"Ni hao may," as Chris Tucker so painfully and memorably mispronounced that Chinese greeting.
Don't know why that occurred to me when I read this article in the Christian Science Monitor, but that's the way my warped brain works. But the need to learn Chinese has been tickling at me for years now, and is just getting stronger as China's economy continues to accelerate like a locomotive into an 9.5% annual annual growth rate and the recipient of the largest levels of foreign investment of any nation in the world.
With all the cheap labor and centralized government control, China looks a like like Korea in the late 1960's, I reckon, but with a larger population, more natural resources, and more stratified and diverse global markets to serve.
And there ain't no stopping 'em, it seems.
Considering the help that studying hanja has been to my Korean vocabulary (albeit the traditional characters that the Koreans and Taiwanese stick to) and how it's a key to other Asian vocabularies, maybe it's about time to start.
"Ni hao may."
