Even though it was a big change, I really liked learning about new people in new places. In North Carolina, everything was different. The foods people ate, the way they spoke English, and even the way buildings looked differed from what I am used to back home in New Mexico. I got curious. I wanted to know what things were like in other countries around the world. But first, before travelling to other countries, I knew I needed to learn another language so I could talk to people in those countries and understand more about their lives.
To get ready to travel, I started learning Mandarin Chinese. Chinese is very different from languages like English and Spanish. Words don’t use letters; instead, they look like little pictures. For example, the word for house is written 家(pronounced jīa). If you look carefully, you can see this word looks like a roof with an animal under it, just like a house! This is the way language works in Chinese. It is hard to learn, but very beautiful to write. After a year of learning Chinese, I felt ready to go to China for the first time. I had never traveled outside the U.S. before. I was 18 years old.
When I traveled to China for the first time to study Mandarin Chinese, I learned a lot about how people share many things in common all over the world, even though we are in different countries and speak different languages. A lot of things that reminded me of America – everyone used smartphones, rode on the subway, and liked having meals with family and friends. There were a lot of differences too, like the languages people spoke, and the history of the country. I hope to share more of these differences and similarities with you during this semester, because I think they are very interesting.
