Things you notice when trying to learn Chinese, No. 1

You realise the drawbacks of the 'pinyin' readings that tells you in western letters how a Chinese character is pronounced. You have to think of the pinyin as the stabilisers on your bike that have to come off before you can really ride it.

You look at a road sign and it says:

北京
Beijing

And your eyes go straight to the words 'Beijing', not to the characters. You can't help it. That's just the way your alphabetic brain was made. If there are letters there, your letter-reared synapses will go straight for the food that they know.

But really the word is 北京 and that is where the Chinese speaker will look. The only way for me to progress (and I'd love to hear the experiences of others in my position) is to take a deep breath and drop the pinyin. It is a very strange feeling - for me - reading characters. It's nice, but I still have that sense of this not being what reading should be like. Try this sentence:

你们现在看着我的博客

There, how did that feel for you? It should mean something like "you are reading my blog at the moment' but I can't guarantee its accuracy. The pinyin reading (with numbers for the different tones) is, I think,:

ni3 men xian4zai4 kan4 zhe wo3 de bo2 ke4

You can read a sentence in characters and understand the meaning, but not have as prominent a sense of the 'sound' of it as you do in English. You sort of know the way the characters are pronounced (that's what the pinyin taught you earlier on in the process) but it's like finding that someone has reorganised the cupboard in your kitchen. Things are not stored in the place they should be.

Fun, though.