Xībānyá yǔ

 Words in Chinese re generally one or two syllables. There are sometimes 3 syllable words, or things like Xībānyá yǔ which means Spanish language. Nouns tend to be two syllables, adjectives and verbs, one syllable. Xinshiliu, or Saturday, is the most beautiful word I've found so far. 

You can make easy compounds like fruit cake, which is fruit + cake.  Ice coffee is bing + kafei.  It is almost Germanic in word formation. 

They say there aren't many loan words, but there is coffee, sofa, and chocolate.  

There are reduplications, like baba, mama, yeye, for family members. Or xiexie (please) or chang chang (often.). 

Sibilants are a problem.  There are a lot of zh, s, x, ch, ts sounds at the beginning of words, The syllables are usually a consonant plus a rhyme, ending normally with a vowel or nasal sound, never with a hard consonant. This means that syllables tend to sound similar to one another, silibant + nasal.  We are grateful when a word sounds more distinctive or stands out more against a backdrop. 

But I'm supposing all languages sound more mushy the farther they are from one's native language. I'm sure the mass of schwa sounds doesn't make English easy. 

Linguistic universals

 I guess I could look up linguistic universals and find out what linguists think they might be.  Maybe negation, words for spatial and temporal relations, words for things and qualities of things. Actions. Ways of ordering words. I'm thinking the beginning and ends of utterances are going to be important. That all languages will have units or phrases.  They will have questions. 

There are other ways of asking questions in Chinese.  Putting a question word at the end like 'na li' (where?). Another one that means "what."   

There are some verbal and temporal things: zai + verb for present progressive.  Le after the verb to make it past.  

It's not like you need some universal grammar at a deep knowledge. It's more that languages have things that they want to do, and then there have mechanisms for doing those things.  So suppose negation is a thing you would expect a language to want to do.  Then you would have some words that negate, or an affix, or whatever. Then a rule for where to place the negative element. 

Tedium and bewilderment

Chinese lessons I have done already seem tedious to repeat, but beginning a new lessons seems alien. I make myself drill the old material for a long time before going on. Then I realize I don't know the characters well enough and have to spend a long time drilling those too. Some I know more from gestalt than really knowing each stroke. 

A few more things

 I do know a few more things: two words of negation, mei and bu. Where to place these words. Chang chang will be frequently, so bu chang will infrequently. zai + verb will be doing that (progressive), not doing it will be mei zai + verb. 

"My daughter is not reading the newspaper."  I know how to construct that.  

There are two other tag phrases to ask question, ni ne, and bui dubui.  How about you, and is that right? 

Wo shi is I am, shi wo, it is I. 

Hanzi

 There are about 77 characters introduced in the first 7 lessons, so if that pace is valid there will be 770 in the 70 lessons. Basic adult literacy is 3.000, I'm told. I've studied for 11 days and one 7 lessons, but am slowing down on purpose. I review what I've learned for at least a day, and don't finish a lesson in one day. 

Sometimes when I am reading I just look at the meaning of the character and don't vocalize the Chinese word. This is a bad habit. 

Syntax

  I haven't noticed anything difficult about Chinese grammar yet. I've yet to make a word order mistake.

Subject verb object.  

Subject adverb (not / often ) / verb object. 

Possessor / possessive particle / thing possessed 

Adjective or adjectival noun / noun 

My son does not eat Korean food. 

You would have the word for I, then the particle de, then the word for son, a negating particle bu, then the verb, and then Korea food.  Nouns can modify other nouns like "music class," the way we do in English. 

We have a word and the works like English and, connecting two things.  It made me wonder whether all languages have and.  

Nouns don't inflect for case or number. Verbs do not conjugate.  I'm guessing there will be a particle before the verb to indicate a time marker. 

Double vision

 It is curious.  Now having studied Chinese for of 9 days, I can see the characters in two ways. As meaningless syllables (as most are to me) or as words I know (as a few, very few are).  In a string of words I happen to know, I can read Chinese! In a string of words I don't know, I am looking at arbitrary symbols. 

Now, it takes effort to read, so a sentence that seems wholly unfamiliar, might be one that I can read if I simply stare at it long enough. So there is an intermediate level of difficulty. 

I haven't said why I want Chinese. I want to be unafraid of it, in the first place; unintimidated. It is conquering a fear (not real fear, like something will harm me, but a fear of failure). I want to get around to the T'ang Dynasty stuff eventually, after doing modern Chinese a while. 

Duolingo is perfectly fine for getting a start here. There are 70 lessons. Divided into three sections (10, 30, and 30). Each lesson has several parts, and to do one part, you must do 15 things, some very easy, some not so much. 

I ordered a Chinese character book, and now I realize that it is part one out of 10, with only 50 characters. It will cost 90 dollars to complete the set.  

Chinese

 Chinese has two difficult aspects: the way it's written and the way it is spoken. 

The grammar seems simple, at least so far. It is SVO.  There's a little negative particle before the uninflected verb. The verb doesn't inflect. Adjective precede nouns, as in English. I've done 4 lessons in 5 days. Probably today, the 5th day, I just need to review the fourth lesson. 

I was wrong that they are introducing more characters with each lesson. The number of new ones is actually less, but it seems like more because I have not thoroughly learned the characters from previous lessons. 

Going too fast risks burnout. Going too slow is not good either. You want to spend a lot of time, but not emphasize going too fast ahead.  Reviewing things that seem easy is good; it seems easy because you know it, and that is a good thing.  But you want to get to know the characters that are repeated a lot: is, and, not. Those have to be second nature. 

Mistake

 I made a mistake.  The third lesson in Chinese did not introduce more characters than the first two. It just seemed like it because of the cumulative  effect. I did three sections (out of 70!) in three days, so of course the 3rd one seemed like too much. I have to spend all of tomorrow's reviewing those 1st 3, rather than going back to the 4th.   

Mandarin

 I was doing some Mandarin in Duolingo.  Don't ask why; I don't even know myself. I guess the difficulty is part of why. The sound system and the writing, put together, are massively complex, or at least foreign to me, even though the grammar itself is not particularly daunting.  

I hear that there are tones and different ones, but I wouldn't be able to tell you which ones are which. 

Anyway, the first section was all: soup, hot tea, coffee, this is coffee, this is water, this is hot water, water and porridge, hot coffee and rice.  It was super easy.  Then the next section on nationality. I am Chinese, I am American, China, Japan, Japanese.  Also super easy.  A modest number of characters to be learned. 

And then the third section, all of a sudden, is way more difficult. It is not inherently more difficult, there is just more material introduced all at once. Professions, combined with nationalities. Far more characters. Words with two characters. More listening exercises in which you have to hear each syllable.  I'm an English teacher, how about you. Etc... 

So I go back first and review the first sections, everyday. 

Some things are like this. Anyone can make a note on the piano by pushing down a key. A simple child's song with one hand is easy. But then intermediate pieces take me a long time to learn.