Life as AFAC

My memorybank is overdrawn. I can speak Mandarin in passable diction but five minutes later I forget it. Our teacher teaches a lot of words but only Anna seems to retain them, Pete and I are just useless. Then two weeks ago I cracked the code. I found a way to remember.
Leelee, Jeffrey, Chiewy and I went to a Cha Can Ting (restaurant), I stayed outside and stared at the signage for the longest time (it was freezing so give me points). When I got in I wrote down the Chinese characters and the pinyin on a paper napkin again and again. They were impressed. They started explaining what each individual words meant, like Cha(3rd tone) means tea, Can (read as tsan) has something to do with resto, and Ting is a small shop. Then I asked, what about Fan Dian, doesn’t it mean restaurant too? Apparently the latter is more like a general term for resto, Fan as in food/rice and Dian as in shop. So I started putting logic to things. Fan (4th tone) is always food related. Chi Fan means eat food. Zu Fan means cook food. Mi fan means rice.
I get confused with pinyin because one spelling can mean a lot of things. Like jiao (1st tone) means teach and jiao(4) means call. But there is just one pronounciation per character, plus it gives a lot more clues. The character for Ming is a combi of sun and moon so it means bright. If you’re bright you’re called Zhong Ming. And if you’re bright you can easily understand (Ming Bai).
The character for a peace of mind/safe is a roof over a woman. Garage has car inside a roof. And the left side of the character always tell you what the thing is made of or related to, such as a tree, cloth, water, fire, leather etc. It’s so cool! Figuring them out is like Sudoku, where you use logic and process of elimination to find out the answer. Then one answer leads to the other. I learned to read and write words like meeting and restaurant table on my own just by connecting the dots!
It feels good! I feel smart! But of course I don’t remember aaaall of them. But I remember more. My teacher now writes the characters along with pinyin coz even Pete, a pure-bred Englishman, can shockingly write them! Amazing! He can write characters he sees! (he calls them drawings.) When Anna comes back, she’ll be in the shock of her life. We totally changed the teaching method. Normally in language schools they teach you pinyin first then words much, much later because apparently it confuses many students. Sort of an info overload.
I guess we’re a Zhong Ming bunch. After all, we are in BBH.

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