Preliminary Meeting & Self-learning Chinese
Zooming from all the way across the world. I'm also trudging through Chinese.
— 2 min read
Table of Contents
Preliminary Meeting
I woke up early. Did a 2 hour zoom from all the way across of the world to Africa where I began onboarding an individual into our projects. I explained away everything from frontend to the backend architecture design as well as touched on devops portion.
Afterwards, I warmed up some leftover breakfast I made yesterday. It was spam, scrambled eggs, and rice. yum
Learning Chinese is Hard
It is so hard getting started. I'm putting my tongue and mouth in positions it's never been in before. I made some good progress though. I learned all the tones, initials, finals, and some vocabulary. I also learned some basic phrases like 你好，您好，你们好. They all mean hello; the last 2 are polite. In pinyin, it's ni3 hao3. I got to learn other phrases as well.
Pinyin is just the romanized version of Chinese using the Latin alphabet to transcribe the sounds of Chinese characters.
There are 2 ways, as far as I know, to write pinyin. One with accents or diacritical marks and one with numbers. The 3 in ni3 hao3 indicates that the tone of the syllable corresponds to the third tone. With accents, it can be written like nǐ hǎo.
Hopefully they stick in my head. I'm putting my trust in Anki.