ni hao!!

While in school, my English language teacher used to say, "English is a funny language.." Now I say, What about Chinese???
I am learning Mandarin(Chinese) these days and boy...it is so twisted!!! Initially, it felt like a singing class with all the tones and phonetics that we have to keep in mind. For the same word, the same set of letters, different tones imply different meanings. The script too is interesting.. pictorial. Modern Chinese has less of pictorial stuff which means each word has its own set of letters..which means unless you know a word, you cannot read it. There are certain alphabets missing..like for example "George" is pronounced as "Chiao ch" :)
Today, we had the first mock conversation and now I know how tough it is to process the foreign language, filter it into my brain and spill out what needs to be said..!!