Some background info:

I am fluent in exactly one language, the one you are reading now. I call it English and you may also. I grew up in the United States so naturally I speak English. Now at the ripe age of 30+ I am jumping in head first into a new exciting world of language learning. Also note that when I say jumping in head first, what I really mean is I have been testing the water for over a year but have been too afraid to jump until now.

This is going to be an experiment, it may help me stay on track, and it may help you. I don’t know and I make no promises what this may turn into, just that I am doing something with this platform.

The goal is to learn, and gain insight to cultures outside of my own. The world is much bigger than we know, and I want to learn from the human collective and not just what makes it though my English filter. We will begin this journey with a language rich in culture and wisdom, Chinese, specifically Mandarin (普通话). I have a bit of a head start actually. I started pouring over material about two weeks ago so I have a basic basic basic understanding already.

If you have looked at studying Mandarin Chinese or any other Sino language, you will know this means learning tones. I think my practice so far has helped greatly with my ability to hear and reproduce the sounds of Mandarin. I can read pinyin well and I feel that I am able to reproduce the difficult sounds that seem to plague people learning Mandarin. Specifically I am talking about the zh, sh, ch, r, c, j, q, and x sounds. The problem with these sounds is that they may sound similar to other sounds that you already know, however they have to be made differently than we are used to in English. For instance, SH is not pronounced exactly the way you are used to making it. The sound is close  but it’s different. Think of the sound for K and G, if you make them side by side they are very similar but you can hear a difference because you are used to hearing it. In my opinion it is worth learning the correct pronunciation of each sound so I decided to focus on it early.

I have a goal to be fluent in Mandarin by the end of 2014. This means I will be able to read a website, watch a movie, listen to music, have a conversation in Mandarin. I am going to attempt to chronicle my progress alone the way. When I am done I will move to another language. I will attempt to complete each project in about a year. For now the next language I am going to tackle starting early 2015 is Spanish, 2016 will be Russian, 2017 Hawaiian, and so on. This may change, but for now this is my plan. Hopefully it works out and I will learn some languages and you will get to peek over my shoulder. I have about 10 languages I want to learn to some degree of fluency that I will discuss when the time comes.

In my next few posts I will talk about some of the methods I have been using so far and the resources I have found for learning Mandarin and languages in general. I will see you then, 再见！