There comes a moment in every person's life when they realise that it really is becoming unlikely that they will ever appear in an Olympics, play football for their country, or receive a pass from Danny Cipriani in a Rugby World Cup Final.Fortunately, I have yet to reach that age.
However, I do think that it is extremely unlikely that I will ever become fluent in Mandarin. But I'm trying Ringo, I'm trying real hard.
So why am I persevering? Because I believe that the 21st century is the century of China. If I can learn just a thousand Mandarin characters, and 4,000 words, then I will be able to pass on this hard-won knowledge to my children and encourage them to learn this wonderful language.
I'm up to about 350 characters, which I can recognise off the bat, but I'm finding the next 150 a bit tough. However, I will get there in the end despite the pain of trying to distinguish between 买and 卖, which is tricky, because one means 'buy' and the other one means 'sell'; this is something I am going to have to be careful of if I ever want to get that job in Singapore's financial markets!
So my advice is, if you want to do something for your children (if you have any), then help them to learn Chinese. But don't take my word for it. Listen to AngloAustrian hero Jim Rogers, instead:
While we're on the subject of Mr Rogers, anyone looking for investment advice really ought to take a look at the YouTube here, where Alabama's finest gives us a run-down of his latest plays. Essentially, go long commodities, short stocks, and get ready to dump the dollar at some point in the next 10 months.
2 comments:
Champion Chinese is a chinese language learning material. Pei-Pei Champion has enabled students not only to learn and memorize (pronounce, restate and write without assistance) the most important sounding systems (including thirty seven phonetic Zhuyin/BoPoMo symbols - the most basic and common components of both traditional and simplified Chinese characters, Japanese Kanji, classical Korean Hanjia and romanized Hanyu Pinyin) but twenty-six English lower-case letters in only two to five hours of intensive learning.
Hi! You’re blog is really helpful for those who wants to learn chinese. In addition to the above resource, i would like to add Kuiale Hanyu. This will also be helpful to your readers
Post a Comment