First Chinese Lesson

I just now finished my first Chinese lesson. I am taking lessons through Berlitz Virtual Classroom, with an online instructor whom I conversed with for the last hour and a half. Her name is Amy. She grew up in Tiawan but also spent considerable time in the US, and now lives in Atlanta. She was very patient with me as I pretty much butchered her native language. In the hour and a half we spent together this morning, I learned to say the names of several desk items~ book, ball point pen, paper. I answered questions like, "Is this a paper? Is this a book?" I also learned desk, chair, and floor, and then at the very end we counted to five. That's it... 90 minutes of about a dozen words. She told me the first few lessons would be slow... she was right! As she painstakingly taught me the vocabulary, she did sprinkle in lessons on how sentences are structured, how to answer questions, the tones of the language, etc.

Fortunately all the lessons are recorded so I can go back and review. I will definitely need to! Mandarin is so very different, so foreign, that my mind can hardly wrap itself around the sounds to remember them.

I think I can remember ball point pen the best... it's yuan zhu (pronounced "jew") bi (bee). I said that one a lot. I should be able to buy pens in China now!