Chinese is hard

I'm trying to learn some Mandarin and, at the risk of stating the obvious, it's hard. Suppose for example that you learn that the word for beautiful in Chinese is "mei". You might think that you now know some Chinese, but you don't. Chinese is tonal, so that syllable can be pronounced four different ways depending on how you inflect your voice. Also, like English, the same syllable might have a few different meanings. So "mei" also means each, plum, younger sister, flatter and eyebrow, and several more, according to my dictionary. I believe that if you want to say that each plum flatters a younger sister's eyebrow, that would go mei mei mei mei mei, with the right tones. Now if you knew the tone you could say "beautiful" but it would be tough to understand someone else saying it in casual conversation because they don't draw out the tones like on a language CD. You could pick it up from context, but that's going to be difficult since you only know one Chinese word. And of course you won't be able to read or write your word until you learn the character, and the right order to do the strokes. Also, the characters are different in Taiwan than in mainland China. And also, some people might speak a local dialect such as Taiwanese and not understand Mandarin. Who's ready for word #2?

I took a couple of adult education classes last year, so I'm not starting from scratch. I'm starting to pick up a few snippets of conversation that I overhear. So I'll get some scrap of meaning like "this guy doesn't have something" or "there are 22 somethings". On a road sign I'll often be able to pick out "big" and "mountain" out of a string of characters. It's quite useless at this point but I think the mind likes to try to make sense of its surroundings.