China - Day 538

Still making slow progress with learning Mandarin. The problem is the following: 1) I am a visual learner and the Chinese characters give no clue as to what they sound like, each one has to be learned individually, so the normal practice opportunities, signage, subtitles etc. do not apply 2) No-one in this town speaks Mandarin, its a local dialect which sounds like something else for example instead of saying 'yi fen' (one portion) they say 'yi ferrr' 3) Its a tonal language so the stress on the words is counter-intuitive if you are used to European languages e.g. there is no rising intonation to indicate a question and it is hard to drop the habit of the European stress model.

So I just need to listen and learn SLOWLY