Madeleine´s adventure in China (Shanghai)

Something that sucks over here is that our promised "mandatory Chinses class", is not available for us to take to include in our studies. So frustarting. Chinese is a weird and odd language to learn for us that comes from Europe. Everything is different and you just have to learn everything from  the scratch. It is not only glossary to learn, thats the easy part. Even if you know a lot of vocabulary, you can not speak chinese anyway. The language is built upon five tones that makes it extremly complicated. When you finally set the tones right, than we have the characters for every word....which is art in itself. They say that it takes half a year to just learn the tones, than you can continue to learn words, than you can continue to speak....than......yeah, it never ends. But, I have some interest for it, but not the time right now (since I am taking five (maybe sic) other classes to be finished in two months). I have decided to do it on a very basic level. Today I bought some books in order to get a kick in the as*, to start doing something about my chinese. I am not gonna be able to speak, but maybe saying something more than just ni hao and xie xie after my stay in Shanghai this autum. Wish me good luck!