Character Building

Amid everything else going on in our lives, I’ve added a new hobby. I briefly mentioned it in my Portland post, but now I’m officially fascinated with the Chinese language.  Brian and I would both really like to become more familiar with the Chinese language, both written and spoken– this is an incredibly overwhelming task considering neither of us knows a lick of Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese). Because we don’t know what provinces we’ll be traveling to until we accept a referral, I’m hedging my bets and starting with Mandarin.

I found a great free app for my phone which allows me to practice correct character writing; every morning I review flashcards on my phone and continue to add more and more characters to my vocabulary. Additionally, one of my colleagues and friends at the museum is Chinese and speaks/writes both Mandarin and Cantonese (not to mention what she considers “Beijingese.”)  She’s been incredibly helpful with my stroke order and pronunciation, and I am feeling less and less awkward with all the different inflections needed for this beautiful language.

I can’t quite explain it, but I’m finding my comprehension growing quite naturally. So far, I find the characters quite logical graphically, and I’m starting to put the pronunciation with the character. Another friend at the museum suggested I check our our library’s language software, and I found out excitedly that our library offers Mango Languages for free for all patrons. Woohoo!

I’m sure I’ll be sharing more quips as I learn more, but I had a great moment this week. As you might guess, Brian and I are settling in on our top name choices for our child (most welfare institute names are given en masse– all children in one institution are given the same last name, and first names are given as a matter of practicality. As we’ve mentioned earlier, all children in the Waiting Child Program have been abandoned, with 99.9% having no identifying information, so no medical record, no birthday listed, no name). After practicing some of the characters at lunch one day, my friend at work stopped by and looked at my paper and was able to read what I had written, including our finalists for names.  It’s difficult to articulate, but to have a native speaker be able to read my very amatueur attempt at such a complex language really made my day.

I know learning a new language from scratch is no short-term goal, but I think we and our child will have a lifetime of learning together.

 

 

 

5,385 thoughts on “Character Building

  1. I’m more than happy to find this site. I need to to thank you for your time just for this wonderful read!! I definitely loved every bit of it and I have you bookmarked to look at new information in your site.

  2. An outstanding share! I’ve just forwarded this onto a co-worker who had been conducting a little research on this. And he actually ordered me dinner simply because I discovered it for him… lol. So let me reword this…. Thanks for the meal!! But yeah, thanks for spending time to talk about this subject here on your web site.

  3. You are so awesome! I do not believe I’ve truly read through a single thing like that before. So good to find another person with some genuine thoughts on this topic. Really.. thank you for starting this up. This web site is something that is required on the internet, someone with some originality.

  4. Having read this I thought it was very enlightening. I appreciate you spending some time and energy to put this article together. I once again find myself spending way too much time both reading and posting comments. But so what, it was still worthwhile.

  5. The very core of your writing whilst appearing agreeable at first, did not really work properly with me personally after some time. Someplace throughout the sentences you managed to make me a believer but only for a while. I however have got a problem with your jumps in assumptions and you would do nicely to fill in all those gaps. If you actually can accomplish that, I will certainly end up being fascinated.

  6. You have made some decent points there. I looked on the web to find out more about the issue and found most people will go along with your views on this web site.

  7. Next time I read a blog, Hopefully it doesn’t disappoint me as much as this one. I mean, Yes, it was my choice to read through, however I actually believed you’d have something useful to say. All I hear is a bunch of moaning about something you could fix if you weren’t too busy searching for attention.

Leave a Reply to FAST WEALTH - Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *