While my hours at the brewery don't make life easy, I'm finding ways around it for now. After my shift is over at midnight I'll probably catch up with a bunch of friends at the bars/clubs for a few hours which will be nice. Working as a server at the brewery has become pretty nice actually. Every day I meet some new customers who are from a different place and maybe speak a few more languages that I've never heard, but they are fun to interact with. I even got to spend some time speaking Spanish last night with a guy who spent 6 years in Spain while we talked about the upcoming World Cup :-) One group of people that I was serving told me that they tutor Chinese people on how to speak English for $30/hour and they recommended that I try to do it also if I have time...that could be interesting. I have become pretty good friends with some of my co-workers at the brewery, and they're fun to hang out with as well. They often teach me new words in Mandarin, which is nice.
Linda, my Mandarin tutor, came by today and I did my second lesson. I seem to be catching on quite quickly and now I can say useful words like different foods, taxi vocabulary, family, electronics, and higher numbers. Counting in Mandarin is quite easy; although the normal American hand counting is much different here, they use only one hand, similar to sign language I think...
It wasn't too hard to master :-) ...I've also started stringing together sentences such as: I'm hungry, I want ____, I love you, I'm eating ____, I am/you are ____. What's nice about Mandarin is that verbs don't seem to need to be conjugated. In Spanish and English you conjugate like crazy and many verbs have lots of different forms, but not with this language :-) What's most difficult is the different tones: you can say 'tang' 4 different ways to mean 4 entirely different things! I'm not learning Chinese characters, just how to speak. I figure that I don't really need to know how to read/write quite yet. Conversing is more important to me.
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PMM
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