Learning Chinese

I'm learning Thai. I feel that I would be remiss about living in Thailand for three years and making no effort to learn the language. My Thai is actually improving fairly well, but my real linguistic efforts for the past year have been in learning Mandarin Chinese.

Unfortunately though, I've found it very difficult to teach myself a language! Things changed when the school year started again. One day at lunch very early on in the school year, the head of the school's Chinese department approached me and asked if I was interested in learning Chinese! Of course, I said "yes!"

practicing calligraphy with Lao shi (teacher)

The Confucius Institute, the Chinese Government's language education program, has an office at Chitralada School. The Chinese teachers at my school are from China, and they are very highly trained to teach not only the language, but promote Chinese culture as well. For two hours every week, the Chinese teacher from the Vocational campus would come to our school to give me a private lesson.

Sometimes it's hard to work on two languages at once, especially two Asian languages. There are some similarities between Thai and Chinese, especially some vocabulary, but there are lots of differences too. I've been working on Chinese on and off for nearly a year now. I've learned a lot, but I still have a long way to go. When I went to Singapore I tried to listen to as much Chinese as I could. Maybe I couldn't say much, but I was listening. I'm now able to chat with Chinese friends about very simple topics. I would really like to go to China soon and try to practice the language.