This is the first in what I hope to be a series of posts that will detail the long road ahead in my quest to learn Chinese. Given that learning languages is an extremely time consuming activity, this will hopefully be the last one I will have any inclination to study. My original goal was to just learn Mandarin (Pǔtōnghuà), as it is China's official spoken language. However, my girlfriend's background is more Cantonese which is a different dialect used in the Canton province. Since we're both planning on tying the knot later on, I am thinking that I might have to learn some of the southern dialect as well; it may come in handy for all those times when her family will be talking about me. For those of you that do not know, there is only one written Chinese language (Hànyǔ); Mandarin and Cantonese are two different spoken dialects/languages that essentially use the same grammar. I'd rather swim than sink, so I have chosen to initially start solely with Mandarin. > continue reading