Starting point

Here's where it begins. I'm Frank, a native English speaker who's fluent in Spanish after about 10 years of study. My consistency with Spanish hasn't yet been repeated, sad to say -- I have a few months of Italian under my belt, a year of Japanese, as well as a few songs' worth of Portuguese words.

So I can't make any promises, but I've learned that that's usually the best course of action anyway. For the past few months, and for now, I'm learning the strange, complex, complicated, baffling and yet beautiful Mandarin language.

I get so tired of people talking about how hard various languages are to learn. They're right, of course; I'm not trying to say Mandarin isn't difficult. But why waste so much time worrying about it? You're either going to learn it, or you're not. Difficulty means nothing in the long run, because if it's something worth doing, it's going to be difficult by default. I'm hoping that I can stick with this, and perhaps one day my Mandarin will be on par with my Spanish. We can only hope.

This is just a quick introduction to my new blog. I'll be sharing my thoughts on the language, stuff that has struck me about it, differences from English (i.e. everything), and anything else I feel like talking about. But that's for later on.

For now, hi!