You Good

Well, after plowing through the first three Mango lessons in Mandarin Chinese, I'm confident I now know as much Chinese as I will ever know! (In other words, it's HARD!) I was reminded, strongly, that I have always been a visual learner -- and there were no visual cues to hang onto. I quickly got "hello" (which translates literally as "you good") and "goodbye" but when it came to repeating a long sentence such as the Chinese for "Please tell me your honorable surname" my mind froze. Auditory learning is not for me. Furthermore, Chinese is a tonal language, and I fear my old ears just can't distinguish among all the subtly different tones. In order to retain anything at all, I had to write it down phonetically and memorize the sounds. That's cheating, I guess. Oh, well. Mango is certainly a tool I will recommend enthusiastically to anyone who's interested in learning a language.

PS - I signed up for Twitter and am now tweeting away. Check out my newly embedded Twitter badge on this blog. There's an awful lot of self-involvement and navel-gazing in this whole idea, no? I suppose it would be a good way for a large family or group of friends to stay in constant contact, if they all signed up for Twitter. Maybe it could work among SPL staff? The problem is that most of us are too busy working to do any tweeting. I found a site called Twellow (the Twitter Yellow Pages) that could be a good resource for finding folks with similar interests whose tweets might be something I'd actually like to read.Right now, instead of following the tweets of a bunch of librarians, I think I'd prefer to follow a few comedians. And maybe a couple of cheerful Buddhist monks for good measure? A daily dose of humor, a little spirituality...