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M R . R O W E N ' S T R A V E L S
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When I came to China I didn't speak any Chinese, and that made it difficult, because in China everyone speaks Chinese and very few people speak English. The hardest part for me about Chinese was that most words have tones that affect their meaning. If I say "ma" with my voice going up at the end I'm saying mother. If I say "ma" and I start out high, dip down a little in the middle and go up again at the end, it means horse. It took hours of practice to say even the simplest things perfect, because you wouldn't want to mess up and call anyone's mother a horse. And to make it harder, in different parts of the country, people speak a totally different language. I learned how to count and say all sorts of things like "hello" and "how much?" and then I traveled to the south of China and people looked at me like I was crazy.
They speak Cantonese in the south, while I had
learned Mandarin, which they speak in the north.
There are literally hundreds of local dialects, or
different languages within China.
There is one written language, but it doesn't use an
alphabet. Chinese is written with each word as one
character. There is no alphabet, just one symbol for
each word. It has evolved over thousands of years and
there were many different styles, so there are different
characters and symbols for the same word.
But about 40
years ago, the government decided that Chinese was too
hard and in order to get more people to be able to
read and write it, they simplified the language. It
still seems pretty hard to me.
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