It was amazing! Our tutor is a young lady named Amy, who works at the local Chinese restuarant where we love to eat. Her aunt, who I think owns the place, introduced us. Amy is in High School and has mostly been raised in the U.S., but is from Taiwan. She came over today and we showed her what books we are working with to learn Chinese. We then went shopping and she would tell us how to say different things, such as "buckle your seatbelt", "shopping cart", "I want to buy...", "Would you like a hot dog?", "Sean is paying", "how much does it cost?" and so forth. We learned a lot! It will take a while to perfect what she taught us just today, but it is such a great start! With what she is teaching us, we can learn to say lots of different things by simply learning more vocabulary. We've had many questions on prononciations and some discrepancies between our learning materials, so were also able to ask those questions and get the answers we needed. The best thing I think I learned today was that in Mandarin, you don't have tenses!!!!!! You don't have to conjugate verbs!!!!!! Anyone who has tried to learn English, French, Spanish and so many other languages knows how hard this can be to learn. In Mandarin, you can add a word for "yesterday" or "tomorrow" etc. to show tense, but the verb itself doesn't change. It doesn't matter who the subject is. For example, in "He speaks Chinese", and "We speak Chinese" the only thing that is different is the "He" and "We"! The verb doesn't change at all! Or in "He came yesterday" and "He is coming tomorrow", the only difference is changing the word "yesterday" to "tomorrow". The verb tense doesn't change!!! If you haven't had to learn a language with tenses, you're probably thinking I'm nuts right now for being so excited, but I always found this to be the hardest part of learning a language. To not have to conjegate a verb will be soooo nice :)
It was so neat to be able to talk with someone who could correct us and tell us how to say things. Learning from books can be nice, but it tells you what the proper form is, and in most countries, people use a lot of slang. We found this in France when we were exchange students there. If you don't learn the slang, you can easily be confused in trying to understand others. I know- we'll be confused anyway, but every little bit can help! We were in SAMS today and I was going over to get Mason a hot dog. We had just been learning how to ask Mason if he wanted a hot dog and how he should say, "yes, I want a hot dog." So I walked up to the counter and stood there for about 10 seconds, practicing. I was about to ask for a hotdog in Chinese when I suddenly remembered where I was and that Chinese wasn't going to get me too far here! I'm guessing the cashier thought I was a little nuts :) It reminded me of when I came back from France and my brain automatically went into French mode everytime I was in public. Of course we don't know nearly as much Chinese as I know French, but it was neat to see that our mind set was definitely on Chinese for a little while, so much so that we forgot where we were!
We hope to do this weekly, whether we go somewhere or stay home. It's such a neat opportunity and a great way to make us learn this beautiful language!
