What’s more important in Mandarin Chinese?

It was March 1984. Someone had brought green tea for the nine of us. We all were genuinely excited. Not so much about the tea, rather that we finally would learn how they actually spoke nowadays. Two of our classmates already had dropped out. They found the classics in the previous semester exceedingly tedious. I wondered how many of us would get a sinology bachelor after six semesters. We all browsed in the textbook of that time for modern Chinese; John DeFrancis’ Beginning Chinese. We called it the green bible in those days; one of the first books which used the new Pin-Yin system. What scared me most were the four tones in Mandarin, as I had no aptitude for music. However, the excitement of speaking two or three sentences in Mandarin after that class kept me going. <a href="https://medium.com/@wuwei_2412/whats-more-important-in-mandarin-3a4e6c2308f5">Click Here</a>