Pre-China notes

Thursday, November 3th, 2011 4:06 pm Rome

5 days have passed since I booked the flight to Hong Kong and I don’t know if it is randomness or fate but the date of my departure is all composed by “1”:

which means 11/11/11. The important thing is that my flight won’t be the Oceanic 815 otherwise I should worry about it xD (As some friend told me).

I will move for 10 months to Shenzhen, Guangdong’s Province, South-Continental China.

I will work for the FLVR studio of architecture.

I haven’t left already my country but my head went there one month ago and I am really eager to begin this crazy/fascinating adventure. I really love the Orient as many friends of mine know. Between one presentation and among other activities of my new poetry book “Spesso smorfie, mute” I had time to study all by my-self a bit of chinese…something very easy but very usefull because when I figured out that in SZ almost nobody could speak english that thing scared me a lot.

A very small excursus: Mandarin is the official language spoken in China,the pǔtōnghuà, translated in caracters 普通话, and it is the most spoken language in the world… There are so many dialects in China which are real languages, very different from mandarin: I will study mandarin and from now I will explain you better the way they write and pronounce.

I can anticipate you, like a teaser, that we have 4 different tones:

mā first tone

má second tone

mǎ third tone

mà fourth tone

ma nuetral tone

So look out when you prounonce a word because you should say “horse” instead of “mother”

I will insert in my blog this Frase-book, a sort of STEP 1 for my chinese… so poor yet:

wǒ = Me

nǐ = You

hěn = Very

hǎo = Good