Every now and then I surprise myself, and not in a good way. It shouldn’t be news to me that I’m slow at learning Mandarin, because languages have always been my biggest personal failing: D in French, so-so in Latin. It’s just that for someone who loves music, singing and talking, I’ve always been surprised that I’m so rubbish at learning to speak anything other than English.

Earlier this year, at the age of nearly-45, I decided to embark on yet another linguistic voyage, and set sail with Mr PC on a Mandarin cruise. The classes were at first buoyant, breezy. Riding high on the light and choppy waves of ‘Hello, You, They, Thank you’, we sailed home after each class in a froth of smuggery, buying a smarmy coffee en route and chirruping out the odd word to each other in front of friends and family. This is easy! [we thought] Everyone look at us! The teacher was a gentle captain, friendly and supportive and funny, but even she could not save us when the Mandarin boat she skippered sailed into the tricky waters of week three, hit a rock, and started sinking.

We persevere, Him and me, each week. He’s pretty good, actually, having an engineer’s clever memory brain, but my brain is mercurial, changeable, restless, and so we are mismatched students. While he sits high up on the deck scanning the language horizon, with his perfect white teeth forming perfectly shaped words, I lie on my bunk feeling queasy and brace for an hour and a half of typhoon learning, small virtual squares hurling themselves at the wheelhouse window of my brain, scattering squiggles across the deck and rocking them back into the perilous waves of sound coming from somewhere near the front of the room. I live in hope that somehow, by some kind of linguistic osmosis, one or two of the little black shapes will get caught in my brain-net, but always they are washed back over the side, lost forever in the tricky D-grade sea.

This week I tried really, really hard. I set aside time each day to pore over the inscrutable pages of my workbook, and when I couldn’t do the current chapter I made myself go back over a more manageable one to at least learn a few phrases from that. I used Mr PC’s clever tablet app, slowly, slowly memorising one, two, three more words each day and it worked, because in tonight’s class I remembered so much more than last week. It is possible, I realised, but only with a momentous effort and many, many cups of tea.

Now you know that if you catch me staring at you with a blank look, it’s not because I’ve left something in the oven, 这是因为我总是在学习.