When I was a kid, I associated Chinese with sounds like bing, tong, ting, ching, chung; a bit like playing golf in a room full of saucepans. I think at that time I may have been exposed mostly to Cantonese, through the staff at Chinese restaurants in Ireland and Hong Kong martial arts films. It’s possible that I encountered Mandarin for the first time in films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I was really surprised. Not only did the characters cycle invisible unicycles to get onto the roofs of houses (nothing like Jackie Chan), but the language was completely different. It was all shi, chi, xi, chu, like a body plunging through a canopy of trees.