Learning Mandarin: Week 1

Learning from our experiences in Indonesia, I figured it would be wise to start our sojourn in China by actually studying a bit of Mandarin and (hopefully) learning the basics of Chinese.

Z was up for this too.

At least until he realised Mandarin is a tonal language. Which means that every syllable has five separate meanings, dependent on whether you say it rising, falling, wobbling, high and flat, or neutral.

So, for the last week, we’ve been taking the bus from our flat in Kunming to Teacher Chang’s house for Mandarin lessons.

Sophie’s a couple of years older than me, with a daughter a year older than Z. She took early retirement from her job teaching Chinese Language at Yunnan University and now teaches foreigners from her 24th floor living room, complete with feng shui fishpond in one corner, a rack of indoor shoes for guests, and her daughter’s four pet mice, whom Z adores.

We’re working from a course called
Intensive Spoken Chinese. It starts with speaking, moves on to writing and only then introduces reading.

Why? Well, there are 2500 Chinese characters and they’re not phonetic. So for the average Westerner to attempt to learn not only alien vowels, consonants and tones BUT the associated non-phonetic syllables is a recipe for brain overload.

That means we’re learning in the transcription system known as pinyin, and picking up the odd character along the way.

It’s tough. So I’ve introduced an incentive.

Z has his eye on a 1000-page jokebook from the English-language bookstore in town.

Me? I’d rather not spend the next three months of my life listening to excerpts from this opus: twenty-five minutes in the shop was QUITE long enough.

Result? The first person to sustain a mutually comprehensible conversation in Mandarin with a Chinese person who is not our teacher wins the jokebook battle.

If Z’s first, he gets the book. If I’m first, he doesn’t get the book.

How’s it going? Wayull…

DAY 1

In Summary
A bracing romp through the four main tones, the neutral tone and a tone created by adding the Chinese ‘r’ to sounds including the Chinese ‘n’.

Next? The 21 Chinese initial sounds, some of them quite similar to English consonantal sounds, some of them more reminiscent of those weird Slavic sibilants and a couple that are purely Chinese. Plus 38 Chinese finals, an exciting selection of vowels, diphthongs and nasals.

Conversation? Hello, goodbye, thank you, you’re welcome. Plus introductions, possessives, question words, pronouns, name words.

Homework? Learn around 100 words, prepare the next two chapters. Practise with the Chinese language CDs.

The Kid’s View
“Chinese is hard! How am I possibly supposed to learn all of those words? WHY am I doing an adult intensive course? WHY can’t I do a kids course? WHY can’t we just do one hour a day?”

Weirdly, though, while my mouth is forming all sorts of weird shapes and my tones sound like I’m trying to yodel through a mouthful of spit, he can parrot back Teacher Chang’s pronunciation and sound, well, vaguely like a Chinese person.

He has, apparently, a “soft tongue”.

It takes us over four hours to drum in the vocab we’re supposed to learn that evening, a session that becomes, frankly, pretty heated.

We introduce a new incentive. After Chinese lessons, every day, if he does well, he will have a number of tokens to spend in the super-duper-outsized arcade in the mall twixt Teacher Chang’s house and our bus stop.

My View?
Before we begin, I am buoyed up by having navigated a series of three buses in Chinese and successfully asked my way to the toilet WITHOUT pointing at the Chinese characters in the guidebook.

Mandarin seems less hard than I’d feared. Sure, the tones are a nightmare. As are the weird “tschyeew”, “jhurh”, “shyiair” type sounds I am expected to make.

On the plus side? There seems to be less grammar than in Romance languages. Tenses are formed by time words, not conjugation, as in Indonesian. There are no genders to worry about.

And, while there’s no common roots to grab clues to meaning from, as with European language, words are assembled from nice shared syllables.

Like this:

Jīntīan: this day (today).
Jīnnían: this year.
Míngtīan: tomorrow (next day)Xiǎoxué: little school (primary school)
Dàxué: big school (university)
Tóngxué: same school (classmate)

Wǎnshang: evening
Wǎnfàn: dinner
Mǐfàn: cooked rice

This is, I think, a very cool and interesting language to learn.

Day 2

Summary
More tone drills and pronunciation drills. Pinyin dictation. Conversation practice. “Who is she?” “She’s my mother.” “What’s her name?”

Next up? Country, nationality, cities and native places. “Where are you going?” “I’m going to Shanghai.” “Where are you from?” “I’m English.” “Have you been to China yet?” “No, I haven’t been to China yet.”

Teacher Chang spends a lot of the day correcting my pronunciation.

“Listen to your son!”
“Fourth tone! Falling tone!”
“Relax your mouth! Look my mouth!”
“Listen to me!”
“NOT chew! tchyeeeuw!”
“Fast tone! Falling tone!”
“STOP moving your tongue! Your tongue flapping about. Tongue FLAT! Say from HERE! Look at me! Chin down! Why your mouth move so much?”

I can only attempt the fourth tone by making a karate chop gesture with my hand and channelling Monty Python’s Knights Who Say NI. I’m quite glad I can’t see the facial contortions this produces, but I can see the effect it has on poor Sophie, who did, after all, teach Chinese language to the province’s brightest and best.

Z gets a lot of rest breaks. During which he helpfully interjects things like: “I think that’s more like a ‘dzh’ sound than a ‘ch’ sound, Mum.”

Homework? Learn all our numbers, 30-odd new words and practise conversation on each other.

And “You no teach your son! Your son’s pronunciation VERY good. Listen to CD. And listen to HIM!”

The Kid’s View
“Actually, Mandarin’s not that bad.”

On the plus side, Z sounds quite like a Chinese person when pronouncing places like Shanghai.

On the down side? When asked a question in Chinese his brain contorts and there is an agonising pause as he puts the Chinese into English, answers the question in English, then turns the English answer back into Chinese.

Twenty yuan go a LOOOONG way at the arcade.

My View?
It appears that Chinese may have rather more grammar than I had thought. On the plus side, we’ve learned a simple tense.

On the down side, this “measure word” (ge) keeps coming up, and it is not immediately obvious what it is or what rules govern it.

Further? My tones are screwed. As are ALL my non-English initial sounds.

We overlap with an advanced student, also a Brit, who gives me some advice on the tones.

“You speak Russian?”

“Well, no. But I learned some at school. And some Polish before that.”

“My friend speaks Russian. Really good Russian. And it makes Chinese really tough.”

“I’ve been sort of using the sides of my tongue for some of the sounds.”

“Yeah. That’s not how you do it.”

Z gives me some helpful advice. “Try and put your tongue down below your teeth.”

My agonising pause before saying anything in Chinese is shorter than his. My challenge is not what to say, but how to pronounce it.

In Practice?
The importance of tones is underlined at the restaurant where we have lunch. I attempt to ask for tea (chá) and a panicky waitress runs over with a pen as I have told them we are missing something (chà). Later, at the local store, I ask for a cold (liáng) beer, and get two (liǎng) beers.

Day 3

We Cover
Conversation practice. More pinyin dictation. Numbers, years, months, dates, days of the week. This is easier than it sounds. Chinese months and days are named by number: May is “wǔ yuè” – “(number) 5 month”, Monday is “xīnqīyī” – “week (number) 1”.

By keeping my tongue entirely still and breathing over it and using my lips I produce more convincing approximations to the Chinese sounds.

Teacher Chang and I spend a lot of time on the Chinese R, a sound that sits somewhere between “zh”, “y” and “r”, which Z can manage and I can’t.

Drilling is hardcore.

“Is this the year 2000 or isn’t it?”
“What is tomorrow’s date?”
“What will the date be next Wednesday?”
“What was the date last Thursday?”
“What day of the week is the day after tomorrow?”
“What date is the year after next?”
“On what day of the week and date did you arrive in China?”

The Kid’s View
“This is a bit embarrassing, Mum, but I’ve realised I don’t actually know the order of the months in English.” We rectify this omission.

Z’s struggling a bit with vocab, still, but his pronunciation’s good. Teacher Chang dishes out a lot of praise and seems genuinely really pleased with his progress.

Yet the agonising pause between being asked a question like “What’s your name?” and answering it has not gone away.

“Try and just hear the question in Chinese and answer it in Chinese,” I say. “Just let the Chinese come straight out. Don’t try and turn it into an English answer. You’ll get the word order all muddled up.”

On his request, we have no homework. Four hours class per day plus four-five hours homework every evening is a lot for a ten-year-old.

My View?
The tones are feeling a bit more surmountable, although my pronunciation is still awful. My “l” has softened sufficiently from the English “l” to meet Sophie’s high standards.

My attempts at “rènshi” (I know) meet with howls of pain, I still have NO idea how to make the Chinese ‘r’ and the word “yuè” (month) is beyond me. On the plus side, my “n” and “ng” sounds are now coming out of my nose.

The grammar? It is beginning to look suspiciously as though Chinese has a grammar every bit as random yet rigorous as English. If not worse.

There are two words for “not”. No obvious rule as to when to use which.

This measure word “ge” keeps coming up. Why oh why is yesterday “zuòtiān” and last year “qùnían” when this year is “jīnnían” and today is “jīntiān”?

On the other hand? I can understand long-ish Chinese sentences and answer them.

In Practice?
At lunch we are asked “liǎng rén”. I hear this, correctly, as “two people”. They are out of Z’s favourite gyoza. I hear the phrase, correctly, as “méi yǒu”, and understand it as “don’t have”.

A small step for mankind. But a giant leap for me. And, yes, OF COURSE I could have understood both those phrases from the context without any lessons whatsoever, but the point is I distinguished and understood the Chinese words.

Day 4

We Cover
More drilling on dates, times, days of the week, years. Birthdays, age, telling the time. We can say when our birthdays are, how old we are, the year we were born.

We are getting to grips with the different ways of telling the time in Chinese. We can hear rapid strings of numbers and understand them.

We cover the daily schedule, which introduces simple time clauses.

My pronunciation’s improving, although my face is still contorting a lot and my sounds are hideously strangulated.

Because Z is still translating the Chinese questions into English and his answers from English into Chinese, when he speaks, as opposed to reading or repeating, his tones slip back to English.

Thanks to my degree and all, I have a better hold on the vocab than Z does. Teacher Chang picks up on this, and does a lot of vocab drilling with him in class. We do conversation practice with each other. It goes OK.

The Kid’s View
“Oh my god! SOOOO much homework.”

“That’s because we had the day off. We still need to learn the stuff we learned on Wednesday.”

His Skype status, I notice, begins: “HOLY SH**! HARDCORE MANDARIN LESSONS AND HOMEWORK 5 DAYS A WEEK! NOOOOOO!”

He can, however, use his Chinese vocab to string together simple sentences. When he’s concentrating, he even sounds vaguely Chinese.

My View
Oh god. Chinese grammar is a lot more hardcore than it looks. Different sorts of time words have different places in the sentence, and I can’t see the rules why.

We have learnt another tense which uses a particle I’d understood as possessive. The same particle also seems to be used to turn a verb into a noun phrase. Or, as the grammar section puts it helpfully:

“When used attributively, a verb or verbal construction must take after it the structural particle 的”.

The pattern is that Z takes a break while Teacher Chang and I do grammar, then I explain the grammar to him as I’ve understood it.

I move from keeping my tongue rooted in my mouth to using it a little on some sounds. Teacher Chang is pleased with the results.

In Practice?
In the pagoda garden I manage the following riveting conversation.

“How old is she?” “She’s seven.” “Is she your son [sic]?” “No, she’s my grand-daughter…. [rapid flood of Chinese met with mystified look…. slows down…]… How old is he?” “He’s ten.”

We watch China launching the first module of their space station on State TV. We catch the time words (“five minutes before…”), the count down, the place names, the name of the module, and fragments of the social small talk between anchors and interviewees.

Not a lot, sure. But given the newsreaders are spitting out characters at the rate of 250-300 per minute, and in Chinese each character has the potential to have meaning all on its own, I don’t think it’s bad going.

Z is SUPER-CHUFFED to count along with the countdown.

Day 5

We Covered
Drills on dates, times, places, conversation practice, pinyin dictation. Public places. Simple time clauses.

“After you go to the cinema to see the film, what are you going to do?”
“What time do you have breakfast before you start class?”
“I don’t have free time until 3 o’clock.”
“Who are you going to the cinema with?”

And, mercifully, some nice “simple” nouns, names of different fruits, pens, pencils, dictionaries.

“What’s this?”
“This is a watermelon.”
“How many dictionaries do you have?”
“I have three dictionaries.”

The Kid’s View
Z had a MAJOR breakthrough yesterday, greeted with rounds of applause from parent and teacher and a yuan spend at the arcade that bought him about an hour on his favourite street racer game.

The breakthrough? He stopped (on some questions, anyway) translating.

“What are you doing later?” I ask him. “I’m going to see my friend,” he comes back, quick as a flash. “What’s your friend’s name?” I say. “His name is Big Wang,” he says, and giggles.

While I’m out of the room, he corrects Teacher Chang on where he’s from in fast, flowing Chinese. When he answers her questions, his pace sounds fast, and his tones sound good.

“Baby make good progress!” says Teacher Chang. “VERY good progress. VERY good baby!”

Z is, I note, sufficiently in awe of Sophie not once to have asked her to stop calling him “baby”.

Our tones are now sufficiently improved for her to let us have a go at reading out the dialogue from the book WITHOUT her reading them to us first.

AND… We can both come out with simple sentences, while I’ll have a pop at more complex sentences.

My View?
A day and a half of trying to speak Chinese without moving my tongue except on certain sounds seems to have taken the worst of the Slavic edge off my sibilants and softened down my English sounds.

On the downside? My “x”, “q” and “zh” sounds are still really bad, my “r” is unrecognisable, my “j” needs a lot of help and I cannot say the important syllable “qù” (go/gone/past etc.) for the life of me.

I’m beginning to understand the sense breaks in a Chinese sentence, where to pause.

Chinese grammar? It’s going to be hell.

There seems to be a loose rule to the use of the two negatives. With a more abstract/idea-led word (like, think, know), you use “bu”. With a more concrete word (have), you use “mei”.

Yet… To say something as simple as “I’m going to the cinema with my friend” in Chinese you need to use two words “together… with”. One goes with the noun/pronoun at the beginning and one with the verb at the end. Yowsers.

And, the true horror of measure words is beginning to unfold. In Chinese, as in Indonesian, when you are enumerating something, you put one of three measure words in between the number and the noun. So you don’t ask for “three plums” but “three fruits of plums”.

In Chinese? There are EIGHT measure words. And no solid rules. In Chinese, most fruit take “ge”. The rest use other measure words.

I have a feeling this is going to be infinitely worse than just remembering whether a noun is masculine or feminine.

“So, there’s no rule? You just need to know it?” I ask Teacher Chang.

“Yes, you practice and you learn,” she says.

The tone picture is worse than it looks, too. The number “yi” (1) can be pronounced with three separate tones. What fresh hell is this?

And, Chinese “y” and “w” sounds are so soft that syllables beginning with them seem to run together (to my English ears).

Worst of all? We are only on page 40 of the book.

In Practice?
After 20 hours of Chinese lessons and at least that many hours’ homework, plus an hour or so in the arcade, we don’t get out much. We watch The Last Emperor and catch a few of the words in the Chinese songs.

WEEK 1, IN SUMMARY

My goal for learning Chinese was to be able to get around the country independently — tickets, hotel rooms, meals, directions, toilets — and manage social small talk with people we meet on trains.

In some ways, we’ve got a lot further than I’d thought we would in our first week. My pronunciation’s good enough for me to be able to say the name of a street or sight slowly and carefully and be understood first time. And we can already manage the basic social niceties.

Z’s tones are better than mine but he’s very, very shy about using anything more than hello, goodbye and thank you.

We can both form simple sentences and understand simple sentences spoken at normal speed, as well as more complex ones spoken at teacher speed. And we know 300 or so words.

Which, after twenty hours’ intensive one-to-two study in a European language, would be an atrocious result. But, for the first week of intensive Chinese is not, I think, that bad.

Tomorrow we’ll be out exploring the town a bit more. So we’ll see how the work translates into practice. And whether Z gets his jokebook.

To read about our second week learning Mandarin, click here.

In the unlikely event you’re inspired to have a stab at Chinese, you can buy the course books here:

Buy The Intensive Spoken Chinese Book on book depository for $16.82

Buy the Intensive Spoken Chinese CDs on book depository for $18.44