You know that Simpsons episode where Bart is in France and wonders why he can't speak French and then all of a sudden is speaking French perfectly? That's a great feeling. And that does not really happen with learning Chinese.
Foreigners learn Chinese through a system called pinyin, which acts as a pronunciation guide using the English alphabet. For example, the character 书 means 'book' and the pinyin is shū, pronounced "shoe". That line over the u indicates that the syllable is pronounced with the first (or flat) tone. Chinese is a tonal language which means the sound your voice makes is part of the meaning. 树 (shù) means 'tree' and 鼠 (shǔ) means 'mouse' and it goes on from there. Early on someone told me that if you use the wrong tone you may as well be speaking a different language. This is difficult to believe but it is true, there is no forgiveness in a wrong tone. Even people who know that I'm a beginner can't figure out what I'm saying if I don't use the correct tone.
I did have a bit of a head start since I took two Mandarin courses during my time in Waterloo. The teacher was very Chinese and saluted us each morning with "hello comrades". My memories of those classes were pronunciation repetition, singing song, slow progress, and humiliating oral examinations. In four months of Chinese classes you basically learn less than you do in one week of Spanish classes. In retrospect the classes were incredibly beneficial if for nothing else than the pronounciation of the pinyin. You can't butcher pronunciation in Chinese.
In terms of grammar, Chinese isn't all that difficult. The killer obstacle is learning characters. There are some stats like 1500 characters means you have basic literacy, with 3000 you can read the newspaper, 5000 means that you are educated and it goes up from there. The mind can only soak up so many characters in one day and for each character you need to learn three things: the character, the meaning, and the pinyin. At any given time here there are words I know how to say but don't know what the character looks like. Recently there are more and more words I can read but don't know what they mean. And every food, every sport, every geographical feature has a different character that bears no resemblance to English. It is like being an archaeologist.
That being said, there is some logic to the whole deal. I remember seeing for the first time the word for 'train', 火车, pronounced huoche. Huo (火) means 'fire' and looks a bit like a fire and che (车) means 'car'. 'Fire-car' makes a lot of sense for 'train' and is easy to remember. Another interesting one is 'clever', 聪明, pronounced congming. The character on the left, 聪 (cong), is made up of the symbols for ear, eyes, mouth, and heart. The character on the right, 明 (ming), is made up of the symbols for sun and the moon. As someone explained to me, being 'clever' means that we should use out ears, eyes, mouth, and heart through night and day. Of course none of your computers have the Chinese fonts installed so all of this elegance is probably lost on you.
Anyway, with my Chinese textbook and the accompanying workbook and audio tapes I am pretty dedicated. On top of that I have an online learn Chinese show I watch every morning, a weekly tutor, some flashcards, and I sit in on a random middle school class every Thursday. Some nights I spend quite some time deciphering characters I wrote down from a menu or that were in a text message from a Chinese friend. All this is finally starting to pay off and in the past month progress has started to happen more quickly. One day I was just walking through the school and suddenly realized I could read a bunch of signs on the walls that I walk past everyday. Travelling during weekends used to be a break from studying but are now the opposite since I can have rudimentary conversations with people I meet on the road. At this point, I have enough Chinese to usually explain myself...eventually. And they always like when I wish them that all their dreams come true: 万事如意.
The biggest surprise is that people here don't speak Mandarin. Every region of China has its own dialect, and in Leshan they speak Sichuan dialect, or even worse, Leshan dialect. You'd think dialect would mean a different accent and a you-say-chips-we-say-fries sort of thing but it is essentially a different langauge. Sichuan dialect has five tones instead of four and half of the vocabulary is different. I shudder to even consider learning Leshan dialect, which sounds more like Thai. There are dialects all over China, the most well known being Cantonese, or Guangdong dialect. I think it is only for political reasons that the other dialects aren't considered separate languages. Mandarin is the common speech that everybody learns in school and is used on television, and that's what I am learning. But I am not immersed in a Mandarin environment, I'm in a Sichuan dialect environment. If a taxi driver switches over to Mandarin we can carry out a conversation. If he doesn't then he may as well be speaking Swahili. The best situations are when people from different regions are talking to each other, since they have no choice but to speak in Mandarin. Actually, let me correct that: the best situations are where someone can speak English.
So travelling during the summer holidays will be substantially easier than my arrival in China a few short months ago, and I am looking forward to it. And when I leave China eventually I can most likely expect to forget everything I have learned which of course makes me very pleased.
Yesterday marked the end of our nine teaching days gauntlet, and I couldn't be more relieved. This week we talked about movies, which everyone found pretty interesting. I also treated them to a few clips from Jurassic Park (as if there was any other film option), and then we discussed what happened. What a great movie. Both clips were edge-of-your-seat intense, scary, and still funny at times so there were some good reactions from the students. I may have distributed quite a few copies of the downloaded file so hopefully Leshan Foreign Language School doesn't run into any copyright lawsuits in the future.
Taking it easy this weekend, maybe I'll write a few more informative and not really entertaining blog posts. Congratulations on your new government by the way, you all earned it.
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