Day 20 – How about start writing Chinese?

By bogaert
Being never too old to learn, I took some Chinese language course prior to departure through an online learning program. I finished the first module of the course, which took me about 30 hours. Now I can understand a few words; occasionally just enough to know what people are talking about. But the high pace of speaking makes it quite difficult to capture individual words. Speaking remains difficult, given the different tongues they use, and in particular the risk of mispronunciation resulting in a word with a total different meaning. We learned the different pronunciations of the word ‘Shi’, and you better don’t mix up Mr. Shū with Ms. Shú, or shù, and for sure not with shŭ! Meanwhile I recognize a few simple characters, but again far insufficient to be useful. I guess it will take me a long time before being able to use the Chinese language in a meaningful way. But it keeps me intrigued about how the language is read, written, and spoken. Last week our intern Deng Chen Chen (Cecily) penciled me down a few characters. I tried to remember them and also to reconstruct them on paper.

#ibmcsc china

My writing exercise

My writing exercise
Today I learned that I was doing totally wrong, the different dashes needs to be written in the right direction and in the right sequence. She gave me a writing exercise for a few characters. In a sequence of squares the character is composed step by step, each square subdivided into four quadrants to indicate the position of each dash. I am very impressed by the language and curious what I will have learned before leaving China, but I doubt it will be much more then today. But I do not give up (yet)!

My writing exercise

My writing exercise

My writing exercise

My writing exercise