The Chinese language is both extremely difficult and very simple to understand. First, the difficult part. The Chinese write in characters, as I am sure you have seen. These characters are very complex and the slightest wrong stroke changes the word all together. Also, there are many different characters for the same word. I have seen four different characters for the same word within one paragraph! The Chinese do have a method of writing using the English alphabet, called Pinyin, but it is not widely used. Most shops and products you come across will have the characters, and will only have the Pinyin about 30% of the time. This is really interesting, because when the Chinese are learning to write and read, they learn both characters and Pinyin.

Something else interesting is how the Chinese read the characters. If you ask a Chinese person what something says, don’t be surprised if it takes a minute for them to be able to rely the information to you. The Chinese must first decode the characters into Pinyin words in their minds, and then translate them to English. It makes me wonder why they characters are used, since the Pinyin is what they really understand, but who knows why the Chinese do anything!

The simple part of the Chinese language is the grammatical structures. I, me, my, and mine are all the same word. The same with you, yours, etc. This makes saying simple sentences very easy to do. How is my Chinese language learning going along? Well, not very well unfortunately. Even though there are only about 50 foreigners in the city, and the majority of Chinese people in Hohhot can only say “Hello” (which they love to do to us on the streets, and then laugh and feel cool), it is easy enough to complete daily tasks with only the knowledge of a few words. Knowing how to say “This” and “That” and give directions to a taxi driver makes everything a lot easier!