Mandarin City

I went to set up my Mandarin language tutoring this evening. I'm doing the lessons through a place called "Mandarin City" and they offer some pretty nice services...

I'm set up to do 36 hours of lessons for 3 months - which is 3 hours a week for 12 weeks. 12 hours per month is included in my NSC (Next Step Connections) package, and I guess I can choose to pay for more hours if that's what I want. The lady who runs Mandarin City, Vicky, was trying to talk me into doing 60 total hours for ¥3300 ($480) more...not sure if its a good idea or not. One of my main goals while I'm here is to learn Mandarin, but thats a good chunk of change and I'm not sure if I'll have time for extra hours while I'm working. Aside from that, I purchased my books and set up my lessons for every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I actually don't have to go anywhere for my classes. My tutor comes to my apartment! (Which is good because the Mandarin City office is in a pretty sketchy area)

I wish I came with some background in the language - Rich is a Mandarin minor at his school, and the rest of the people I know seem to know much more than me, so I usually use them for help :-) It's a bummer because right after I graduated, my high school added Mandarin to the World Languages program. I guess you have to start somewhere though. Here's what I've learned so far while traveling the city of Shanghai (without any formal lessons)...I can say "hello, thank you, 1-10, English?, goodbye, sorry, road, north, south, east, west, water, and beer." Those words seem to get me around pretty alright :-) There's a lot of room for improvement! I have a feeling that successfully mastering the different tones of the language will be the most difficult thing to do...but that's the beauty of the Shanghainese dialect of Mandarin - tones are essentially forgotten and you just blur everything together really fast =) I'll probably be good at that.

I start my lessons on Wednesday, so I'm pretty excited about it. Hopefully my tutor is very helpful.

My first official day at the brewery is tomorrow afternoon - today I rode my bike back and forth from my apartment to the brewery a few times so that I got the route down. It only takes me about 8 minutes to get there by bike, so that's pretty huge.

I'm trying to find a soccer league or something that I can get involved in around here. No great luck yet.

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PMM