Shanghai: An evaluation of Things

With the advent of Christmas, the New Year and the end of the semester coming closer and closer, I thought I'll share a few thoughts on what its like over here in Shanghai, China.

Learning Mandarin.
The initial phase of learning mandarin is never easy. Characters are a constant challenge to memorize, pinyin words are difficult enough to make a grown man cry; trying to distinguish the spoken tone then drives the man into bi-polar disorder, even when you think you have got the tones right, you haven't cause the 中国人 is staring blankly at you in the eye with a frown of confusion and a squint of incomprehensibility. If you mind thinks in cartoon, you'll can easily spot a huge WTF thought bubble.

DO NOT BE FOOLED MANDARIN IS NOT EASY!!

You will be angry at how characters when unrecognisable cannot be read. Frustrated at how difficult pinyin can 比如说 que, ci, chi, zi, zhi. Agitated at how slow your mind works when it comes to translating your core language to mandarin; only for the receiver to say "你说什么意思" or "听不懂" due to grammar errors from your side.

Unless you have a very cool head, or the passivity of Dalai Lama, you will get want to scream, throw your books in a tantrum-like manner, scribble huge swathes of red ink over wrongly written characters and finally declare mandarin a stupid language and that it makes "NO SENSE TO USE CHARACTERS SINCE YOU CAN NEVER REALISTICALLY MEMORIZE ALL CHARACTERS AND THAT MEMORIZING CHARACTERS IS A WASTE OF BRAIN SPACE"

Been there done that.

After that you will cool down. Focus on the books you have, read, memorize, write essays, listen to tape recordings. As 1-2 months progresses some characters like 是，要，如果，还，需要，大小，比，学，生,气，一起，不错，对，说，汉语，活，动，请
start appearing very often and new words start getting easier to memorize as a new word can sometimes be a matter of adding the words you have learnt with another,
比如：学生 = Student 大学 = University 需要 = Need 大小 = Size
It gets even better when you look at the dictionary and look for a single character like 生. Just from 生 and combining words about you can easily get 生气，学生，生活，生动

then there are radicals. for example:
请清青情
ALL OF THEM ARE QING!! They are simply prounounced differently but the context of the sentence helps you clarify which one you are using as well as the radical otherwise known as zi pang.
eg. 清 has 3 strokes in front of it, otherwise known as the water stroke. Chances are, this Character has some relation to water, and sure enough, 清白 = pure, clean and 清楚 = clear.

sometimes by understanding the word in isolation, you get to understand things better. For example, say 生出, sheng has many uses eg. ripe, raw, existence which chu is to go to (出去is to GO to a location), so if you combine, ripe/raw/existence with to go to, you'll get BORN!! This connecting the dots helps when trying to learn new words from the book without having to memorize the word as a whole.

I can recall about 50-70% of new vocabulary from my textbook for the next 1-2 hours after the teacher has gone through the text by understanding what the characters in isolation stand for.