Learning Chinese. (Well, attempting to at least...)

I've been heavy hitting the Rosetta Stone lately trying to get a solid foundation for my Chinese skills, but it's a tough language. It's not so much the words as is the pronunciations. I can recognize a fair amount of vocabulary in pinyin (and characters!), but actually spitting that out into a word that others can recognize is difficult. So is finding a Chinese person to speak slowly enough for me to understand them.

The major issue for me is training my mouth and ear to discriminate the infinitesimal differences between sounds and tones. For example, the words: shī, shí, shǐ and shì mean different things but sound quite the same to me. Combine that with, speed, dialect differences and accents (Hello Haimen-hua?!), and background noise (China is loud) and you've got yourself a complex and chaotic language situation.

My fellow teacher Sky has agreed to tutor me.

A common conversation during any session might go like this:

Sky: "Try to say rénmen"
Me: "Rénmen"
Sky: No, that's not exactly the sounds I'm making. Try it again. Rénmen"
Me: "Rénmen"
Sky: "Almost, you're getting a little better." (She is just being nice here.)
Me: "I can't hear the difference. What I say sounds exactly like what you are saying in my head"
Sky: "Hmm...maybe you need to practice more."

I admire her patience.

On the flip side, I am now a master of charades. I can mime like nobody's business.