Me Ol' China (week 7)

Dear visitor,

this week has been the toughest week so far. I think that my honey moon with China has taken a break and I would like to shout to the whole world that I feel soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.... so what? I don't know how I feel... Probably helpless is the word that can better describe my current state. I am starting feeling the weight of not being able to have a decent conversation in any of the languages I speak and, by now, I know that everything I say it's going lost. I have to forget about proper English and switch to basic one. An English without any sort of sophisticated grammar rule, without any slang or way of say... I even had to omit the DO's and DON'T's replacing them where possible with nothing or with a not. So a sentence like "Don't you like going to the cinema?" is now "You not like cinema?" "Do you like this?" is now "You like it?". I more determined than ever to start learning Chinese and on March 1st I will start my private lessons. Really looking forward to that. I decided to see how many signs I know and between those I recognise and those I know the meaning but not the pronunciation, I have reached 54. I bought a Chinese newspaper and I went through a page and I counted them. I am really impressed, even because I learned them just like this, without really looking in any book... anyway... We shall see.

So, I am really getting tired and mainly bored for lacking communication and grown up talks. I have decided that next week I will not meet anyone and try to avoid contacts with people as much as possible. Not only lack of communication frustrated you but it makes you lazy and even what should be a pleasure turns into a pain in the ass... The language is not the only issue, though. People can be really sticky and the attempts to manipulate and patronise you are very very common. I got experiences with some young guys that feel the right to have an exclusive friendship just because they are lonely and you don't speak Chinese. Or ladies that reckon to be the right person for you because you can use them at your pleasure to communicate with the others or even for shopping, in exchange of special favours in other aspects of life. All the people I know have been trying to put me off from learning the languages and these are some of the comments:
"Why do you need Chinese? I am here for you". "Chinese? Forget it, you will never learn it, better concentrate on other things and help me to improve my English so I can help you". "Chinese is not the language for white people". "Why should you got to learn in school? You can learn it here with us and perhaps you can give us the money you wanted to pay to the school". "You learning Chinese? ahahahhah"... You can imagine how pissed off I get every single time they tend to show this sort of non-objective comments and the fact that they tend to make you dependent. I experienced this situation before in 1990 and I promised I would not have ended up in a similar situation. And I will not do it here.

So, this week has been most annoying and the fact that I am very busy at work hasn't helped either.

I will be very short this week because I would like to avoid saying things I will have to rectify in the future due to my bad mood.

Take care guys!