Not all those who wander are lost

[Lawyer&Mom]

My regards to your wife for her lovely garden! That’s a beautiful avocado tree. Does it bear fruit? (I’ve read they are easy enough to grow but it’s hard to actually get avocados.)

[sfuqua]

No avocado yet. My wife says there wouldn't be room on the porch to get an avocado tree big enough to bear fruit. We had a nice little orange tree, but we gave it to our apartment manager. The orange tree was steadily producing oranges even though it was less than a meter tall.

[Lawyer&Mom]

So what is the lovely tree with the braided trunk that I *thought* was avocado, but isn’t?

(Citrus is amazing. My parents have a Meyer lemon tree that comes up to about my knees, but produces excellent lemons…)

[sfuqua]

Well my language plans, such as they were, got upended by a happy event which came my way over the weekend. E is my daughter-in-law now.
I talked about it here https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=18344.

Anyway, I quickly realised that I was in way over my head with all the cross-cultural implications of a Chinese daughter-in-law. Back when I was younger, I was involved in teaching people about cross-cultural issues that can arise in multicultural living and working situations. It is amazing how big some problems can be just because people aren't sending out the correct non-verbal signals. When you add in all the difficulties that can happen from uncertain language translations, well, sometimes it is amazing that any international work gets done at all.

Anyway, this stunningly beautiful Chinese princess is our daughter-in-law now, and her warm, loving extended family are our family now, and this is about family and love and generations, and maybe someday grandchildren, so we can't mess this up.

Once I realised that I was in a big cross-cultural family event, I suppose I looked like Ariana Richardson in the clip below as she says, "It's a Unix system; I know this."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxIPcbmo1_U.

Not that anything like a velociraptor attack was going on as part of the wedding ceremony, but I probably had the same look of shocked recognition on my face that Ariana has in the clip, except I was saying, "This is a cross-cultural event; I know this." Of course, the girl in Jurassic Park gets the computer working for her in a few seconds; it's going to take me a lot longer to figure out how to become a good father-in-law in a Chinese family. I know that E's family isn't really expecting anything, but I am simply not going to be the Laowai who sits uncomfortably in the corner at family events.
My wife feels the same way. This big extended family has accepted our big, handsome, brown (half Filipino) son as a husband for their daughter, who is obviously the hope of her generation, and they deserve our love and respect. Because the extended family is big, mostly in San Francisco, we will always be far outnumbered at family events. Our extended family is in Kentucky and the Philippines, and they won't be attending family events.

Of course, I never will be anything like perfect, but I know we can get better. Better at Chinese, deeper in my understanding of China. I'm starting out from pretty much zero, so any change will be an improvement.

I must show respect. I must get to where I can communicate. I simply must...

I moved all the decks, which I had been working on, off my phone except for Spanish (my wife insists that we finish the Spanish deck, and it won't hurt me), and I downloaded a few shared decks to try to get started on Chinese. I find the many HSK test prep decks intriguing, and I think that it might make a good goal to try to pass some of these tests some day. Of course, my main goal is to speak, but I have always been intrigued by the written language (I mean, who hasn't?). I'm still floundering around with too many resources and not enough time.

Another thing that I think I'm going to work through is Heisig's Remembering the Hanzi. I had some friends raving about the Japanese version of this book, so I'd like to give it a shot. I can read and practice in this book at my own pace away from my other practice sessions. The other thread where I asked for help has a bunch of other resources that i haven't really looked at yet.
For right now, I have a laser focus on Chinese which excludes Old English, Irish, and so forth. This is about family.

Anyway, life is great. Nothing makes me happier than realizing that I have a lot to learn.

Sometimes adventure can come and just knock on your door.

[rdearman]

Btw, that is not how Unix file systems look.

[sfuqua]

Of course that doesn't look like Unix.

Apparently this was some horrible graphical user interface that SGI was fooling around with at the time the movie was made. Remember when SGI was cool? That's before they started to fool around with Microsoft...

Does anyone even remember that Google's first big headquarters building was the old SGI headquarters?

They should have had Ariana typing on the command line

That scene from Jurassic Park was popular with us at NASA back in the ancient days. Whenever we had a computer acting up in mysterious ways, and people were getting frustrated, you could crack up the team by excitedly pointing at the monitor and saying,. "It's a UNIX system; I know this.". Of course everything at NASA was UNIX.


Of course I am 22 years out of date as a sysadmin, but I miss the old days sometimes.

[Lawyer&Mom]

Btw, that is not how Unix file systems look.

Which is why I’ve always loved that clip, and was tickled to see it again after so many years.

[sfuqua]

My first impression of Pimsleur Mandarin was pretty negative... I feel like I need to know more about Mandarin phonology before I start trusting my ears to do all the work in learning Chinese. I'm still looking for a good resource for this. I may put off Pimsleur for a bit. Michel Thomas Mandarin seems a little more beginner-friendly since they go ahead and explain things. I'm not sure how far they get, but it might be OK to work through. I think it will have the same problems that the other Michel Thomas courses have -- it is hard to review because of the other students.
Likewise, I'm still playing with anki shared decks. I keep my computer and my phone in dark mode all the time, and a couple of the decks assume a bright mode, so I need to tweak some styling on the cards to make everything visible. I am red-green colour-blind, so I often need to tweak interfaces so that they look good to me.

Playing with styling on anki cards is a great way to waste time and avoid studying.

[Lawyer&Mom]

Have you considered Paul Noble Mandarin? It’s less than $20, and has two native speakers instead of two students.

[RyanSmallwood]

Fluent Forever has some useful videos for getting an overview of pronunciation

Mandarin Chinese Pronunciation, Video 1: Tones and the Pinyin Spelling System
Mandarin Chinese Pronunciation, Video 2: Mandarin's Consonants
Mandarin Chinese Pronunciation, Video 3: Mandarin's Vowels
Mandarin Chinese Pronunciation, Video 4: Some quirks of Mandarin's Pinyin spelling system

Cantonese Pronunciation, Video 1: Tones and the Jyutping Spelling System
Cantonese Pronunciation, Video 2: Cantonese Consonants
Cantonese Pronunciation, Video 3: Cantonese Vowels
Cantonese Pronunciation, Video 4: Spelling Rules (Three Peculiarities of Jyutping)

The FSI courses also include lots of phonology practice. For the Mandarin course it's under the first Resource Module "Pronunciation and Romanization", for the Cantonese course I believe they're split up at the beginning of tape 2 for several of the initial lessons, so you can just jump to that part if you want to practice pronunciation first.