Learning Mandarin: Week 3

A week to go before we head out of Kunming into the great wide open, over 30 hours of language lessons in, and we are, both of us, beginning to wonder whether the blood and sweat we’ve invested in learning Chinese is going to work.

To understand and be understood in Chinese, I’m finding, you have to completely reshape your ears, your vocal apparatus, even the way your brain works.

And I’m honestly not sure we’re going to crack the comprehension barrier in time. The problem with tonal languages, as a friend who speaks three of his five languages with equal fluency remarked after taking a stab at Burmese in Myanmar, is that, if you don’t get the tones right, “They don’t even realise you’re trying to speak their language.”

If you’re new here or thinking about studying Chinese, you might want to take a look at my first two posts on this, Learning Mandarin: Week 1 and Learning Mandarin: Week 2.

Day 1

We Cover
Languages, learning, addresses, phone numbers, making arrangements. I’m beginning to have mixed feelings about the Chinese fondness for compound words.

Yes, it’s great that “primary school” is xiǎoxué, “university” is dàxué and “study” is xuéxí. But why does “school” have to be xuéxiào?

On the plus side, a character named “Little Wang” makes an, umm, entrance to great hilarity.

Talking about food, we mention the word “roast”, which produces an illuminating exchange.

“What?!” says Sophie. “This is two different words. You say ‘rost’ and he say, ‘rest’.”

“No,” I say. “In English, it’s the same sound. It sounds different in Chinese ears. But in English, those sounds are the same. A lot of sounds that are different in Chinese are the same in English.”

The tones are the most obviously difficult part of Chinese. But, honestly, the vowels and consonants are pretty tough too. I still can’t reliably distinguish “j”, “q”, “x”, “c”, “z” and “ch” sounds in dictation.

My View
I can understand Chinese sentences when I hear them. But the grammar is doing my head in.

On the plus side, I’m no longer frightened by measure words — sometimes I use the right one, and most of the time ge will do anyway. On the downside, Chinese particles are now scary.

We’ve seen de used as part of a sort of past tense, and to indicate possession. It’s now being tacked onto verbs to turn them into a sort of clause.

Chinese is an uninflected language, pretty much, meaning that words don’t change their endings the way that they do in European languages, or the beginnings the way they do in Indonesian. (For more on Indonesian, see: 20 Words to Get You Almost Anywhere in Indonesia and Expedition Outfitting in Pidgin Indonesian.)

Instead, particles and word order do all the work. While English tends to mark a clause at the beginning “after we finish class, we…” Chinese puts it the other way around “we finish class after, we…”.

The lack of inflection is good on one level, no chanting of verbs. On the other hand, it’s bad, because while I can understand these sentences peppered with des, I still can’t understand how I’m supposed to use it.

Try as I might with my tones, I can’t get more than three or four syllables in a row to sound remotely Chinese in their flow. I alternate between yodelling and English speech rhythms.

And the verbs! So many verbs, all stacked up together. Verbs for intention. Verbs for movement. Verbs for actions. Verbs for direction. How am I ever going to string them altogether AND get my tones right?

The Kid’s View
“There is an orange. And I don’t understand it.”

“No!” I say. “Jùzi. Not júzi.”

“Oh!” he says. “There is a sentence that I don’t understand.”

Z can welly through translations on the page. And when he repeats back phrases our teacher says, he manages to get the tones right across whole sentences. He even sounds Chinese.

But he’s grappling with vocab. We’re learning, in theory, well over 50 words per day. He has a system which he insists, against all evidence, works extremely well.

In Practice
On Z’s insistence, we have lunch at the same Japanese noodle joint we always go to, and he eats gyoza, like he always does.

My restaurant Chinese has now progressed from holding up two fingers and pointing to saying, “I’ll have two plates of dumplings.” They understand me! Yay!

Day 2

We Cover
Duration of time, results, possibility, transportation, through realistic dialogue such as: “Why don’t you take the bus?” “There are too many people on the bus, and it’s very slow.”

We learn useful Chinese vocab like traffic jam, queue, slow and crowded, also how to make “if” clauses (which seem pretty easy).

My View
Lots of time words in Chinese — as in English — are nouns. As in English, they seem to be placed randomly within the sentence.

Gah! Chinese is definitely as bad as English.

There is a sort of past tense in Chinese that you make using the particles guo or le. Sometimes you can use them interchangeably. Other times, only one or the other will do.

I don’t understand how the two particles differ. Years of training in Latin and Greek mean tenses hold no fear for me.

Pluperfect passive subjunctive? Bring it on.

Le? It’s, well, all Greek to me.

The Kid’s View
Z has in some areas a better feel for the way that Chinese works than I do. There’s a word chē that is translated as “bicycle”, a verb that’s translated as “ride” (though the same sound AND character can also mean “open”, “fill out” and “start”) and a verb that’s translated as “drive”.

“They can’t mean ‘drive a bicycle’ on the second one,” he says. “That must mean ‘drive a car’.”

It does indeed. Just as bēizi can mean “cup” or “glass”, any receptacle from which one drinks, chē can mean car or bicycle, any vehicle in which one gets around.

You won’t catch my spawn wasting time endeavouring to analyse le or guo. He just translates them. Hey-ho.

In Practice
We go to Cuihu Park after class.

I ask the way. I understand (yay!) the response, which is (not-yay!): “I’m sorry. WHAT place are you looking for?”

I give it another go and it gets through. And, when I ask a second person, I finally work out that I’ve been saying Zaihu Park.

We meet an old man. “Hello!” he says to Z. “Hello!” Z replies. “French?” he says. “No,” says Z. “American?” “No. English.” He asks how old he is. Z says he’s ten.

It’s a breakthrough, and we celebrate it. He’s managed a small Mandarin conversation with a Chinese person who’s not our teacher. Not quite enough to win the jokebook he’s been gunning for, though.

Day 3

We Cover
Directions and position, asking the way, weather and climate. We translates sentences like:

“Straight in the direction of forward walk, at the cross crossroads in the direction of left turn, walk five minutes and you arrive already!”

Chinese has LOTS and LOTS of words for “straight”, “ahead”, “forwards”, “at”, all of which you stack on top of each other in teetering towers.

Chances of understanding directions given in rapid-fire Chinese? Close to zero, I figure, regardless of accent.

On the plus side, I know why foreigners asking directions in London always look so confused by my response.

Along comes another time particle, ne.

My View
I keep trying to construct sentences using ne, le and de. I’m wrong about 70% of the time.

On the plus side, if I could get the tones right, I’d get my gist across even with the particles in the wrong place, or used wrongly. On the down side, I can’t, umm, get the tones right.

The Kid’s View
“There is NO way I’m going to learn all this vocab. I hate learning Chinese.”

“I don’t think you hate it. I think you quite like it sometimes. But don’t you see how useful it is? I reckon you’ll thank me for dragging you through this.”

“Well, it’s not particularly useful to me right now. But, you’re right. It will be really useful when I’m an adult.”

Z agrees to let go of his patented system for learning vocab (repeat each word at least ten times, with the English, then move onto the next).

We try mine: cover the English, translate the Chinese, if you don’t get it right, check the English and repeat the translation a few times. It works! We cover the vocab, and prepare for tomorrow’s class. He’s chuffed.

In Practice
At the coffee shop, a guy from Shanghai gets talking with me in English. “How long have you been in Kunming?” I ask. He doesn’t understand my English (I talk fast and my consonants are blurry).

I try in Chinese. He understands! Yay! “Are you working here?” I ask. He understands! He’s not working. “Are you a student?” I ask. “No,” he says. “I’m not a student or working.” “When do you go back to Shanghai?” I ask. “I’m not going back to Shanghai,” he says.

A bona fide Mandarin conversation. BRING IT!

Day 4

We Cover
Sports, shopping and comparison. Entertainingly, the Chinese for “golf” is gāo’ěrfūqiú, “bowling” is bǎolíngqiú and “ping pong” is pīngpāngqiú.

We particularly enjoy the section of the dialogue where the shop assistant asks: “Is your child as fat as you?”

And, yes, in China, this is a perfectly natural piece of dialogue.

Handily, I am now equipped to say things like “Do you have this in black and a very large size?”

My View
Some Chinese comparisons are easy to do: “I than you big.” “This with that not same”. Others are more complicated: “Our clos-ing more-than other-people late.”

I can understand the ways that the dialogue uses de. I still don’t know how to use it in a sentence in anything other than its most simple form, as an equivalent of “‘s”.

And WHY do you need to add anything to an ADJECTIVE to make it agree with a noun? And WHY do you need to add an ADVERB (very, extremely, etc.) before an ADJECTIVE?

And what is it with this le particle, anyway?

The Kid’s View
Z takes great pleasure in explaining in Chinese that, yes, his mother is fat, and yes, she takes large clothes sizes. He also seems to think that I’d take a large size in the UK.

For the record, I’ve recovered from my mysterious weight gain and am currently a UK size 10-12. Which is elephantine for China. But shopping here is not the hell that it was in Cambodia or even the Philippines.

I think Asia has distorted his idea of Western people’s sizes.

Well, that’s my theory. And I’m sticking to it.

The new approach to vocab is paying dividends. “Hey! We’re going to get through all this vocab. This is easy! I can learn this.”

In Practice
My confidence in Chinese is relatively high now. We need to buy a weird kind of light bulb for the bathroom at our flat. So at the supermarket lightbulb display I successfully manage to ask “Do you have more of these?”

I’m also looking for conditioner and can’t work out which bottles are conditioner and which shampoo. I take a flier that the word for shampoo is international. And manage to establish, with some sign language, that this one is NOT shampoo, but indeed conditioner.

Mustard? My request for “Western spicy thing food” is met with utter incomprehension, not least because I get the tone on “spicy” wrong. They don’t have “Western food”. Still, 2 out of 3…

We head to the train station to buy tickets on the soft sleeper to Lijiang. I practice the word for soft sleeper (which begins with the Chinese “r”, a sound I can only make even vaguely correctly when saying “Japan” – Rìběn), and gear up for the Chinese word for month (yuè), a syllable that sounds like a truncated retch.

We get to the front of the queue. “How may I help you?” asks the girl at the ticket desk. In, frankly, excellent English. Bah!

Day 5

We Cover
The pace is really stepping up now. In six hours we welly through: illness, hospitals, parts of the body, changing money, colours, clothes, room decoration, activities and hobbies.

We learn that all Chinese doctors can prescribe either Chinese or Western medicine, at the patient’s choice and that to say “red bag” in Chinese you need to say “bag red colour of”.

We cover the Chinese passive, which is easy (“Man hit dog / dog by man hit”).

“Oooh! Look, Mum, they’ve missed out the translation on that word!”

They haven’t missed out the translation. Bǎ is a Chinese preposition which is untranslatable in English because we do not have an equivalent to the bǎ sentence.

My View
Sophie and I spend about half an hour on bǎ sentences, and le. We look at stuff about them on the computer.

It’s becoming clear that the Chinese sense of time is completely different from the European languages I know, which are all about perfect/imperfect, continuous/discontinuous. Nor does it share Indonesian’s obsession with levels of action.

Chinese seems to be about changes of state. But, because I don’t understand what Chinese think of as a change of state, I don’t know how to use the particles.

On the plus side, my strike rate with de and le is edging past the 50-50 mark.

The Kid’s View
Z happily zones out during the grammar stuff. In conversation, he comes out with full Chinese sentences rather than a sulky one-word answer. Complete — huzzah! — with measure words. Often, indeed, the right measure word.

He’s highly motivated today as after class we go to the arcade to spend the tokens he’s been earning for his learning. When he puts his mind to it, his tones are really good.

“You realise,” I say, “That you’ve got only this weekend to win your joke book?” He leaves class with a sense of purpose…

In Practice
Leaving the arcade after a couple of hours of vigorous Terminator action, plus shooting up giant spiders on Lost on the Island of Spice, Z realises he’s left his fleece in there.

The Chinese sentence “My son has lost his red top. Have you seen it?” springs, Athena-style, from my brain. Holy cow!

I head purposefully to the reception desk, where my confidence falters. The Chinese take dance-pad gaming extremely seriously, and there’s a cluster of about 20 people watching the arcade champion busting some serious grooves on the flashing lights. It’s even noisier than usual.

“I lose an upper-outer-garment red-colour-of,” I yell in Chinese. She looks blank. I try again. “I. Don’t. Understand,” she enunciates clearly.

Well. At least I understood that…

We go back to the restaurant. “My son lose upper-outer-garment red-colour-of,” I say in Chinese.

Blank look.

I repeat.

“Oh!” she says. “His clothing?”

“Yeah,” I say. “His clothing.”

Object lesson? Keep it simple…

And Finally… We Bust the Comprehension Barrier
On the bus, we are compressed against a Chinese mother and her daughter. I get talking to the little girl. She’s nine.

Z chimes in. He find out her name, her age, that she likes swimming, what she thinks of school. They ask how long we’ve been in China, how long we’ve been learning Chinese, where we’ve been in China. He gives her our phone number.

Z’s tones, the mother says, “are very good. He has a soft tongue”. He talks less than I do. But everything he says is understood first time, whereas I often need to repeat.

Sure, we’re grabbing at snatches of vocab rather than following the full conversation. But it is a bona fide Mandarin conversation. And… Z wins the joke book by a narrow head.

Because, at the shop under our flat, I get talking to the couple who run it, who’ve been watching our progress with interest.

They ask where Z’s father is. I explain that he’s in Australia, working, we’re travelling, how long we’ve been in China, how long we’ve been learning Chinese. I establish that they have two kids, one boy, one girl, both at university, and are both from Kunming.

60 hours in, or thereabouts, and we’re through the basic comprehension barrier. It isn’t pretty. And we’ve got a zillion lightyears to go. But it feels GOOD.

It also feels great, to be frank, not to be sitting down with a massive list of vocab to learn.

We have one more day of lessons before we head out, in which we hope to finish the course book we’ve been using. And we’ve agreed that we’ll carry on studying via Skype.

What was just a passing interest in learning Chinese has somehow developed into a mission…

Click to read Learning Mandarin: Week 4.

If you’re interested in studying Chinese, you might want to check out our coursebook, complete with CDs. For more information or to buy:

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