Save the 5 minutes that we went outside to experience the "Super Typhoon" today, my house mates and I have now been in our apartment for over 24 hours straight. Although catching up on the missed seasons of various TV shows starts out as fun, when you're still doing it 10 hours later, it loses some appeal. Luckily, from what I can tell from the weather websites, the eye of the storm has passed over Taiwan, what's left now is just the tail end. And what a tail end it is. It sounds like you're in a wind tunnel, and whenever a big gust comes, the windows sound like they're about to crack. We've put tape in huge Xs over the glass, hoping that if the windows DO break, they'd break into large pieces instead of shattering. However, if this were to occur, we realized that we don't have anything to cover the, then exposed, window with. Details...

I took last night to make flashcards in a feeble attempt to learn some Chinese before I get swamped with teaching (class starts on August 30, so not much time there, I suppose). It's a very frustrating feeling being surrounded by writing and not being able to read any of it. Chinese is a tonal language, meaning that there are 4 tones that any given word can be in. One tone means one thing, the same word in a different tone can mean something completely different. For example: "tang" in a first tone means "soup," but "tang" in second tone means "sugar." The problem is, a lot of the time, people talk very quickly, and while I can hear the tone difference in some things, I feel like a lot of the time, I'm gonna have to stick with putting the words in the context. A side of soup makes a lot more sense than a side of sugar when ordering noodles...

Anyway, one thing I'm struggling with in terms of language is the whole idea of the characters. Our Chinese teacher suggested that we learn b, p, m, f (pronounced boh, poh, moh, foh), which is basically the alphabet. However, each sound is associated with a character- makes sense: when we learn to read English, we realize that the sound of A is connected with the letter A. The character aspect is called "MPS," while the written out sounds (in this case: b, p, m, f) is called Pinyin. The MPS characters you learn make up the more complex characters that mean actual words. We have been told that our students learn MPS, and it would be more benifical if we learned MPS too, rather than Pinyin. This adds an extra step. Now, we have to look at a character, recognize what that character is in Chinese, then translate it to English. For example: you see the character, you recognize that it's the character for bai, and then you remember that bai means "white" (it's also the first part of my Chinese name: bai ba ru). However, if you don't know that the character is bai, your stuck, and not only can you not read it, you sure as heck can't say it. NOT to mention, when you combine the characters with other characters, they make up new words- for example, bai (white) when combined with two other characters make up the word "passion fruit." Never would have guessed that.

This definitely makes language learning frustrating. The last time I learned a new language was Spanish, and at least then I was using the same alphabet. At the same time, when you finally figure out what a word is, it is SO satisfying- like identifying a code. I worked on translating part of a menu last night, and while I still don't know what a lot of words mean, I can definitely find the character for vegetable, meat, and water. I know people spend years and years learning this language, but I'm bound and determined to at least know enough to get by here.