Weekly Mandarin: 23

23rd edition: Men

I was in Korea for a week, which I'll go into more detail in another post, but I resisted the temptation to bow out of a Weekly Mandarin 'cause they don't speak Mandarin in Korea.

They speak Korean. Duh.

I like Korean a lot. There are no tones. There are clever little tag words that identify what word is what part of the sentence. And a lot of Korean is phonetic. But, because they were a part of the whole China thing for a while, they still use a lot of Chinese characters (which, haha, of course, are not phonetic).

But while we were touring Seoul, I was really thrilled to see and use Chinese to understand what was going on around me. A great example of this was "men" meaning gate or door. Seoul has lots of old, fancy gates which have been preserved and kept in place right in the middle of the city. And I kept being so excited to read the labels on them "West Gate," "East Gate!" It was all just exciting and made the Chinese studying seem a little more useful.