A little Mandarin goes a long way toward deeper connections

All those hours agonizing over learning Mandarin are worth it when you see the smiles, and relief, on locals' faces.

Mandarin Chinese, or Putonghua, meaning "the common language", is a tough language to learn for those unused to tones. It has four tones, or five if you count the neutral one, and the distinction between them, to my untrained ear at least, is minimal.

Putonghua relies on these tones to distinguish its many homonyms - words that sound alike but have different meanings. That means that without mastering the tones, it is very easy to be talking absolute nonsense even if you are pronouncing the pinyin - the Romanized spelling - accurately.