With China’s rapid economic ascension over the last 3 decades, the number of foreigners learning the language has increased dramatically. As China’s economic miracle continues, the world is beginning to understand more about this complex culture and more people are being enticed by its fascinating and frustrating language.
Before I began my love affair with this fascinating language back in 2009 I did quite a bit of research. You see I’d come back from 6 ½ months of travelling and I was amazed by the amount of people who were bilingual. It seemed everyone could speak my language, and I couldn’t speak anyone else’s. After spending a month in China I resolved that this would not happen again; I decided to learn to Mandarin Chinese.
Upon returning to sunny old England my research confirmed my worst initial fears, that Mandarin Chinese would be an incredibly tough. However there was a wonderfully motivating quote I read on a language learning website:
“With its reputation for intractable difficulty, speaking and writing Chinese fluently is seen as the gold standard of intellectual achievement. If you are fluent in Chinese and have no Chinese background, nobody should ever have a doubt about your intelligence.”
A pretty inspiring if otherwise terrifying quote.
The Defence Language Institute, based in the USA consider Mandarin to be amongst the most challenging languages for native English speakers to learn.
Why?
Its spoken in tones and written with pictures.
A fairly blunt, and possibly even crude assessment, but when you first examine this language it’s not an uncommon thing to think.
When you factor in the huge differences between formal and informal Mandarin, especially in the written form and then throw in some Cheng yu (idomatic phrases where a paragraph can be explained with just 4 characters), internet language and a vibrant and ever-changing dictionary of slang. You should have a clearer idea of what you are getting into when you open your first textbook.
For all of the challenges faced when learning Mandarin, grammar is not one of them. In fact the grammar is surprisingly simple, especially when compared to a lot of other languages. As a result constructing sentences from the word bank in your head is quite easy and often fairly successful. The rule I used to help me remember grammar is: “Who+When+Where+What,” for example “I yesterday at the park played football.” The word order stays the same regardless of tense and on top of that there is no verb conjugation! Sounds great right? All of the verb conjugation and masculine, feminine and neuter nouns that leave many a secondary school student of French, German or Spanish scratching their head in disbelief do not exist in Chinese!
Hold your horses….
Learning Chinese should come with a warning: The first few months are incredibly hard, you will feel like you are banging your head against a brick wall and ultimately you may not actually enjoy it. It feels like you are climbing an impossibly steep hill with no end in sight. These first few months involve grappling with tones and pinyin (the romanization of Chinese characters). However stick with it and all of a sudden the steep hill flattens to a lovely plateau, where everything you have learnt suddenly makes sense and you are suddenly able to communicate. Hallelujah!
Hold your horses again….
That lovely plateau is about to encounter a seemingly Everest sized mountain in the form of reading and writing. Be under no illusions, it’s about to get very difficult…
Gradually the pinyin in your textbook will be replaced with characters, you will spend hours trying to write basic characters like 我 and 你 (wo3, I and ni3, you) correctly. Sadly that feeling of bashing said head against said brick wall will return.
I still remember my teacher telling me that after 3 months of classes that we would start focusing on using characters. I was terrified. Initially it was unbelievably hard, but over time became easier. Once you’ve learnt your first 100, its gets a bit better, after your first 500 it’s pretty amazing and after your first 1000 you are on a role. Very quickly I began to actually prefer characters over pinyin. This is because the same sound, with the same tone can be a huge number of different words. A quick check on my pleco app (a must for anyone learning Chinese) revealed 55 different words are the sound shi, said with the 4th tone (high falling), so shi4. Each with a different meaning and character. Consequently the more you learn, the more you realize that pinyin is only a tool for pronunciation. If I am given a page of pinyin I can read it, but I have absolutely no idea what it means. This is why you need to learn characters, they convey more information that pinyin ever can.
At this stage you are feeling like a king or queen. You can read, write and speak a conversational level of the language! Don’t worry the next Everest is coming up in the form of formal written Chinese, idiomatic phrases and slang. These are things you never stop learning. It’s been almost 8 years and these areas of Chinese still leave me amazed, frustrated and sometimes a little clueless.
When you feel like your head is smashing against that proverbial brick wall just remember this:
“With its reputation for intractable difficulty, speaking and writing Chinese fluently is seen as the gold standard of intellectual achievement. If you are fluent in Chinese and have no Chinese background, nobody should ever have a doubt about your intelligence.”
Happy studying.
