Learning Mandarin
Yesterday Mary, Sam’s babysitter, told me this story and I found it both funny and interesting/insightful to Sam’s learning process re. Mandarin (and also indicative as to why Mandarin can be a difficult language to learn for English speakers):
Sam has started to wear a baseball hat recently (John also wears his hat in the morning so has had more luck getting Sam to wear his as Sam likes being like daddy :-). I set it out for Mary to take with them to the park yesterday. Turns out the word for "hat" in Mandarin ( if you want to you can see the character too) sounds somewhat like "cat." So when Mary said the Mandarin word for "hat", Sam (at first) replied saying "meow."
🙂
I could relate to this as Mary and I had a similar exchange last Friday at music class. Turns out that the word "hua" in Mandarin can mean "draw" or "flower" or "Hua", Mary’s Chinese name (she changed it when she moved to the US) depending on the tone/inflection (which I can oftentimes hear, but can’t always replicate with my voice).
Sam was also saying a phrase this weekend (repeatedly) that I got Mary to decipher when I saw her yesterday: "Qu jia" , which means "go home." (I found what I think are the words online but I could be way off. Check out how many ways there are to say "go" — you’ll have to type "go" into the search box and hit enter to see the results (sorry about that). But the number is quite amazing)