Practice Practice Practice

I ended up with a very studious weekend. On Saturday Bill bought me a travel calligraphy set, brushes ink and ink stone etc from the Asian Art Museum so I could sit in the Chinese garden in Portland this weekend and practice my characters. I think I want to see if I can learn a few good lines of poetry to write. I'm really hoping the garden will be mostly empty, or I can at least find a secluded spot to write as otherwise it would be a bit embarrassing. But then we went to vivace for hours and hours and I studied lots of Chinese from my new textbook and workbook, it's the one that my class is based on, though we're not really using it in class. If that makes any sense. But it went really well. I found I could remember the Pinyin of the characters without too much trouble, and could translate from pinyin to characters without trouble, and could read both and know what they said in English. Granted they were only simple chapter one and two ssentenceslike, the teacher is aAmerican she in not the teacher, I have two older brothers and no younger brothers, kind of ssentencesbut it's a start!

I also read a nice simple dover book on calligraphy, The Art of Chinese Calligraphy by Jean Long. It was a nice simple introduction to Chinese calligraphy, almost two simple in places, particularly with the history of writing section. But it was a nice little overview, the history of writing, different calligraphic styles what people used to write on, how it decorated art; pporcelainceramics and paintings, a chapter on seals, and a good introduction on actually going about to write ccalligraphy The introduction to actually writing was nice, talking about the different materials needed and how to use them correctly, basic stroke practice and some simple characters to practice with to start. It was a nice little introduction book, and full of lots of good and big illustrations.

I have another book on Chinese calligraphy by Chiang that I got at the book fair last time that I still need to read. It is much bigger and probably has much more details that I may try and read before the trip too. Also my brush pot if finally glued back together, it has pretty Chinese women in a garden on it. Now it is fixed I need to set about translating the inscriptions so I can find out who they are and what they're doing.

I'm enjoying Chinese so much, it's so nice to be learning a language without endings and changes to the words for tenses to worry about, always the hardest part for me with French and German. Though I do feel badly that I didn't have any time to study my French this weekend. I really don't want to let it slip back as it was all returning so well. It's hard to find time to learn two languages at once!