Don't forget to book your lesson with me. :) I'll leave the transcription as a comment down below. Few languages are so associated with their written form as is Chinese. The mere mention of the language calls to mind an elaborate, beautiful and—to outsiders—mysterious script. The Chinese themselves are extraordinarily proud of it. Without doubt, though, it is hard. Opinions vary on how many characters a user must know, but around 1,000 are needed for minimal function; 6,000-8,000 is a common estimate for an educated person. Characters are usually assembled from smaller pieces, one of which might give a clue to the meaning and the other to its pronunciation. But that is not always so, and in any case, which piece goes where is not fixed. Learning to write Chinese has always been tough. As if that were not enough, for centuries the few people who could relied on its literary, classical form, equivalent to the use of Latin in medieval Europe. In the guise of poetry and proverbs, it is still in use today. Bringing Chinese into the modern, international and digital world is the subject of “Kingdom of Characters”, a fascinating book by Jing Tsu of Yale University. First, the modernisers had to replace classical Chinese. This involved choosing one of the many mutually unintelligible spoken varieties at a heated conference in 1913. Wang Zhao, one of the key figures there, chased another delegate from the room for having called him a “son of a bitch”—or so Wang thought. The poor man had actually said “rickshaw” in his southern dialect. Wang and his allies overcame the southerners, and the Mandarin of Beijing became putonghua, the “common tongue”. The written standard was based on it.