Well, I have a few updates.
I sent Maryknoll the money for the course, but I sent it in TWD because that's what their quote was in. Unfortunately, it turns out that their bank only accepts foreign currency, so my payment ended up getting rejected after it was already sent, so the money is in limbo. It looks like the banks have started getting in touch so things should be in motion. In the meantime, they have very graciously agreed to send the books in advance of the transaction being finalized so that I can wait until I have the original amount back before sending them the balance in USD.
I had started learning some basic spoken Mandarin in case I needed to call the bank myself. I did the first Pimsleur lesson and I thought I identified the sounds pretty well, but then I did the first of the six FSI Chinese phonology tapes (part of their modular Chinese course) and I found a marked improvement in my tone recognition upon redoing Pimsleur lesson 1, going from around 70% recognition to basically 100% recognition with just a 22 minute investment! I also looked ahead to their banking unit and I found the phrase "Hello, Bank of Taiwan", which has to be the most specifically applicable sentence I've ever seen in a course! From Pimsleur I have also learned the very useful phrase, "duì bù qĭ, qĭngwèn, nĭ huì shuō yīng wén ma?" (Excuse me, may I ask, do you speak English?)
I never figured myself for a Mandarin afficionado, but I've really fallen in love with it over the past couple of weeks. I always like the sound, finding it very soothing. I always assumed that Japanese would be my anchor language for the Sinosphere, but now I think Mandarin is the best candidate, with some backup from a couple of more conservative Sinitic languages.
I don't think it will turn out that I have to call the bank, so I think I'll return to Arabic for the time being. My future plan to learn the characters is:
- Complete Pimsleur and FSI Mandarin
- Complete the Maryknoll coursebooks
- Complete Pimsleur, FSI, and Teach Yourself Cantonese (and Assimil if I can get my hands on it but it's out of print); ignoring characters for now
- Finally, go through A Course in Contemporary Chinese. Learn each character that is introduced, plus not only the Mandarin reading but:
- The Taiwanese reading
- The Cantonese reading
- Reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciation with Cantonese tone
- Simplified version of the character
- For compound characters, learn all of the above for each component character.
Uh... that'll take a few years so I'll probably want to wait until I've achieved my basic goals in, at the very least, French, German, Arabic, and Hebrew. So this is a looooong term goal. And yes, I am fine being illiterate in three different Chinese languages for a couple of years while I learn the spoken language. It's definitely the scenic route but there's certainly a boost in motivation for doing something your own weird way.
I think my priorities have been a bit off. I want my daughter to get plenty of exposure to Hebrew which means prioritizing my Semitic project, but I think French is more important to us as a family language. My wife was in local patisserie run by French people, and during a chat with one of the workers she asked my daughter « t'a les macarons ? », forgetting to switch back to English, and she was floored when my daughter replied, "yes, I have them!" So it seems like she has absorbed more French than we thought.
So I think my short term goal will be to finish up the Arabic resources I'm working on right now (Duolingo, Pimsleur, and Assimil), and then switch back to French, starting with Duolingo and FSI and then moving on to the CLE books. However, I've gotten pretty obsessed with chess which has limited my language learning progress.