Learning Zhōngwén

So learning Chinese (Zhōngwén) is pretty hard. I like to think that I have a flair for languages, but this is no walk in the park! Actually, I think that Chinese is rather logical. The sentence structure makes sense to me. For example:
*you add the word "ma" to the end of a sentence to change it from a statement to a question
**Nĭ māma máng (Your mother is busy) --> Nĭ māma máng ma? (Is your mother busy?)

* you add the word "men" to the end of a singular pronoun to make it plural, and the word "de" to the end of any pronoun to make it possessive
** Wŏ (I) --> Wŏde (my) -->Wŏmen (us/we) --> Wŏmende (our)
** Nĭ (you) --> Nĭde (your/yours) --> Nĭmen (you all) --> Nĭmende (all of yours)
** Tā (he/she/it) --> Tāde (his/hers/its) --> Tāmen (them/they) --> Tāmende (their/theirs)

So far I get Chinese grammar. But my spoken Chinese stinks! It's the tones that are killing me. There are four tones:
First tone - ā ē ī ō ū and it's high
Second tone - á é í ó ú and it's rising
Third tone - ă ĕ ĭ ŏ ŭ and it scoops (high, low, high)
Fourth tone - à è ì ò ù and it's falling
Neutral tone - a e i o u and it's neutral!

There's also a fifth vowel ü but my computer won't let me type it with a tone mark on top.
The thing about the tones is that it's very difficult to understand them from a book.

So I have a whole CD of pinyin practice. The pages look like this:

B
bā, bá, bă, bà
bō, bó, bŏ, bò
bī, bí, bĭ, bì
bū, bú, bŭ, bù

bāi, bái, băi, bài
bāo, báo, băo, bào
bān, bán, băn, bàn
bāng, báng, băng, bàng

I'm listening to this as I type and it's hilarious. The woman just says the syllables over and over. I wish I could describe what it sounds like. It's kind of like a song. In fact, one of the books I'm using has the tones represented as notes on a piano. I played them several times and really didn't get it.

So, as if this isn't confusing enough, there are also characters to learn. I have a book of the 1000 most common characters. If you can learn these you can read some Chinese. And if you learn just 2000 more you can read the newspaper! Crazy! The biggest problem for me is that they all start to look similar:

天 heaven, god (anthropomorphic deity)
大 big
太 extremely
夫 husband (big man)
夬 (I looked through my dictionary for ten minutes and heard the woman say "zā, zá, ză, zà, zhā, zhá, zhă, zhà" a million times and still can't find this character...)
夭 gentle

See, the problem is that I pretty much think of all of these pictures as the same in my head ("the one with two feet and a line going across") but that doesn't really cut it. Honestly, all I can recognize right now are 女 (female) and 人 (person). If you put them together you get woman.

So, I have a lot to learn still. I will keep you updated on my progress.
I can say zàijiàn (goodbye).
Until next time,
Elizabeth