Those Damn Doodles!

Chris and I had our regular Chinese language “class” on Tuesday.  Class meaning we sit on his bed with a laptop and try (try so hard) to put in at least one hour of Mandarin lessons with Rosetta Stone’s program.  Usually our brains check out well before the end of that hour.  I twirl my hair and finish a glass of wine.  Chris loudly complains “Omigod.  WHY is the “word” for dress FOUR words long?!” And we both exclaim throughout the lesson: “ah!  Doodles!  Why, why those damn doodles!” (To anyone without a sense of humor, that probably sounds terrible but have you looked at a character?  Doodle. This is really just a display of our annoyance and frustration at being raised in country with a doodle-free language).

And then there are the tones. máo, māo, mào.  That’s THREE different words. Máo the Chairman, māo the cat and mào the hat. The meaning of the word depends on what tone you use.  In other words, it’s all about how you pronounce mao. So if your voice is steady and high it’s the first tone (ā), going up it’s the second (á), down-and-up like a yo-yo it’s the third (ă) and it’s fourth if it goes down (à).  Oh boy.  (Nic, if I miss-toned something, please let me know!)  Hmph.  So that’s 3 maos.  We don’t know what the last măo means. Probably something ridiculous like tripod.

 So you see after one lesson of this our brains are like this: @%#$&@*@&^%$#@^&!!!  A couple months later this is still happening, but all around we’re making steady progress.  I’m getting the vocabulary although I’m not so quick with the recall.  I can at least recognize the word!  Chris gets the grammar and remembers the tones better then I do (I still see just the letters in the word not the accent thingy that denotes the tone).  Between the two of us, I feel increasingly confident that we can minimize offenses.  We’ll also be gesturing a lot.  I have a feeling I’ll get myself into trouble when I ditch Chris for my cross-country camel ride.