My Chinese name is Chen Wei. I can speak a tiny, tiny bit, just basically get around, but I understand it decently well.
The tattoo that means the most to me would probably be my Chinese symbol on my neck. It means love - I got it on Mother's Day.
For Cantonese - because there's no standardized pinyin system - I have to have someone read it to me, and then I rewrite the whole script in my own Cantonese pinyin.
I speak Mandarin and can read and write a little. I took a few classes at Harvard to get better in my reading and writing skills.
Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.
I speak Italian and a little bit of French. I moved to Trento, Italy, when I was around 10 to learn Italian. I have family there. I'm trying to restart my French. And then I want to get into Mandarin.
There is no way for me to replicate for you what a sentence reads like for a Chinese reader.
The first time I walked into the Olympic athlete village seeing the Visa ATM machine with my picture on it and the Chinese characters saying 'Destiny.' For some reason, it just boosted my confidence and it was before I had even worked out or had my first training or competed.
For Mandarin scripts, there's software now where you can just insert the Chinese script, and it comes out all in pinyin.
I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.
Chairman Mao not only introduced Pinyin in China, but also simplified half the Chinese characters, believing that fewer strokes would enable more people to learn to write the characters.
I didn't learn Chinese to write 'Confucius.' That would've been a monumental task. I have three friends who can translate Chinese text for me; all three helped me with my research on Confucius. They are acknowledged in my acknowledgements in the book.
