Yes indeed. Chinese language training has begun. After a day of general orientation, we've jumped right into sounds and pronunciations (and a very brief, very basic conversation).
So far, so good. Of course, learning the actual Chinese written characters will be slow, as they have no correlation to the pronunciation. So in the meantime, we're using Romanized spellings. Problem is, that system (known as "pinyin") was developed to help native speakers of Chinese with pronunciations. So, they've used English characters picked seemingly arbitrarily (from our point of view, anyway) to represent the sounds -- because many of the sounds aren't even close to the characters they chose. And the sounds change depending on which "initials" (essentially, starting consonants) precede them.
Well, it's only the first day of actual class. No point in getting all worked up yet. I just hope the chumps in my group don't hold me back like it already seems they will (no, DiploWhat is not in my group). A couple of them are really slow.
I guess now we'll just see if I can keep up with the lessons while still putting in a decent number of hours at the store.
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2 comments:
Well, if nothing else the slow people will make it more manageable with your job. And it should help you have a really solid base for later on. Good luck!
And slow people will help you feel better about yourself =)
-bt
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