90 days of Chinese

As of yesterday Duolingo said I had 90 consecutive days of studying Chinese. (Technically 91, but there was one day when Duolingo was down for maintenance.)

Duolingo claims I know 538 words now. I'm not sure I believe that.

The grammar continues to surprise me by how well it matches English. For instance, where you say "Chinese teacher" in English, many other languages require you to rephrase it to "teacher of Chinese" or at least do something explicit to turn the word(s) for the Chinese language into a modifier. In Chinese, you take the word for the Chinese language and stick it in front of the word for teacher and you're done.

The one area which is significantly different is word order in questions, and even that has a parallel in informal English. In Chinese, questions other than yes-no questions are phrased the same way as a statement, only with a word replaced with something that means "this is the thing I'm asking about". This is different from proper English, where we say "What are you looking for", but it perfectly matches the colloquial English "You're looking for what?".

I did not keep up with Hello Chinese for more than a few days. I still need to start regular speaking practice of some sort.

A tranquil domestic scene

Me: I'm going to chop some vegetables to make stew with, it may get a little noisy.
SO: Okay, I'll run the vacuum cleaner!