pinyin

It's hot and humid here. All of the sliding doors in the apartment are open, but they don't have screens, and so we live with mosquitos.  My host family uses these plug-in repellants that leave what I imagine are toxic fume marks on the walls.  Most of the time, I skip using the toxic plug-in and hide under a sheet, a strategy that works pretty well except for the bites on my face that make me look like I'm 15.  Part of the Peace Corps issued medical kit is a suspicious looking green liquid that we're supposed to put on bites.


Late last night I was lying on top of the sheet, just thinking about how I can survive the next few weeks when I felt something brush against me.  I did my mosquito wave, and continued fussing.  Then it happened again, it felt creepy. I flipped on the light and there in the room with me was a cockroach the size of a mouse.  I am not kidding!  And they fly, cockroaches fly,  I hate that they fly.  It was like having a flying mouse in my room.  The chase was on and now there is a dead cockroach-mouse under the curtain.  When I finally calmed down, I tucked the sheet in all around me and about suffocated.

This morning all puffy eyed, I met with my current language instructor for a 30 minute one-on-one conversation in Chinese, a prospect that for 24 hours caused no small amount of anxiety.  This is one time I was grateful for the Chinese practice of last minute notice.  Our instructors know we are so busy with teaching that we're not putting much energy into language and memorizing.

What we're memorizing is pinyin, a  modern way for the rest of the world to read and speak Chinese without the characters.  The pronunciation is tricky because it requires saying the letters and the tones, and both must be memorized because several words with the same spelling mean completely different things with different tones.

We rotate language instructors every week and it's helpful to see different teaching styles.  My current instructor is a university English teacher with a great smile and she's not intimidating at all, except for today. I sat across from her, sweating, not even realizing I was twisting my dress under the table, while she fired question after question at me.  I am slow, really slow.  I hear the question, translate, form my answer in English, and then translate my answer, hopefully getting some of the pronunciation and sentence structure correct.  I have a long way to go.  In a few weeks this will be our language competency test, another conversation.  And, we are expected to ask questions back!  Right now, just about the only question I use is, "How much are these bananas?"