Learning Chinese?

March 22 – Today I worked at the Heifer office counting money. Some of the schools have completed their Read to Feed programs so the envelops have been collected & the money needs to be counted. As you can imagine this is very time consuming. There was another volunteer helping with this also, Eva. She is Chinese, thank goodness. I say this because, I had to match up the child’s name on the envelop with the name on the class list. OK, you don’t really need to know a language in order to match up characters, but if you’ve ever really looked at Chinese writing, it is very complicated. They use lots of small lines & crosses. It is amazing how many different characters you can create without using curves or circles (they don’t in Chinese). Also, Chinese writing can be just as sloppy as any other writing, so this seemingly simple taste was a tough one for me. As I went along I did pretty well, but I just couldn’t figure out, so Eva came in real handy. The other challenge was when there was a check in the envelope. The checks needed to have the class & student’s name written on the back. Most of them already had this, but several did not. SO I had to write the names in Chinese. OK, so I thought reading it was tough, writing it is even harder. I wrote really big to get all the little lines & slashes in. The other people at the office were very supportive & said it looked great, but the did laugh at how large I wrote. I asked if it looked like a little child’s writing & they admitted it did a little, but was fine.

The final challenge of the day did not come from the counting of the money, but from the radio. This office is small beyond belief. There is barely room to walk & with 2 extra people, well we just sat where we could. So my spot happened to be right next to the radio that was playing the entire time. I’m not much of a fan of random noise for more then maybe 30 minutes, just prefer silence. So having a radio in my ear for 5 hours was a challenge AND it wasn’t just playing music. They had it on a music talk show & it sounded like they were calling people up & having them sing. So listening to all of this in Chinese made for a tough day. I think I did pick up a few phrases, but I have no clue what the mean!

So if there are any kids reading this, my message is, be glad you only had to learn to read & write in English, believe me, Chinese is WAY harder! I think they have something like over 300 characters to learn (or is it 3,000), I’m too tired to remember!