongues and shouted with wide eyes "ta zhi dao Zhongwen!" ( she knows Chinese) take that mei mei.... :) smiles smiles smiles smiles smiles ahhhh...still not great at it, but hell, its been three months, and i can have conversation. hell to the yes. please dont judge me for using that dorky phrase.

As for Jane, she has become my best teacher, and teaches me a new word or so everyday. We both really enjoy i think, hope it continues. My favorite recent chinese word is...well its not, but it sounds like "wah-wah" which means drawing or coloring. So...something fun to say to natlie now a days " hey, you wanna wah wah? cool, yeah i really wanna wah wah, i love to wah wah, i could wah wah all day, can i wah wah with that color now? xie xie"

Stressed beyond blowing a gasket.
overwhelmed beyond what whelmed means
shakin' in my black leather boots.

Gimme some feedback. no?

j