Comfort and Chinese

So I am back in the comfort of my home in Troy. And maybe we (my family and I) are too comfortable with each other. I say that because I just got back from the kitchen where one of my brothers was wearing just his tighty whities and a tee-shirt. Maybe its because the only two times I have seen adult male genitalia have been relatively traumatic (once was my brother in a freak pantsing accident, the other was a guy publicly pleasuring himself on the train from Seoul to Anyang) but I would rather my little brothers not be so casual parading their junk around the house.

In my last blog I said I was going to start learning Chinese characters, and right now I probably know a little over 100 (their English meaning, and Korean pronunciation.) Its pretty exhilarating. Sometimes I feel like Lyra reading the Alithiometer in the His Dark Materials series. While some combinations are ingenious; the word "eye under" means now, at present. The character which doubles the character for fire one over the other, "yawm" means flame, bright, brilliant, inflamation, or ...itis. Others however are a little harder to understand, and then I feel like Lyra going through the levels of different meaning in each component of the character to put together a comprehensive meaning. For example, the character for tree combined with the characters for eye and heart is "sang" which means, to think or expect. Combine rain with tree and eye and you get frost (also pronounced sang). I know sometimes characters will have one component to denote pronunciation with another to suggest meaning but neither rain, heart, tree, or eye make are pronounced "sang" which would mean they are all there for meaning, in which case I a little lost. Maybe tree eye makes sang, and I've just forgotten. Any way, I love it. I wonder how hard it would be to learn to speak Chinese if I could already read it? I'm glad my roommate this year is freaking awesome in Chinese (three dialects no less) cause I think I need some help with my calligraphy.