I'm sitting here listening to the news in Chinese. I don't understand much of it, but I can pick out a few words and phrases at least due to my taking 2 semesters of Chinese back at Belmont University. You might think that living in Hong Kong would help me learn Chinese, but its not as simple as that. Most of the Chinese people in Hong Kong speak Cantonese (common in southern China) rather than Mandarin which is the official language and common in northern China. Although the written language is the same, they sound very different. Plus the written Chinese language consists of characters and you have to memorize about 5000 of them to be fairly literate from what I've been told. At this point, it seems like I'll need a lot of luck (the characters above) to become anywhere close to literate.
I need to find a tutor (maybe a Mandarin-fluent Lingnan student) to work with while I'm here in Hong Kong or I think I'll forget most of the little I've already learned.
Zaijian (Goodbye) for now!
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