Learning Mandarin: Week 2

So the boy and I have completed our second week learning Mandarin in China. We’ve only got a week’s more learning before we’re out on our own exploring — although I think we’ll carry on via Skype.

If you’re a language geek, or planning to study Chinese, you might want to read about our first week learning Chinese in China.

If you’re not? Well, you might just want to skip that post. And this one too…

Frankly, week 2 has been a challenging week. Language has been the least of it.

Day 1

We Covered:
Shopping, prices, and drinks of all kinds. We learn a bewildering number of words for tea, words for weights and money, a range of particles and more pesky Chinese measure words (these appear, most obviously, between number and noun – Chinese is BIG on numbers).

Also? Some useful conjunctions and sentence constructions.

After great gains last week, when we pick up lessons my tones have gone right back to yodelling level and Z’s forgotten half his vocab. Not a great start…

Z spends a lot of time going through new vocab. Me? I have to make a new sentence with each new word. It’s good practice.

My View
The full horror of Chinese measure words is beginning to unfold. We met eight of them last week. Today it becomes clear that there are… well, I’d guess hundreds, quite possibly thousands.

There’s also a whole bunch of particles, single syllables used to form tenses, for emphasis, to change meaning, to indicate possession, to signal questions, and, well, any combination of the above, really. And, I’m sure, more too.

Chinese is, arguably, even more difficult than English for non-native speakers. It has a similar concatenation of little nothing-y words that carry a lot of meaning and can be placed apparently at random.

However… It’s also a hackable language. You can string nouns, verbs and conjunctions together and the results will be ugly, but generally comprehensible.

Plus, your tones can be a LONG way off — I’ve yet to hear a native English speaker sound like a Chinese person when they speak Chinese — and they’ll still make sense.

With some Chinese sentences now I can hear a sentence and spit out a comprehensible response without translating back into English.

The Kid’s View?
“Hmmm… I don’t think Chinese is that bad at all.”

“Yeah, but you do need to learn the words and really listen hard to understand. You don’t seem to have remembered a lot of your vocab…”

Z finds it easy to translate the pinyin lesson texts.

When it comes to speaking Chinese? He’s finding it hard to distinguish the tones when listening and he’s not confident enough just to have a go at speaking.

On the plus side, he can still remember his Indonesian (and not just the twenty essential Indonesian words). My Chinese has pushed out my Indonesian, as Indonesian pushed out my little Spanish in its turn. (My French is still there, thank god.)

In Practice:
On the bus, we say “hi” to a little Chinese girl. We ask her name and her age. Our tones are good enough for a three year old to understand. Yay!

At our local shop, I realise I can recognise the local accent — Sophie, our teacher, is from Xian, so speaks with a standard accent.

Kunming Chinese has, I think, the Chinese equivalent of the English West Country burr. So “forty-seven” (sì shí qī), which sounds roughly like “sir-shir-schee” in standard Chinese, sounds more like “zur-zhur-zhir” in Kunming Chinese.

And, no, we’re not in China’s answer to Glasgow. China is a vast country and pronunciation of standard Chinese varies widely from city to city.

The different Chinese dialects? Hell, they can be as different from each other as German and English. The only reason they’re not called Chinese “languages” is that they’re written the same way.

Anywise, my shop Chinese has progressed from pointing and holding up fingers and waving flat palm when I’ve finished, to pointing and saying “two” to pointing and saying “I want two bottles of water”.

I hear, understand and answer “Do you want anything else?”, hear the numbers correctly despite the local accent, and successfully ask “how much is that?” And, yes, I could have done all this in sign language. But THAT’S NOT THE POINT.

Day 2

We missed two days’ study this week because Z was sick. Copiously, repeatedly but, mercifully, painlessly and accurately, for three hours both mornings without fail. So Day 2 was actually Thursday.

We Covered:
Coffee bars, teahouses and menu items. The dish “fish-smelling hot shredded meat” appears more often than is strictly necessary, IMHO, though we’re delighted to find that “tomato” translates (roughly) as “Western red thing”.

We learn the distinctions between various types of knowing and wanting. Also that Chinese likes to stack its verbs up, without the link words you have in English. You don’t say “I want an apple” but “I want eat apple”.

There’s also a whole vocabulary that’s used only in buying, selling, restaurants etc.

The measure words rear their ugly heads again. To say “I want three cups of coffee” you use the measure word “bēi” (cup or glass) and the noun “kāfēi” (coffee). “Can you bring me three cups?” takes the measure word “gè” and the noun “bēizi” (cup or glass).

I had, optimistically, assumed that, because there are five tones and each syllable can have five different meanings, all Chinese sounds had unique meanings.

Nope.

You can have a syllable that is written with the same character, pronounced precisely the same way and means, well, several different things. So: laí means “come” and “take”. shàng means “on” and “go to, go up”.

“So this is a different word in Chinese?” I ask. “Not just we translate it different ways in English?”

“Yes,” she says. “Different word in Chinese too.”

My View
Chinese script menus are a nightmare. Dishes seem to all have their own names rather than a list of nice characters for the ingredients. I have no memory for characters.

On the plus side, we’re finding that a lot of food words have crossed over into other Asian languages. Dumplings are jiǎozi (like Japanese “gyoza”), and the steamed stuffed buns called “bao” in much of Asia are, well, bāozi.

There’s also a huge overlap with even the little Vietnamese we know, unsurprisingly so since much of North Vietnam was occupied by China for centuries and Vietnamese was first written in Chinese script.

Oh yes. We’re also learning a lot about Chinese culture.

The Kid’s View
“All this learning is killing me. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Oooh! I can recognise the sign for fish. It looks like a boat on the sea. And the character for chicken looks quite a lot like a chicken. And beef looks like something being cooked on a griddle.”

Z’s very visual, which gives him a real head start on the characters. But he’s still struggling to talk much in Chinese, while I’m quite happy to have a pop at it. He’s reverted to turning a question into English, his answer into English, and then translating back into Chinese at quite painstaking length.

In Practice:
The problem for Z in China, as in Indonesia, is that in most day-to-day interactions I am expected to do (and therefore do) the talking.

We’re also not going to be in our flat in Kunming long enough for me to make a sustained effort to find kids or families to hang out with, particularly since we’re studying five days a week.

I suggest he socialises with some of the Chinese kids at the arcade. He’s more interested in coming first on his racing car game. Plus, he gravitates to the teen games, while the kids his age are on the little kid games.

Me? I ask “Where is the coffee?” in the supermarket and am understood first time.

I ask at the cinema “Do you have English language films?” and am understood first time. Unfortunately, the name of the film the girl points to is written in Chinese characters.

Hey-ho.

At our local shop, I manage to communicate that I’d like my change in one-yuan notes because I want to get the bus tomorrow. “Bus”, by the way, is gōnggòng qìchē — seriously, the Chinese make the Academie Française look like lightweights.

Day 3

We Cover:
Restaurants, foods, eating habits, likes and dislikes, family and profession.

We learn the four different particles that can be used to turn a sentence into a question (in Chinese, the rising tone we use for questions is just one of the five tones used for syllables). I don’t have much of a clue when to use each of them, mind.

Ludicrous quantities of measure words appear. There are at least two measure words used specifically for counting people. Gah!

On the plus side, we learn that you can basically turn an adjective into a noun by adding the particle “de” to it. We also learn some prepositions. As to where we fit them in a sentence? That’s more difficult.

We do six hours today and my head is spinning.

My View:
“I think you think like a Chinese person,” says Sophie. “Most students take a year to finish the book. You can get through it in three weeks. When we finish here, you’ll be able to understand Chinese people.”

I’m officially star pupil! Yay! Clearly all those years of learning Greek conjugations, declensions, particles and the like weren’t wasted.

Z? He’s learning at the pace of a typical Western adult student.

And, yes, Chinese is beginning to make some sense. I can have a stab at abstract sentences, and form time clauses.

Tones? My fourth tone is just plain horrible. My second tone is too short. My third tone is too long. If I try more than three high tones in a row my voice drops as it would in English.

I’m often too focused on getting the sounds out to make even remotely appropriate sense breaks.

I can now hear how the tone changes both the vowel sounds and the consonantal sounds in a syllable. I can’t replicate it.

The Kid’s View
Z spends a chunk of our lesson hanging out with Sophie’s daughter, who’s a year older than him and speaks very, very good English for someone who’s only been studying it for two years.

He’s getting to grips with the differing meanings of Chinese words. “Chinese people think about food very differently from English people. There’s no way you’d find an English person saying that a dish isn’t greasy enough.”

After translating the pinyin texts for our lessons flawlessly, he remarks, “I’m quite pleased with how I’m doing in Chinese.”

“That’s good,” I say. “But you do need to work on your vocab. And you don’t like talking. You need to focus on the talking, just let the words come out…”

“Look!” he says. “You’re twenty-seven years older than me and you studied languages at university.”

Fair comment.

It’s weird. He grasps the grammar and syntax easily. But he’s pathologically averse to talking the language and, though his spoken tones are better than mine when he tries, he seems to have trouble distinguishing the tones when he’s listening.

That said, he can do the basic social niceties. Names, ages, birthdays, likes and dislikes. He’s starting to use conjunctions to string together more complicated sentences.

In listening, though, he tends to miss crucial particles. That’s not surprising. They’re chopped-off, non-tonal sounds that are supposed to be almost swallowed.

Unfortunately, they make important differences to the sense, turning a statement into a question, a present tense into a past.

When we talk? His second, third and fourth tones are better than mine when he puts his mind to it. But he pitches his first tone, which is supposed to be high and flat, in his standard English speaking voice.

Yet, by the end of the day, he’s having stabs at quite complicated sentences.

In Practice?
We go for lunch in the Chinese section of the mall, and traipse around asking for roast duck until we find somewhere that serves it. My order for roast duck and cucumber salad is understood, first time, though my tones are terrible. Cucumber salad does not mean what we thought it meant.

That evening? A whole new adventure…

At the local shop, I reach for my wallet. Which is when I realise, first, that my bag is open and, second, that my wallet is not in it.

There follows a slow, sickening realisation, like the time before Z was born when I came home to find… “Oh! The television has moved… Oh, there’s a pile of rubbish on the floor… Oh! that bag’s gone!… Oh! the window’s open…. Oh! we’ve been burgled…”

Yep. As we’ve been warned, there are pickpockets on the bus. I am down credit cards, driver’s license (unusable in China anyway), plus around two hundred pounds in various currencies and the entrance card to our flat.

How could I be so stupid?

I exclaim in rubbish Chinese, “Money gone! No money! You see? You have? My money gone!”

They didn’t see. And they do not have.

This is especially vexing since the 1500 yuan in my wallet was intended to top up our Chinese cash reserves to a comfortable safety level for, well, exactly this sort of emergency.

Plus, we’d meant to go shopping for warm clothes. Gah!

Z’s take on it all? “Well, we’ve got travel insurance, right? That will cover it.”

“No,” I say.

“We haven’t got travel insurance?!”

“Yes,” I say. “Of course we’ve got insurance. But to claim on it I’d need to file a police report in Chinese — and we’re not registered with the police. Then I’d need to prove to the insurer a) that I took the cash out and b) that I haven’t spent it. They never pay cash claims.”

Day 4

Our plan on Friday evening was for Z to do a catch-up lesson on Saturday, to try and get him using more of his Chinese.

However, the pickpocket thing is a bit of a shock. I spend the evening ringing banks in the UK, endeavouring to send money to myself via Western Union and failing, while Z grapples with his VPN. We have only 500 yuan cash to last us until I get the money sorted out, so when I wake up I feel…

… Well, a bit anxious, extremely cross with myself and a bit down…

It’s no big deal, being pickpocketed. It could happen anywhere. It happens in London all the time. Two hundred quid isn’t much in the scheme of things.

But it’s a lot of hassle when it happens in China. And, irrationally, it makes this big, alien, wonderful country feel like, well, a VERY big, VERY alien, wonderful but slightly scary country.

Plus, I’ve got sod-all work done this week and I’m late on a deadline.

End result? We take the day off everything and mainline Doctor Who. Not good for my bank balance. But a nice day.

Week 2 In Summary…

We’ve had less time studying than we’d have liked. Z’s been ill and I’ve been robbed, which makes for a bit of a “meh” week, all in all.

I reckon, though, by the time we start exploring China by train — a week from now — we’ll both be able to have simple chats with the locals we meet.

I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to manage the basics of ticketing, directions, shops, guesthouses and so on.

And, yes, I could manage the ticket stuff from the phrases at the back of a guidebook.

The small talk? That, I think, will be the gain.

Most importantly — we’re both finding Chinese a genuinely interesting and worthwhile language to learn.

We’re beginning to get glimpses into the richness of it, the alien-ness of it, the different patterns of Chinese thought and even a vague sense of how the characters might work.

Next week? I think the plan is for Z to have two hours study on his own each morning, focused on his talking and listening. While he does that, I’ll do some work.

Then we’ll do four hours together after that. And then work on his vocab in the evening.

All in all? I think 80 hours over five weeks, or even 100 hours over five weeks, would have given us a more solid grounding and allowed us to do more in Kunming.

But we’re commmitted to Christmas in the UK and want to see quite a bit of China before then, so 50-60 hours will just have to do.

I wish we had longer here. I really do.

If you’d like to learn Chinese and get a bit of a head start, you can buy our course books and CDs here:

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