Mandarin

I'm a big advocoate of learning a second language, even if you don't think you'll need to use it very often, because I believe it expands your creativity and cognitive ability.  I'm studying Mandarin while living in China, and although it is extremely difficult for me to master, I'm learning to appreciate the beauty of this language. 

I'm a minimalist, and what I love about Mandarin is its ability to use spareness and logic to convey complex meanings. They don't use three words when one or two will do. The library of sounds is much smaller than in English, which can cause a lot of confusion for me; my ears are not yet skilled at differentiating such minute differences, but the preciseness has a simple beauty I am learning to appreciate. Those one or two words can convey a more complex understanding than our three, due to the artistry of the written language. 

Reading Chinese characters involves a lot of memorization. A lot, a lot, a lot. Every night before bed I spend time memorizing which characters go with which syllables. (Each character represents a single syllable.) But the characters themselves can be works of art, incorporating pictograms and combinations of smaller words to create unique expressions of the culture in a way that simply combining letters, as we do with the Roman alphabet, does not. Characters teach me about what is valued in the culture, in addition to the basic expression of language. (For example, the word for "good" or "desirable" pictured here is a combination of the characters for "mother" and "male child".)

For now, my Mandarin skills are very poor. I can only speak at an intermediate level, and I can identify and understand perhaps 75-100 characters. (According to what I have read, it takes about 3,000 to be able to read a newspaper; the average person who has completed school can identify around 5,000-7,000 characters, and knowing 10,000 characters is considered very literate; in other words, I have a long way to go!) But, I am really enjoying my study of Mandarin and look forward to having another year and a half in-country to try and refine my skills.