Pinyin power!

Last year I was faced with 6 tones, unnatural and unfamiliar consonant clusters and more vowel sounds than Countdown could shake a conundrum at.  Needless to say, my progress learning Vietnamese was slow, my motivation plummeted and lessons came too little too late, moving at a phenomenal speed few could keep up with.

This year, however, Mandarin offers 2 fewer tones (all of which I can not only recognise, but can also accurately mimic), more natural sound sequences and pinyin.  This is the written form of Mandarin that uses our ABC’s to create phonetic versions of words: a saving grace in a world of unfamiliar and often very intricate Chinese characters.

My Mandarin experience started over 18 months ago, when I took a few lessons on the off chance I accepted work over here.  Writing the words in pinyin aided language learning, assisting my ability to retain my growing, but still limited repertoire.  Needless to say, after a year of ‘Trời ơi !’ in Vietnam, most of the Mandarin was forgotten.

This year, I have more motivation and incentive to learn.  Few Chinese people speak English and I was keen to learn the basics before arriving here.  Cue the mandarin lessons on my iPod, which I listened to repeatedly during workdays in the UK.  And to top it all: Chinese people understand when I speak Mandarin! I was very impressed I didn't have to repeat myself when asking a taxi driver if he could give me a receipt in what was only my second day in the city.  This is going to be a far easier language to get to grips with.

A xx