Chinese

I love languages. My father's mom and dad came here in the 1950's from Switzerland. My father was born in the US, but was raised in a German-Swiss speaking household. I always found it ironic that my mom is more academically educated than my dad, holding a BS in Accounting, but my dad is the one who speaks two languages. Not only is he bilingual, English is actually his second language. I attribute my love of foreign languages and culture to my dad and my grandmother, since it sparked such a facination in me as a child with the reality that not everyone in the world spoke English.

Another aspect was that my mom had a good friend in college who was from Hong Kong, exposing me to a completely new aspect to language with the introduction of the Chinese writing system. Those symbols weren't just pretty pictures, but words. I have always been attracted to writing as an art form. I even worked on creating a personal script in Cyrillic. But I digress. This in a nutshell is the foundation of my unfolding dream to learn Chinese.

I always had an interest in China along with Russia and various other places I wanted to visit. But my desire to really learn the language didn't bloom until I saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. For some reason it truly inspired me to learn Mandarin (which is funny since at least two of the leads were actually native Cantonese speakers).  I never got very far in the past.

I started up again learning Chinese a few months ago, and have been very impressed with myself as far as my progress and how I've been sticking to it.

Currently I have been using Fluenz Mandarin as well as ChineseClass101.com - Learn Chinese with Free Podcasts. These are two of the products that I have been using and will be talking about. Perhaps my experience will show someone else that they too can do this, or anything else that they dream of. I am a bit new to this, so I will be editing and revising posts and pages as I get more experience.