I've been ill for the last few days and so missed a couple of blogs. Sorry, but I needed sleep! This will also be kept short, as i'm still a little ill and don't have the energy to write something of a reasonable length Anyway, today I would like to talk about learning Chinese so far, as three months in seems like a good point to stop and think about how it's all going.

I use quite a few different ways to improve my Chinese. A lot of the ways are pretty dull to talk about, and others are perhaps a little more interesting. At least I hope they are...

Firstly there are the dull things. I have two textbooks. One is a 'teachyourself' Chinese textbook, which I firmly believe is excellent. But then I pretty much exclusively use 'teachyourself' books for languages. The other was given to all the volunteers in Beijing, and isn't so good. It is however quite handy for practicing the basics again, and for learning any characters that may have been missed by the other textbook.

I also have my Chinese character flashcards. These are really great, as they give the meaning of the character, the pinyin pronunciation and a sentence with the character in it. So much information for only a small piece of card!

If there is anything that i come across during the day that looks useful, be it characters, words, phrases or something else, I tend to note it down in a notebook. So I now have very long vocab lists, and little phrases and characters all over two little notebooks.

The more interesting side to learning Chinese is getting out there and using it. Naturally all the shop signs, street signs, bus stops, adverts and all the other things you see every day, are in Chinese. This basically means I can practice Chinese by just being outside and trying to read signs as I walk about. This is really handy for me, but I'm sure I get a few odd looks from people who are wondering why I am looking everywhere but the way i'm going. Reading menus is also great reading practice, but under the pressure of the restaurant staff staring at you impatiently while you try and work things out.

For me, the two best ways of improving my Chinese are to with speaking it. One of these ways is to talk in Chinese to our friends that we have met at Jasper's. They know us, so they already know we can't understand the language when spoken at lightning speed. There's also often a Jasper there to help us out when we really can't understand anything at all. The other way is to use taxis regularly. They're cheap, and generally have a talkative taxi driver, dying to know why on earth there is A 外国人 (foriegner) in Kuitun. Hence it's a great chance to practice the language!

If I have any big questions on the language which i'm really struggling on, I can also ask Rosie for help. I have two lessons a week, which generally consist of me asking questions on certain topics to help iron out anything I can't get quite right.

So that's language learning in China!

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