Just a two hundred page job I picked up from the library on Monday. Sort of an overview of the language, how it developed in China over the years, and the way in turn that the pictographic written language has produced some unique cultural features in China.

On the plus side, the grammar seems fairly simple. Word order can be a bit different, but there don't appear to be a lot of incomprehsible rules like the gender stuff that French and other languages have. On the minus side, the spoken language requires developing an ear for intonation. In northern China raising your voice at the end of a vowel, lowering your voice, keeping it flat, or dipping in the middle can all result in different words for what are otherwise the same pronounciation. While that's four intonations, apparently Southern Chinese has eight.

Also, the Chinese seem to place a premium on good penmanship. I learned how to type in high school because I knew my handwriting was not very good.

Still, I'm thinking if I did five words a day for a year I could have a decent rudimentary vocabularly. I could pick up a language program for less than fifty bucks.

Maybe I'll look at Farsi again though. Like I said, not very useful because Arabic is obviously the more widespread language in the Middle East, but I've always had this fascination with the Persian Empire. I it goes back to learning that the wise men who visited the baby Jesus were probably Iranian, and a few other Christian - Persian associations from the time of the Romans, but the whole 1979 Iranian crisis might also have had some subconscious impact on my interest. Readers of this journal may also remember a few years back that I dated an Iranian woman briefly. I wasn't as into her as I was this Chinese woman I saw more recently, but she was kind of nice. I also had an Iranian friend at a temp job I worked at, and I had an Iranian dentist for a few years.