chinese

Yes its true I do speak a little Chinese and a lot of horrible Chinese. At our last Drupal meetup in Beijing I was stuck as the only presenter and I didn't have an interpreter handy so it was just me and a room full of Chinese Drupal folks just waiting for me to speak. Very intimidating but I think I managed to get my point across.

These videos only prove one thing. I need practice!

If you're expecting pork sauce you might want to learn to read a few Chinese characters. The English on this menu read "Seasonal vegetables in Pork Sauce", The Chinese read "Seasonal Vegetables [with] frog"... Guess what it really was.

There are advantages to reading Chinese.

Wow I'm actually learning something. Two days ago I had my first Chinese writing test. The teacher said a word and we had to write out that word. Books closed and the whole nine. It was only 21 words and I studied all of them the night before so it wasn't exactly like a standard test but I still wrote 21 Chinese characters in less than 10 minutes so I'm proud of myself.

OK watch the video.

Last night I had an IM conversation with a new friend of mine whose English name is Patrick. During the conversation he told me that he turned down an offer to do some hacker programming against paypal. Now I know the Chinese word for hacker.

黑客

The word is a transliteration. Transliterations are several Chinese characters that form the sound of the word but by themselves mean nothing. Broken down this is

We arrived in China almost two weeks ago and every single one of those days has been consumed with language study. Every morning Diana and I wake up, perform some daily rituals (breakfast, shower, yoga, etc.) and then hit the books. My flash card count moved from around 175 cards to its current state at 316. Diana's flashcard count is something like 450 or 500 but she knows even more. I still have resolved my own big issue though; which was one of the strongest reasons behind the decision to move to China.