Beijing is the site for the 2008 world Olympics. It has a lot of interesting places to visit. The city is a bustling centre of trade and finance. Beijing, despite its clamor for modernity, is a place that hosts a many historical structures. For one, Beijing is where you can witness the beautiful historical remnants reveal a little of the mysteries of the Ming and Ching period (Beijing, 2010, par.11).
One place that I am looking forward to see is the very famous Wall of China, which stretches in the northern part of Beijing. I guess, it would always be amazing to see first hand a structure that symbolizes power and military strategy. Another place I would like to see is the equally famous Pagoda of Tianning temple, built in 1120 during the Liao Dynasty (Beijing, 2010, par.9), is one of the historical remnants found in Beijing (Beijing, 2010, par.1). I would also like to see the Tiananmen Square because it is always mentioned in articles and books that talk about China. I guess the place must reflect a lot of China s history, traditions and customs because it was even adopted as China s national emblem (Beijing, 2010, par.20).
The best season for me to go to Beijing is during spring time because during the winter (Beijing, 2010, par.21), it can be very cold. On the other hand, spring gives a more comfortable climate that is perfect when one goes around the city for site-seeing.
Reflective essay
It seems to me that the more I learn about the pinyin and character writing, the more I think I get in touch with the Chinese ways of life, thinking and attitude. I have already learned the basic Mandarin, and I have to admit that it does not get any easier as the learning progresses
The Chinese language is very complex and intricate for me, and at the same time it somehow appears to be a very romantic language considering the intensity of intimacy that one needs to put into just to learn how to write the characters. I learned that the characters, which I simply understood as drawings before, represent some kind of symbolism and meaning that give clue how the word should be used in the sentence. Somehow, this makes learning easier because it can make one remember how to use characters easily. Yet, at the same time, that also makes the learning more difficult because the symbolism reflects much of the Chinese culture to which I am considered foreign.
So far, the challenge at this point is in remembering the characters and the pinyin because without the pinyin, it will be very difficult to rely on listening skills to understand what is being said in Mandarin. Plus, the alphabet word, or the pinyin, without the correct stress may also mean different things. Sometimes this makes translation more confusing for me because I am not used to seeing words with different stress, it is really different from what you get used to with English.
Translating mandarin to English based on words results to very awkward sentences because mandarin does not follow the word order in a sentence that English has. Writing the sentences using the vocabulary sets, my clarification at this point relates more with proper sentence structuring.
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