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[continued from yesterday's post; series started 07/05]
We looked around and discovered a continuing education Chinese conversation class for adults being held evenings at Rice University. It was five weeks long and not cheap, but worth every penny; the teacher was great, and to this day I've retained just about everything we learned during that class. Once it was finished I'd really begun to learn Chinese.
I practiced my newly-acquired skills on family and (a very limited number of) friends. Everyone was impressed, but it was short lived, as I only had enough vocabulary to keep a conversation going for about two minutes! Not to mention a very limited repertoire of topics to discuss. But I soldiered on at the risk of boring my listeners. Once, I was speaking to Chenjean's dad on the telephone and when I handed the phone back he asked Chenjean, "Why does Jim keep asking me if I'm busy at work?" Case in point...
Meanwhile our son, Andrew, was born. We hired a live-in nanny from the mainland of China and she spoke nothing but Chinese so there was a little practice there. And between her and our family full of native Mandarin speakers, Chinese became Andrew's first language. I learned all of the little-kid words up to about the age of two: snot, drool, pee, diaper, dirty diaper, spank, hungry, thirsty, don't kick, airplane, fire engine, etc. etc. In fact, when the nanny left and we had to take Andrew to a nearby Montessori school in Charterwood (suburban Houston) I had to teach the staff all of those words so they could communicate with Andrew the first few weeks.
In the middle of this came my first real opportunity to practice. When Andrew was 14 months old it was time to take him to Taiwan to meet the rest of the family...
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