I had my third Mandarin lesson this morning and your prayers are helping because my teacher came back today and is still encouraging. Tim and Abi are also learning Mandarin so at any time during the morning or evening you may hear strange noises as we practice our "tones". Tones are very important because the same word can have different meanings depending on the tone that you use. I wonder if Chinese mothers say "Don't use that tone with me". There are four tones plus one that officially does not qualify to be a tone but really is. I'm not sure what the qualifications are but...there are really five!!! They are flat, rising, falling-rising, falling, and the outcast...Mr. Neutral Tone. To practice these tones you have to say the same word (in this case "word" is a loose term for twist your lips and tongue around until a strange sound comes out of your mouth)four times in a row so that each one sounds different. We never practice Mr. Neutral Tone but he shows up unexpectedly and you should intuitively know how to use him. Let me just say that there is nothing intuitive about learning Mandarin. I may have written about this before but shortly after we moved here, I remember standing in the cleaning supply isle at Lotis looking for bleach. How hard can it be to find bleach? After I had been standing there for about 15 minutes (no exaggeration...do you know how many cleaning supplies there are in one isle of a grocery store with Chinese characters on them?)I over heard a conversation at the other end of the isle. There were two people discussing the pros and cons of a product...or at least that's what I think they were discussion by their body language. They were speaking in Mandarin. When I really looked to see who was talking I saw that one of them was a white person. Side note: White person is the term that foreigners from all nationalities use to describe each other in Shanghai. This person was male and it was really strange to hear this language coming out of his mouth. I was so jealous. This experience caused me to set my new goal. I aspire to have a conversation about bleach in Mandarin some day. Or...at least be able to ask "Which one of these bottles keeps your clothing white? I have simple dreams!!!