speak fluent Chinese

My first trip to China didn’t go quite as planned. I was supposed to live and work in Wuhan for 6 months and only ended up staying 6 days. So, this particular job wasn’t for me… I still would love to work in Shanghai and Hong Kong and really learn to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese.

And willing to trade Cantonese/Mandarin lessons for guitar lessons, or help building a bicycle, or help building a motorcycle.

Just contact me.

gjwken@gmail.com

I know a tiny bit of Cantonese but now I am studying Mandarin in school. I also plan on studying abroad in China in a couple years.

Well Cantonese at least. I’ll have to say it’s my most useful skill in my current job (a sad state of affairs if you’re familiar with what I do…)

Today I’m going into town to study Chinese. I’m going to sit in Starbucks and read my book and write out characters just like I used to do in Beijing every week. Shame my lovely friend Selina won’t be there to teach me those difficult words and explain everything so brilliantly…

I spent last year in China so I have made a few small steps towards this goal. I carried on learning when I got back, doing a class every Wed evening for a couple of hours. Now that class has finished I’m not doing anything. Starting from next week I’m going to try just doing some Chinese for those 2 hours that I would be in my class and go from there.

Learning Chinese is not as difficult as it seems, it requires tenacity, commitment and patience. Basic grammatical structures are far simpler than many other languages and there is great deal of logic involved in the structure of Chinese characters. The more characters one knows, the easier it becomes to acquire new characters.