Mandarin: Simplified Chinese

Simplified, my eye!

Be that as it may, I'm absolutely loving my Mandarin class. Today was day two of week three. It's challenging, fast paced, fun, and rife with the kind of strange and wonderful happenings that always occur when people of completely different cultures and backgrounds come together.

On day one, true to form I reached class early enough to sweep the floor, take a nap and grab a quick bite before the rest of the class got there, if I were so inclined. Yes, 20 minutes early. Class is on the 26th floor of a building, as mentioned here, in the heart of Singapore. This affords us a stunning, panoramic view of the city which promised to be highly distracting during class! (a promise that has been kept I tell you)
After about ten minutes of wishing I wasn't the geek who showed up before the professor, my fellow students began to trickle in...

There's just ten of us, but the diversity we manage is quite something.
There is the guy from Tel Aviv who works here as a cosmetics salesman, the girl from Italy who is studying Mandarin in Singapore as a stop gap on her way to university in China next year. There are the two monks from Thailand who are learning Mandarin (which they don't know..naturally) in a class where the medium of instruction is English (which they also don't know, !!). There are two Vietnamese students, two Indonesians students fresh out of college, one South Korean who is a father of two little boys and is learning Mandarin as a alternative to afternoon baby sitting. And there's me, from India. And number eleven, our teacher from China.

It's a cleverly structured class where the first lesson taught conversational Classroom Chinese. Things like, 'hello teacher', 'how do you pronounce this word', 'could you repeat that, slowly please'. This made conversing in Mandarin possible from day one. In subsequent classes we were given our Chinese names (my name is Shi Lin: some Poetry and some Jade. No real combined meaning) and could only address each other by these. I can't for the life of me remember what everyone's real names are.

Since language mirrors a culture and vice versa inextricably, I find that reading up on the culture and the history, learning about the thinkers and the movements that made a difference, looking at the paintings, leads to such a beautiful, full picture of the language. Studying in the age of Google is a very pleasant thing!

I've been working on some typically Chinese art. I've been playing around with an old, yet new, medium for them (I'll let you know what medium after I post the drawings/ paintings on here) and I'm so happy with how they're turning out. I can't wait to post them. Soon!

Until then, off I go. It's almost 8.00pm and I want to go for a run and be back in time to study for a couple of hours before I can watch the late telecast of Ugly Betty, guilt free!

Zaijian! (Goodbye, see you again)