David goes to China

After the disaster of losing the recordings of our oral last time, we've done it again and taken a belt, braces and two pairs of trousers approach to the recordings so I'm very hopeful of not having to do it again, again. Our conversation wasn't as good as last time, but good enough I think.

Followed by an hour's lesson and more vocabulary to learn. Next week Yulan has threatened us with learning the characters - the part I find most difficult.

Reading an article the other day about whether or not Chinese characters represent ideas or sounds made me think a bit. I've been helped by (dubious?) explanations of the origin of some characters that made it easier for me to remember their meanings. eg ren = person
symbol like a curved upside down V, supposedly like a person walking. Da = big, the same person with their arms stretched wide.

But actually I hadn't come across a single character which I could unambiguously understand as a picture of a concept until yesterday when I saw the characters for "lamb" and "meat" followed by a new character for me which I immediately understood - in context to be fair - two rectangles one above the other with a vertical line bisecting them and continuing above and below.

I find learning the pinyin (but not the tones) for new words relatively easy, but characters very difficult. The explanations help me to remember the shapes and practicing in the correct stroke order (which makes me feel like and certainly empathise with a five year old learning to write English) also helps.

I don't think in words except when I'm being consciously analytical. I do think quite quickly in concepts and images. I don't normally construct (English) phrases before I utter them. Sometimes what comes out of my mouth surprises me - and I don't mean last night's curry. I sometimes find my own witticisms very funny because I've never heard them until I say them.

When I read in French I don't translate into English, I just take in the meaning in French, as it were, until I hit an unfamiliar word, or a difficult piece of phrasing or grammar.
I'm getting that way a little with pinyin (albeit with a tiny vocabulary), but I recognise characters so slowly that I can't help but word for word translate into English when reading characters.

Odered my visa from Chinese Visa Direct Limited. Very happy with the service. Visa arrived about a week after I sent them the form and cheque.

We had a writing exam yesterday. After spending an hour or two revising at the weekend I wasn't overly confident, but it was actually considerably easier than I had expected. I think I've probably scored very highly on it, but we'll see...

Good news: Yulan told us during our revision class that we'd all done well in the listening exam.
Bad news: The technicians have managed to lose all our recorded conversations for the speaking part of the exam and we have to do them again.

Monday's reading and writing revision made me think that I have

• almost all of the vocabulary English to pinyin and pinyin to English BUT only about 40% of the tones for the pinyin
• and about 70-80% of the vocabulary English to character/character to English

We'll see next Monday...