Advice to Chinese Language Beginners

Even writing this title, I feel a little strange - even a bit of a cheat. Who am I to give advice to beginners when I'm barely out of the cradle myself. That said, this October I'll be two years into my study of the language, and there is at least one thing that I would do differently that I'd like to pass on.

In a nutshell: Get over it.

I think I spent as much as the first 12 months marveling at - but also being intimidated by - the twin strangenesses of tones and characters. They are surely the two biggest differentiators between a European language and Chinese. And while it does take a bit of time to get the sounds and ideas into your head, I think I spent far too much time pondering this - to the point of letting it get to me.

So my advice to anyone who is just encountering these novelties now for the first time. Do yourself a favour: Be amazed, have your mind boggled, lose your intellectual footing - for about 2 weeks. And then stop. Don't give this aspect of the language too much respect. Treat tones and hanzi like they were the most natural linguistic artifacts in the world. In that way, they will become exactly that faster than you might think.

I'm the flippin' veggie...

What a difference a day (and one horizontal stroke) can make. Here's what my 'radish' turned out to be:

As Chris very perceptibly figured out, it was meng4, not luo2 that I saw in the cosmetics ad. The word Masayume apparently means something like Dreams that Come True. Which might be a great name for a Japanese cosmetic, but frankly it's a bit odd for one made in Duesseldorf.

And will my dream of being able to speak this language ever come true? I think I'd need a lot more than cosmetics...

Do I smell of principled radish?

Over the last couple of weeks I've seen a perfume for sale in Italian shops. It seems to have a Japanese name (can't quite remember - four syllables with 'ake' at the end), but it also boasts some hanzi as a prominent part of its title:

正萝

I wish I could offer a photo here, but I haven't had the chance to go and take a picture yet. I recognized zheng1 but I had to memorize the second character and look it up on zhongwen.com. Either my memory is shot, or the perfume smells of upright/principled radish, or the Japanese use hanzi in a very different way to the Chinese!