Thoughts on language learning, part 2

Since a large portion of my life right now is spent trying to communicate in a foreign language, it's not surprising that I often find my empty moments drifting towards thinking about language learning in general and Mandarin specifically.  (In other words, this post might be extremely boring to most of you, but it does give you a peek into my brain these days.)

In some ways, I like Chinese because it's very orderly.  Many of the words make so much sense.  Take the months of the year, for example. January is literally translated "1 month."  February is "2 month," March is "3 month."  Can you guess what December is?  "12 month"!  Moreover, there are a limited amount of initial and final sound combinations, so while the sounds are difficult for most American mouths to make, at least there's a finite number of them!  (413, to be exact.)

The picture gets a little more complicated when you factor in that each syllable can be intonated in 4 different ways.  So that gets you to about 1,600 distinct syllables.  Tone is mucho importante because the rise and fall of your voice when you uttering a syllable determines its meaning.  Click here if you're interested in understanding this more.  Basically, it means that the word ma can actually be 4 different words, depending on the rise or fall of your voice!  (Actually ma can be around 10 different words but that's getting ahead of myself...see the next paragraph!)

Things get even more murky when you realize that a word can be pronounced exactly the same as another but have a different character and so a different meaning.  (Think 'two' and 'too' and 'to').  Then I come to learn that it can go the other way too, and one character can have more than one pronunication and meaning (like desert as in abandon and desert as in Sahara)!

My weekend in the countryside was a little encouraging though...at one point my friend told me that she couldn't understand her husband's family's speech either and they couldn't understand her because of differences in dialect! It made me feel a little bit better that it wasn't just me, but then also a little disheartened...if a native speaker can't even communicate with people in her own country, what hope do I have! Ha!
I've also come to an odd point in my study of Chinese characters.  I'm finding that I'll often be able to read a sign (as in, pronounce all the words and know what each one means) and yet still have no idea what the sign means!  This is because a character might mean one thing by itself, but when combined with another character the meaning changes completely!  So I can read but not understand.  That would be like being about to pronounce a word in English but not know it's meaning....not very helpful! 

I did hit a milestone this week that I'd like to share with you.  I took a picture to commemorate it:


That, my friends, is a grocery list.  That I wrote.  And gave to our helper and she actually understood it! 
It wasn't perfect, by any stretch, but it got the job done.  Woot!