Mandarin with a little help from the newsroom

When China Daily's Deputy Editor-in-Chief Wang Hao - who was in New York in September to direct coverage of President Xi Jinping's US visit - asked my colleague Chris Davis and me to join the rotation of writers on this page, I thought: "Why not"? I'd be syndicated internationally.

For my first offering, I decided to write about some of the challenges I'm facing in trying to learn just a little Mandarin. Aside from the memorization of the words in pinyin (the Chinese characters are another story), I'm struck how most of the words are no more than four letters, which may be easy for speaking but actually doesn't help with memorization.

The brevity makes a lot of words seem similar, even though they're not. And Chinese, which refreshingly sticks to a very direct word order, also can have some 20 different meanings for the same word (sort of like English), let alone the variations created by the four tones.