chinese language 中文和汉子！

one of my favorite parts of china has been studying chinese. it's a really cool language and i love the writing too. i want to keep learning it when i come home, but it's going to be hard because i won't have many people to practice with. somehow i have had way more opportunities to practice my chinese this semester than last semester though, which has been great. if life gets in the way and i can't continue my studies at home, i will at least feel like my studies came to some kind of a culmination here with the chinese family that i hang out with that doesn't speak english. it's been really cool trying to talk with them.

here are my first attempts at writing chinese. my teacher taught me to write some of the basic characters. i still can't really remember how to write any of them except for characters that look like these: 人小区问口中子女...etc. my personal favorite is 口 haha. it's easy to remember, it means mouth! some of the basic characters are pictographic.


however, this way didn't really prove to be an easy way to learn chinese characters. writing them is too hard, i just wanted to be able to read some. finally, the chinese family helped me download a free software that converts pinyin writing to chinese characters. it's pretty easy- usually you can just type in the pinyin and the correct characters will come up (because the most common characters come up first). so now, i can chat online with my students in chinese! how fun. it's helping me start to learn more and more. here is a sample below. my student didn't know that i could speak chinese so she was a little surprised. i had to get a new QQ, my friend named me VicDragon :)