Chinese

Chinese is a very, very tough language. The whole time I learned a total of two words. Even when somebody was sitting with me trying to teach me how to say something simple like “where is the bathroom”, I couldn’t understand the sounds, let alone repeat them. I couldn’t tell a single difference between the Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing and the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong, it all sounded like gibberish to me.

One thing that I noticed is that the Chinese language does not use any L’s. Because of this, English-speaking Chinese could not pronounce the “L” sound, and used and R instead. The “Great Wall” was pronounced “Great War” and “Hello” was “Harro”. It is interesting how the sounds used by one’s primary language dictate the accent that one has in another language.