Chinese Christmas

Merry Christmas! Today was a great day filled with lots of presents and delicious food. Avery had a wonderful time with all of his toys that his grandparents and aunts and uncles got him (Mom and Dad did not get him any toys, anticipating the amount he would get from others).

The last present and probably the most surprising gift we opened was a gift from my Dad and Neal. Last week, they took our server home to update/upgrade it as it was older and slower than we would like and they said they could piece together some things to make it better. Fast forward to this afternoon and looking at this last present, it was shaped like a computer tower, so we thought, oh, it's the computer tower they fixed for us. Awesome! So Jared and I opened the box and found a computer tower inside. Upon taking it out of the box however, we noticed that it was covered in black duct tape and that while it was heavy and not empty, it clearly did not have computer bits inside of it. So we took off all the tape and opened up the case to find a wrapped present inside the tower. The present was a laptop! Apparently their neighbors had two identical laptops, neither of which worked. They told Neal and Ken if they could get them to work properly, they could keep one. So they kept one and loaded software on it for us and even put TV shows and other programs on it that they knew we wanted. It was such a surprise!

One of the things that Neal included on it was the Mandarin Rosetta Stone. He knows that Jared (and I) want Avery to learn Mandarin and that we need to learn some ourselves in order to accomplish this. So we loaded it up and I started doing the first lesson to see what it was like. I put the settings to pinyin because let's face it, there's no way I'm going to learn to speak some of it AND learn the symbols, at least not unless we move to China. So the words are at least recognizable and somewhat pronounceable but the inflection of each syllable is what is hardest for me. I also found that I easily recognized the words by sight after learning them but could barely differentiate when just listening to the words. This will be problematic as I will need to learn how to say the words in order to say them to Avery. Who cares if I can recognize the words in pinyin?! (<--insert interrobang here). I have a long way to go, that's for sure. We got Avery the Little Pim videos from the library for him to learn, but he's still a little too young for it. We figured it's better to at least start hearing it now though!


What I learned today: Mandarin is going to be the most difficult thing I will ever try to learn. I also learned the words for water (shui), tea (cha) and juice (guozhi) among others. ***Sidenote: All of those words have symbols over a lot of the letters but I don't know how to do that here so you get the English bastardization of the pinyin :)