Jiangmen, is my new home in China. This city is located in the Guangdong province of Southern China, just a couple of hours from Hong Kong. I came here to take what it seemed to be an impossible challenge, learn chinese.

Learning mandarin or putonghua has been quite a feat, it’s a very complex language to say the least. It frustrates me that there are  4 different tones to each syllable, which if I mess up I could be saying something completely insulting. The tone difference between kiss and please in mandarin is one that I haven’t mastered yet, and it’s a pretty dangerous mistake I would say.

The only other language I’ve had to learn as an adult is French, so at times I find myself trying to make a sentence with the few words I know in Mandarin mixed up with French. I have even caught myself answering people with a “oui” .No that chinese and french sound anything alike, is just where my mind goes when I’m trying to communicate with someone in chinese.

Writing chinese characters is another nightmare.  I am the worst at drawing, and almost any kind of art form for that matter, so my characters look horrible.There are about 3000 characters, which kids learn at a young age and learn at least 700 per semester. Two months in and I can say I master to the last stroke, no more than 30 of them.

The good thing about chinese is that they don’t use tenses or articles, which makes it easier to form sentences. And it actually can be fun to learn. There are so many words that sound like inappropriate words in either  spanish or english, that being able to say them freely without no one even realizing it , is pretty fun.

Although this language is very hard, I’m happy to be able to speak a few sentences. I’m confident that after a year of studying I will be able to communicate and express myself in a somewhat fluent manner. 🙂

         

All the pictures from this post , I took them inside “Wuyi University” campus, where I take my chinese course.

.