Soon: Chinese 101!

Yay! Am enrolled in (Mandarin) Chinese lessons! Am also working on Spanish fluency and will let you in on a secret: To learn any language, you must pretend like your own doesn't exist. Am sitting in Blue cafe downtown looking at two objects on the table: a can of coconut water and a pint bottle of San Pelligrino. The quest is to name and ID these object in Mandarin, Spanish, or fill-in-your-own. Do this each minute with everything you see and it won't take long to develop a large vocabulary with context. Make literacy a separate journey over time. Now, if only a dictionary! Phones OK but sloooow. While typing this sentence, there's a guy leaving the store who holds the door open for another guy who replies: "Gratzi!" See, all things through context! Update - here's how to say "coconut water" and "mineral water." SPANISH: coconut water>agua coco (oh yeah, duh - but wonder why it's not agua coca and maybe it is...hmmmm.) mineral water>agua mineral MANDARIN (source is Google translate - http://translate.google.com coconut water (simplified characters with pinyin translation) 椰子水 (Yēzi shuǐ) and mineral water (simplified characters with pinyin translation) 矿泉水 (Kuàngquán shuǐ)