Mandarin

I have been working hard and keeping myself busy by taking Mandarin lessons at the local university.  The course is described by the university as intensive and is typically taken by someone that intends to earn a degree at a Chinese language university.  A student would study the intense Mandarin classes for one or two years, and then enroll in National Taiwan University’s chemical engineering program, as an example.  The students enrolled are driven and here for a purpose.  The class is three+ hours per day, five days per week.  Study is four or more hours each day outside of class and more on weekends.

There are 11 students in my class and all of them are from a different country and multi-lingual.  They are multi-lingual and not bi-lingual, except me. Most already speak four languages or more.  One student is in his 30s and the rest, other than me, are in their teens or early 20s.  The countries represented other than the U.S. include Israel, Russia, Spain, Guatemala, Germany, Belgium, Canada, Netherlands, Indonesia and Korea.  Everyone sounds different speaking Mandarin and each person has their own sounds that are problematic for their mouths to form.  The Indonesia guy struggles with a number of sounds, despite the similarities of his language and Mandarin.  For the first week, the teacher would continually scold him and say “No L, No L”. After hearing this for a number of days, I was about to defend him and tell the teacher he is not saying “L”, when I realized she was saying “No Air” meaning that he should say the word without having air leave his mouth.  The teacher’s English is poor, which creates some problems.   One day she kept trying to explain the “Freezes” that we are creating.  It made no sense and we had her write it down and discovered we were creating “Phrases”.

 The Chinese speak hundreds of different regional dialects.  The primary differences are the tones used, however a person speaking Cantonese cannot communicate with a person speaking Taiwanese.  Mandarin is the Beijing dialect and considered standard Chinese.  Mandarin is taught in all of China and Taiwan, and only the very old or very poor/uneducated do not understand Mandarin.  Despite the standardization, a number of regional differences exist.

Tonality is important in Mandarin.  There are five tones: voice drops from beginning to end, voice rises, voice remains constant, voice drops and then rises and the fifth tone is neutral, which is very short and no variation.  When you learn each character, the tone is critically important.  As an example, the word ma using a constant tone is mother.  Ma using a rising tone is hemp.  Ma using a falling and then rising tone is horse, and using a falling tone is a scolding word like no, and with the neutral tone, it is used as a question particle.  You don’t want to call your mother-in-law a horse, so it is important.  Many words have exactly the same tone and sound, yet have different meanings; they have different written characters though.  When words are used in succession, like most words are when you build sentences, the tone rules can change, especially for words that using the falling then rising tonality.  Mandarin is difficult.

Written Chinese is even more difficult than spoken Mandarin.  There are approximately 80,000 characters, however if you know 2,500 of the right ones, you cover about 98% of the language needs.   Unlike students in western education systems, the Chinese will continue learning how to write through high school and leave for the university with the ability to correctly write over 10,000 characters.  In the west, we typically know our alphabet and diacritics for certain vowels by the time we are seven years old.  The stroke order for making a character is highly important to the Chinese.  I still don’t fully understand why, but it is not a logic based rule.  It is just a rule that you create the character in the correct order of strokes and marks.  After the war, Mao Zedong was faced with educating a large peasant population.  He ordered that written Chinese be simplified.  Simplified Chinese is taught in China with almost 3,000 characters modified from the traditional version.  Traditional Chinese is taught in Taiwan and that is what I am learning, and is more difficult.  Some characters have more than 25 individual strokes. 

There are several methods to teach Mandarin with Latin language derivatives, including Pin-Yin, the Taiwan Tongyong Romanization System, the Yale Romanization, etc.  We temporarily use Pin-Yin, but in the end, you need to learn the characters and abandon Pin-Yin.

Learning the language is hard-very hard.  For westerners, we have nothing familiar to hold on to.  There is no alphabet, the rules are totally different, and nothing makes sense.  I have never felt more vulnerable and inadequate in my life.  I took Spanish as a young child, German in high school and Japanese as an adult.  German and Spanish are incredibly simple compared to Chinese, though I can’t say I speak those languages very well either.  I tease my German classmate that Chinese has some similarities to German, though we don’t get to spit when we speak.  The 11 classmates get along very well.  For those that watch the tv show Community, I play the Chevy Chase character.

Every week we learn about 50 new words and we need to be able to correctly write at least 25 characters.  Everyone in the class except me, has either lived in Taiwan or China for some time and knew some Chinese or had previously taken Mandarin lessons.  I started the class with a previous knowledge of 10 words.  I have always been embarrassed that I speak only one language and it is never too late to change.  I can now recognize a number of Chinese characters as I travel throughout Taipei, and read some signs, or have a very basic conversation.  I am trying very hard to learn Mandarin, though it has been humbling every day.