As a Spanish major, I have primarily spent my time taking Spanish courses both in Amherst and abroad in Spain. In my spring semester of freshman year, I decided to try something different and enrolled in Chinese 110. Learning Mandarin was something that I had always wanted to try since it is a language that my family speaks and is one of the most spoken languages in the world. Although my family speaks primarily Cantonese, I knew a few phrases and words in Mandarin before taking the class. What I wasn’t prepared for was the writing. Unlike English, Spanish, and other Romance languages, in Mandarin, you don’t have the luxury of being able to use letters and attempt to sound out and spell unknown words. In Mandarin, words are composed of characters. A number as simple as zero is pronounced as ‘líng’ but translates on paper to ?. In addition to having characters, there are four distinct tones. The way in which you pronounce words has to be very specific otherwise you could be saying a completely different word. For example, m? is the flat first tone translating to mother, má is the rising second tone translating to a toad, m? is the third tone translating to a horse, and mà is the falling fourth tone translating to scold.