My attempts at learning Chinese

As my previous post may have hinted, my Chinese-language skills are next to nothing.  (I think) they say you need only know around 3,000 characters to read a Chinese newspaper – I can recognise less than ten!  But as I’ve only been learning Mandarin formally for around eighteen months, perhaps I should cut myself some slack.  I’m never going to reach an adequate level of fluency – starting to learn a new language at the age of 29 is really difficult, and it’s not like I have a natural aptitude for languages anyway.  I’ll be happy if, in a year’s time I can just about get the gist of a slogan on a propaganda poster (I can already recognise the character for people (ren)!) and perhaps, write basic sentences in characters.   Watch this space!