Chinese Name

All over Taiwan you can buy personalized items like stickers and stamps with your name on it. I have been wanting a Chinese name for a while now, so with the help of my Taiwanese friends I picked my own:

愛麗山

This is said 'ai li shan' and translates into 'love pretty mountain'. Although it is not a real name in Chinese, ai li sounds like Ali, and I am tall like a mountain so I thought it was appropriate.

While on a role with my Chinese, my friend Viola taught me a tongue twister. In Chinese there are 5 different tones meaning you can say the same exact word in 5 different ways and it has 5 different meanings. This fact has put a major damper on my speaking skills thus far as I am incapable of hearing a difference between the tones, let alone being able to pronounce them correctly. The tongue twister translates to "Mom rides a horse. The horse is slow. Mom scolds the horse.' and uses 3 tones of the word ma:

mā mā qí mǎ, mǎ màn

mā mā mà mǎ.

Another cool thing about Chinese is that often the characters look like a picture of the word they represent. For example horse looks like a mane, legs, and the tail of a horse:

馬