Why You Should Learn Chinese if you want try Asian Languages Part II An interesting and unique part in Chinese is 成语(Chinese idiomatic expressions) which usually consists of 4 characters and took shape from ancient famous stories or literature and carry wise and metaphor so widely used by Chinese people in daily life. E.g., 熟能生巧: Practice makes perfect 言多必失: Careless and non-stopping talk leads to trouble 树大招风: Within forest, the taller the tree is, the higher probability being blown down by the wind One more point to choose Chinese is its long, exotic history and relatively independent culture from westerners that would help you look at the world in another perspective, even though modern Chinese are heavily westernized or influenced by the western countries. There are a lot of common customs and cultures originated from China but shared by other Asian countries like Japan, Korea, e.g., we mark years with animals(year of dog, pig, monkey, tiger...), we have another lunar calendar. That's it. I hope this helps you make your decisions on the Asian languages.

Why You Should Learn Chinese if you want try Asian Languages Part I I'd recommend Chinese(Mandarin) for you because Chinese is very different from what you are speaking or learning, such as English, Spanish, German, Portuguese which are phonetic languages. Chinese is a ideographic language, which means the elements in the language represent the concepts or ideas or the things directly, rather than a specific sounds of words in language. For example, 人 means person, which looks like a person walking with hands removed. Then we use 众 to mean a group of people, which you can see that we have 3 persons in it! Antoher example is 伞(umbrella), looks like exactly an umbrella! We actually have a unique writing system, which can date back to thousands of years ago, when people wrote or draw the words on the shell bone. Those words pictured what they saw in the old times. Even in modern Chinese, we can get some clues why it is written that way. For example, 日 means sun, 月 means moon and 明 carries a meaning 'bright' because in the old days there were no other sources that could bring you 'bright light'. Another point to learn Chinese instead of other Asian languages, in my humble opinion, is its great influence to the languages of borded countries such as Korea, Japan, Vietnam. Actually as far as I know the old Korea, Japan and Vietnam used Chinese writing system as their official writing system and shared a lot of common cultures. Even in modern Korea and Japan, you can see a lot of evidence of Chinese charactors! So if you master Chinese, it will defefintely help you learn languages, cultures, histories of other asian countries, e.g., the most influential history book in Vietnam was written in traditional Chinese! That being said, many westerns are daunted to learn Chinese because they think it is too hard, especially for writing (yes, even if you can communiate fluently in Chinese, it is likely you can't write nor read because of lack of writing pracrice). But trust me, if you begin writing, you'll love it because the process of writing Chinese characters is kind of the way doing art. Another challenage thing is that Chinese is tonal languages, which means different intonations might mean different things! On the other hand, the good news is that Chinese grammer is straightword for English speakers and much simpler, e.g, we don't have verb inflections, no tense, no articals, no plurals, no phrasal verbs etc.

My Ninth Lesson With Marie Yesterday evening I had a conversion with Marie and she is a young girl from Canada and a native English and French speaker. She also studied Spanish and Mandarin. The interesting thing is that she likes to talk with her dog in different languages. That dog is really quad-lingual! She is kind of the way teenager, who often stays up to late in the night and wakes up late in the morning and then have brunch! We talked about site touring about China and she also told me something about Singers from Canada, whom she dislikes (LOL). I also taught her some mandarin and she told me she would minor Chinese in the next year. WOW

My Eighth Lesson with Diana Yesterday morning I had my eighth lesson with Diana. She is extroverted Persian American and she was really easy-going. It was really pleasant to have conversations with her because of her engaging smiles, vigorous gestures, which always encouraged you to speak English. I rehearsed my upcoming presentation with her and received many useful corrections and advice from her. I was especially grateful of her corrections with any, even minor, grammar or vocabulary mistakes since people tend not to correct you if he/she can understand you even if you make some mistakes. I'd suggest any teacher in this site that it is always better to correct anything you think of inappropriate, even it is a nuanced mistake. Yeah, I'd keep practicing voicing 's' out for plurals and 'ed' for past sense verbs. Thanks you Diana!

My Seventh Lesson With Lloyd Last night I had my lesson with Lloyd. He was always helpful and offered to start the session earlier than scheduled as much as he could. So I think he loves teaching English, he enjoys it. I can feel it, really! I learned a new useful phrase 'speech crutch', which help you organize your sentence and give you time to think when you need pause. Probably the most used speech crutch is 'You know', 'well' especially for Chinese. My crutch word is, 'right'. I don't know why, but I use this word very often. Well, I use 'You know' and 'Well'' sometimes too. I introduced Chinese 'hotpot' to Lloyd and made him hungry. We had good conversations and I learned about his life. I was kinda surprised to learn that he didn't speak good Philippines even though He was Philippine! He was raised in Canada with his family in his childhood so He is actually a native English speaker living in Philippine.