Hi Jeo and Snew, I should have mentioned in my earlier letter, I have several good friends here in the USA who are Chinese.
I have sometimes asked my Chinese friends to teach me a few words of Chinese, and **my** pronunciation of Chinese is terrible, they can barely understand me, even though I am only repeating back to them the words they said to me !!!! So the problem of pronunciation is really a difficult problem, I am well aware of this. Speakers of European languages, (especially Swedish and Dutch, and to a lesser extent, German, for some reason) often learn to speak English with near-perfect pronunciation--One Dutch friend has even learned to speak with a (Brooklyn)-New-York-city accent, which is a really strange accent in comparison with most USA-English...But she does it! She really sounds like she is from New York City, not Maastricht, Netherlands, her true home city.... Merry Christmas and Happy (western) New Year, John
