Adventures in Mandarin

So I've been learning Chinese here for about a month, and I think my character reading capacity has tripled.  You can learn so fast when its everywhere around you.  It's such a fun language to learn because it makes so much sense.  No conjugations, no tenses, no gender-specific particles.  And the grammar is so logical.  

There are a few basic symbols that most characters are made from, and each symbol means something simple, like knife, dish, or moon.  When the symbols are put together, they make a word.  For example, a woman and a child makes the word for good.  Put a roof over the woman's head and you get peace.  Also, most words are made up of two characters, so often if you don't know the word, but know the characters that make it up, you can figure out what it means.  Small write means lower case.  Hand machine means cell phone.  

Beijingers all talk with a funny accent, adding "ar" to the end of many words.  Kind of like pirates.

Chinese Learning

I'm pretty amazed at how fast you pick up a language when you are surrounded by it.  I had 4 hours of class in only Chinese today, and then spent about 3 hours studying and I feel so accomplished.  At home, I was always pretty exhausted if I spent more than 2 hours studying Chinese, but there's something different about being here.  I have an environmental engineering textbook in both languages and have been trying to decipher it.  It's actually pretty fun.  I feel like an archaeologist.  

I have a roommate finally.  She is from Hong Kong/Singapore/French Canada.  (There are so many Asian-American/Canadian/Australian/Europeans here.  I had dinner with 8 people who looked Asian but weren't).

  

Chinese Overload!

I guess I've never experienced the language barrier thing on my own before, but it is pretty overwhelming at times. I am attending a wastewater class that is taught in Chinese by my professor (who talks very fast) and I understand very little, even though I know the subject. I have a Chinese textbook that I'm trying to read/translate, but it's very slow going. I feel like a 2-year old who is learning what everything means for the first time, except my mommy and daddy are talking absurdly fast.

I do get to sit in on a Chinese conversation class that some of my French friends are in, and that should be really good for my learning. It's kind of funny, but I get so much satisfaction when I can get my bike fixed or as where a building is all by myself without using English or looking like a deer in the headlights.

In good news, the campus is beautiful. and huge. There are a lot of houses and people who live on campus who are not students and its fun to explore on my morning runs. There are also large park areas with huge lotus leaves and cute little pathways and old Chinese people doing Tai Chi. Although somehow, the 31,000 students get by with only 6 classroom buildings. Maybe Chinese people are just really good at bending space when it comes to large quantities of people.