Life in a third language (Continued from “Talk to me in English”)

My "Talk to me in English" thread is pretty much obsolete right now, but I wanted to share a few of my experiences while ramping up on another language. Mandarin Chinese is my third, or fourth language, depending on how you count. I've only been studying since January, and this is the first time for me to be immersed in it. It's been a while since I've gone through that particular situation, and I'm remembering just how much fun (positive and negative) that is. I want to post a few of my fresh experiences as I go. You can read them or not. Sometimes, I may have to give some context or explanation for it to make sense, so you may have to wade through some of that. I welcome anybody else to share fun experiences you have with language learning, or with someone else learning a language. For your sake, I'll try to limit my entries to just the Chinese experience. So I don't have to explain it every time, when I Romanize a Chinese syllable, I'll use the numeric Pinyin to give the intonation. There are 4 tones in Mandarin: 1 is a high level tone. 2 is a rising tone. 3 is a falling rising tone, and 4 is a falling tone. If there is no number, it is a neutral tone which means it isn't so important, but it is actually determined by the tones on either side of it.

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