I have vowed to myself that if we end up in Singapore or Hong Kong, I'm going to learn to speak Chinese. Now, I got by in school pretty good by figuring out shortcuts to learning -- for instance, you can get by in physics pretty well just by learning to plug values into equations and grinding out the results. Learning a language can be frustrating to me because there aren't many shortcuts to learning short of sheer rote memorization. And now I just found this page, which has some daunting statistics about the language. Most depressing: "A Chinese child learns about 2,000 characters by the time he is ten, but it takes two or three times as many to be able to read a newspaper or novel." Yikes.

Still, I'm going to try. I can't decide whether to shoot for Cantonese (spoken by residents of Hong Kong and most Chinese in the US) or Mandarin (considered the lingua franca and spoken by two thirds of the Chinese population). There are several other dialects, spoken by tens of millions, that I'm not going to touch. Coming from the US, it's hard to fathom how a country can get by with that much disparity.

Of course, if we end up in Australia, I'll be able to speak to the natives pretty well, thanks to those Fosters commercials.

While on the subject, one thing we found hilarious while in Singapore last year was the signs that were up everywhere hawking the government-sponsored Speak Good English Movement. Note that that does not say the "Speak English Well Movement". There doesn't seem to be any of the widespread guffawing and derision there that I would expect from such a mistake, so they apparently have a long way to go.