Started learning Mandarin Chinese because I'm dating a girl from China. Our first date was the beginning of December and I started learning on some apps within the next few days. I still have barely any oral comprehension skill unless she slows down a lot (tones are hard). But I can text simple sentences, and if I don't know a character I can look it up on the fly. The other night while texting we had an exchange of maybe 10 messages back and forth where we were discussing our favourite pizza toppings. The longest message I sent her was "我爸爸做非常好吃的比萨。他有一个比萨烤箱" (My dad makes really good pizza. He has a pizza oven).

She tells me she's really impressed with how quickly I'm learning.

[–] Blaze 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Seems impressive indeed!

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I have great motivation because I really like her, and she's a great practice partner. Yesterday she asked me a question and I wanted to answer "it depends". That sort of sentence fragment isn't easy to look up, so I took my best guess and said "要看…" which literally is like "will depend..." It wasn't the right way of saying what I wanted to say, but she got my intention right away, told me the right way to say it, and said my mistake was so cute.

I get it because frankly I find her mistakes in English super cute as well. Like she gets her Ls and Rs mixed up orally, which I already knew was a thing, but I didn't realize Chinese people could mix them up in text as well. The other day she asked me via text if I've seen the movie "Purp Fiction" and my heart just melted a bit from cuteness.