{"id":9,"date":"2005-11-30T23:22:11","date_gmt":"2005-11-30T15:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.quadhome.com\/?p=9"},"modified":"2005-11-30T23:22:11","modified_gmt":"2005-11-30T15:22:11","slug":"yangmingshan-mountain-of-a-thousand-steps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/wordpress\/?p=9","title":{"rendered":"YangMingShan &#8211; Mountain of a Thousand Steps"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, that&#8217;s not its name. Don&#8217;t know what YMSh means. But do know that the way up is a short 2 clicks. First half is 5 foot wide stone stairway. The rest is rougher stone, 3 feet wide. Both are steep with something like 50 feet of levelish ground in the whole way. If I had counted the steps in Chinese, I&#8217;d &#8216;a had to take camping gear.<\/p>\n<p>The top was socked in so there was nothing to see. Windy and kinda cold. Nice walk, though. The mountain is either really close to or inside the city. Took a city bus to the hike.<\/p>\n<p>Learning Chinese. Heck, learning anything:<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s been a long time since I&#8217;ve learned anything that&#8217;s not filling in existing knowledge. So, it&#8217;s interesting to experience. One thing that I&#8217;d either never learned or had forgotten years ago is how it could be nice to have someone to smooth out the emotional part of learning. Encouragement.<\/p>\n<p>After riding on a bus for 40 minutes and hearing only unintelligable chatter, I&#8217;m walking down the sidewalk hear someone behind me saying two words of one of the half dozen &#8220;phrases&#8221; I should be learning. Score!   Better feeling: I can hear in my head the phrase I should learn spoken by a fluent person. So I street-wisper it and, hey, it sounds pretty good. <\/p>\n<p>But other times, when I can&#8217;t seem to say a half word without mangling it &#8211; depths of despair.<\/p>\n<p>Yep, encouragement is probably good. Or, perhaps, at least someone to remind you that it&#8217;s not going *that* badly.<\/p>\n<p>Best part about learning to speak is the (surprised) light in a fluent persons eyes when you say something right. That&#8217;s the object of the game. But, dang, it&#8217;s hard to get.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, that&#8217;s not its name. Don&#8217;t know what YMSh means. But do know that the way up is a short 2 clicks. First half is 5 foot wide stone stairway. The rest is rougher stone, &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tranzoa.net\/~alex\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}