9:18 AM

Began working on getting a small notion about Chinese today. After all, our flight leaves in about four weeks.

Yesterday, Eileen pointed me toward a Chinese Memory game online. I keep saying that it would make sense to play a sort of matching game to familiarize myself with a few ideograms. Eileen has been working harder on the spoken language.

This site has a list of the most common Chinese characters. In order to see them, I had to install an XP patch of some sort. I started out in Explorer (which I rarely use) and it walked me through installing the needed stuff. Then I accidentally reloaded the page in Mozilla and Yahah! it worked. Thank goodness. I am so disgusted at Microsoft right now. Why vista? Could it be another way to convert old tired ideas into new money? Consumer’s money? Yikes.

So I printed up the first seven pages of the most common Chinese characters.

Had a look at a couple pronunciation guides online and started fooling around with it.

After Eileen gets up, we are planning a trip to Barnes & Noble to see if we can buy a set of Chinese flash cards. If not, I’m pretty sure I could print something up anyway.