My Chinese lessons! 🙂 I have started end of September with a private teacher, my Lao Shi – I am seeing her twice a week, for 2 hours each time. It is going well so far, but it is a process that takes a while. I have become pretty good to tell taxi drivers where to go, to turn left or right, to stop etc. I can do my shopping and ask for something, or how much it costs. I can order in a restaurant supposed that the menu has pictures for me to point on (while saying “this one”). Lao Shi is a really nice person. Yesterday we’ve been to a flea market after my lesson. And we have the plan as well to go visit some art galleries or something alike. She is working 7 days a week, teaching at the university, and she has 6 private students on the side (like me). She is 38 years old, and has bought a house recently. I look forward to getting to know her better.
Am still very enthusiastic about learning Chinese, even if sometimes I wish it would go a bit faster. Lao Shi is teaching me some writing too, which is absolutely fascinating! She bought another book for me, where the characters are explained in their origin. Fascinating! But the main focus is of course on the talking. My Chinese friends are encouraging me, and I hope that at some point it will do a “click” in my head and I will simply be able to speak.
Chinese people that I met told me that my pronunciation is pretty good… of course I can never be sure if they just want to say something nice to me, or if indeed my 3 months of audio course during my break in Germany last spring are paying off.
I have a goal: anyone remembers the movie “Eat Pray Love”? When Julia Roberts, after 3 months in Italy learning Italian, in the restaurant takes care of ordering the meal for her bunch of friends sitting with her around the table? There we go: my challenge is that in 6 months, I will bring my Chinese girlfriends in a Chinese restaurant, and I will order for all of us! I considered that Italian is somehow easier to learn than Chinese… so my girls agreed to give me 6 months instead of 3! 🙂
Breaking news: I have a real Chinese name now! My new employee has given it to me, because I had told her that I would like to have one.
So my new Chinese name is 希琳
希 xī is for the pronunciation (say “Siii”), and
琳 lín : the right part of the character means woods, tree or forest (in relation with “Silva” in my name, latin for forest). Though this character is a male one, so June added the left part to it, to make a female name out of it.
Now the meaning of these two characters is that
希 xī means “rare” or “uncommon”. In other context it can stand as well for “hope”. And
琳 lín means “beautiful jade” or “gem”.
So here I am asking you: Isn’t this incredibly beautiful?!?? :)))
Lao Shi told Mr.Zhou this week what my Chinese name is. Yesterday, he called me by my new name. So did another Chinese friend earlier this week, and he taught me how to write it.
I really love it! And I’m absolutely fascinated by this language!
