Some interesting tidbits about learning the Chinese language:
1. In China, kids learn pinyin before they learn to read and write. Pinyin is a phonetic system based on the alphabets, and the method by which most foreigners learn Chinese. I find this quite intriguing because that means Chinese kids learn to write and read the alphabets before their native language.
2. Most Chinese type in pinyin using the western keyboard. As you might have heard the same pinyin (or, pronounciation) can be converted into more than one character, so after you type the pinyin in, you have to pick from a list of suggested characters. This certainly makes learning Chinese easier – you won’t ever have to learn how to write the characters; just how to recognize them.
3. In Hong Kong, we speak Cantonese, which is a dialect. We learn how to write the same way that Mandarin speakers do - how we write is how Mandarin is spoken. Which is confusing because we can pronounce all written Chinese in Cantonese but we never speak to one another in that manner. Thus, when I speak Mandarin, I’d first have to translate it into written Chinese (in terms of sentence structure and vocabulary), then change the pronounciation of each word to Mandarin. Yep, very confusing.
