I've been thinking a lot about the process of learning Chinese. In class, we're learning to speak and write at the same time, and it's taking a lot of effort and concentration to pull this off.

I've been trying to learn the characters by writing them and speaking them out loud at the same time. I've been wishing that I had looked harder for children's books in Harbin; one day someone (I forgot her name) brought her son to class, and during the class he was writing characters in a workbook that was designed to teach characters . . . I knew I would want one of those books when I came home. I bought the supplemental character workbook that accompanies our textbook and I'm making copies of the pages so I can do them over and over. (I wish I had a calligraphy pen, because I think it would help to learn to make the strokes with the proper weight.)

Learning the characters is like unpacking those Russian nesting dolls. (You know the ones: You open the big one, and there's a smaller one inside, and then you open that one, and there's another that's smaller still . . . ) When I "unpack" the characters, I get small bits of knowledge about Chinese history and culture. For example, my textbook tells me, "According to an etymological speculation, the character __ (xing), with a woman radical on the left side and an ideographic component on the right that can mean 'to give birth' suggests the matriarchal nature of the society at the time of the character's conception, when family names were inherited matrilineally."

I am just captivated by that bit of information, and I keep turning it over and over in my head. China was matriarchal at some point? I didn't know that, and now I want to find out about it. None of my ancestors, to the best of my knowledge, have ever been matriarchal.

And I am fascinated by the fact that China has the oldest living civilization on the planet. Perhaps some of my ancestors were matriarchal - but if so, that was somewhere on a different continent, five or six or thirty conquests back, in a language that is probably long since dead and buried. This is the most fascinating difference between the two countries and cultures, if you ask me. It shows up in all sorts of ways, and the language is one of them. (Cooking is another, but I'll save that for another day.)

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In non-China-related news (yes, there is some), I have been getting in some knitting. Since I've been home I've made a laptop cosy:



. . . to warm my new Acer Aspire One notebook, and to hold its wireless mouse.

In a not-so-successful endeavor, I finally took my entrelac sweater off the needles to see how it's going to fit. (It's a cardigan, and I'm knitting it in the round, so this is the back and both fronts, but still.)



I think it's going to be a little loose.

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I went for a walk in the wetland area a few blocks from our house. It's darned pretty out there these days:















It's not a big space but it packs a lot of visual punch.

That's about it for today. The weekend is drawing to a close; it was restful and fun. I hope everyone else has had the same . . .