Without further ado, I will begin with the first thing I like.
Chinese
Mandarin Chinese, to be precise. Currently I am working on a Bachelor’s degree in the subject, and to be frank, I tremble for the future. This past semester, we had to struggle with about 70 characters per lesson. Now to be fair, Chinese is not as hard as the uninitiated might think. But at this point, I’m really beginning to realize just how damn nice an alphabet is. I mean, you can look at a word and know what it sounds like! And if you know what a word sounds like, you can write it down on a piece of paper! Amazing!
I mean, I swear: I learn 20 characters and 20 fly out of my head. I’ve heard it gets better–let’s see if I can retain my sanity until then.
But I do like learning Chinese. Really. It’s a challenge, and while it can be the most frustrating thing to can ever do, you find after awhile that you are actually learning something. And it looks really good on your professional and social resume.
Chinese characters fascinate me as well. I can understand why so many people get tattoos of Chinese characters (hanzi, in mandarin, kanji, in Japanese). Ill-advised sometimes, perhaps, but understandable. And many characters tell a story, have a history, all by themselves. Take the character for “love”:
I don’t feel like going into the whole explanation of the character, but in the middle you can see the character xin, 
(please excuse the weird formatting) which means heart. This is more evident in the older version of the character, found on oracle bones from the Shang dynasty, about 2000 BC-
That middle thing looks like a heart doesn’t it? And this illustrates another cool thing: the characters used in Chinese today are direct decedents of the very first known Chinese written script, which is very old. Because I have a picture on hand, the oracle bones, which these characters were first found on, look like this: 
Turtle shells, written on and heated-the resultant cracks used for divination.
OK, so I think that’s enough for today. Thanks for reading my first, awkward post, and next up: something else I like!
