A disclaimer before proceeding: I studied Chinese (writing, reading, speaking) for all 12 years of my formal schooling (the last 2 years are what the British call college, what is junior college in Singapore and is not mandatory) and have a Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK5) Intermediate certification. While this might qualify me as proficient in the language, I do not claim to be a native speaker as I am more proficient and comfortable in English. In fact I have lost maybe half my 3000 or so characters along with 80% of my academic proficiency at age 18. I am, however, able to converse with a native speaker from China and have had prolonged conversations with my Taiwanese friend whose patience outstrips my Mandarin vocabulary. Those of you who already know me would know that I am ethnically Chinese, my grandparents were born in China and I use informal Chinese on a daily basis in a predominantly English-speaking environment although Singapore is a multicultural society with an ethnic Chinese majority.
To begin, I'm not putting anyone off from learning the language. As a new parent whose single biggest challenge is to bring her child up in 3 languages (including Chinese), I think I am entitled to say that this is not a walk in the park. It's closer to a swim across the Pacific with your hands tied behind your back. You're more likely to drown before you get to Hawaii. Many westerners who have put in their hard yards to seriously learn the language have paid their dues and pretty much all of them agree that Chinese is pretty damn hard to learn (read a great tongue-in-cheek piece from American scholar David Moser or input "Chinese is hard to learn" in Google and find all of these people easily). There are plenty of good blogs out there which explain in great detail the difficulty in achieving minimal proficiency in this beautiful yet exasperating language -- David Moser's is a must-read for all beginners, Hacking Chinese gives good and practical advice -- but what else can I add to the conversation?
Well, as an almost-native speaker, I can comment on the difficulty of learning the language and the claims about what strategies work best, since I spent a good 12 years at it and during this time, I have been in the shoes of Western students who have never learnt a tonal language.Yes, I have wanted to tear my hair out staring at a list of words I had to memorize (we learn writing and reading at the same time) before a test and wishing to God and The Cosmos that I could quit Chinese was a weekly -- sometimes daily -- prayer. Ask any Chinese student or student of Chinese who didn't do it voluntarily. This is my version of a reality check for anyone who's deciding whether to embark on this journey. Oh, I'm not saying it isn't worth every bit of effort you're going to put in, it's damn well worth it after the 5 or 6 years you've been at it; but for those of us who like to live life without the blinkers of delusion, painful as it may be, here are a few things that some of you might find helpful if you are thinking about taking Chinese on, or wondering whether to call it a day.
1) Your Chinese-speaking husband/wife/girlfriend ain't gonna be much use
From first-hand experience, I can tell those of you who are thinking of or who recently acquired a partner who speaks Mandarin to forget it. If you think he/she is going to be your free tutor, conversation partner, you're better off speaking Mandarin to your dog. Your dog would be more interested. As others can attest to this, spouses and lovers are in your life for other reasons -- communication, getting intimate and the other half of the chores -- and they don't have the time or patience to be your teacher.
My husband Daniel is German and in our 4 years together, he has not picked up enough Chinese from me to have a conversation beyond two sentences at the coffee shop. I, on the other hand, have enough German (from being self-taught) to have a protracted conversation with his relatives: me in broken German is a lot more comprehensible than Daniel with any Mandarin. A big reason for the disparity in our ability is the requirement for me to speak German in order to communicate with his parents (they don't speak anything else). You may think that's a real pain, but it's like a little accelerator for any student of any language. That's why you always hear about immersion and people advising you to go to China or Taiwan to really accelerate your proficiency. It's the deep end of the pool. Do or die. And most of the time, when you have no choice but to use the language, you do almost what any baby does naturally in language acquisition: you soak it up.
But what if you don't want to spend 6 months in Beijing (in the smog) stuttering to locals and ending up having a conversation with them in English? There's plenty out there. Watch movies or TV from the Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong (here we get Taiwanese and Hong Kong stuff dubbed in standard Mandarin, putonghua) online. Lots of Chinese pop music available, Jay Chou has atrocious enunciation, but he's a good starter kit to Chinese pop culture. Youtube will give you hours and hours of Chinese lessons (only helpful for students who already have some foundation and need practice), Chinese programs, and pop culture. Or you could just come to Singapore, aka "Asia For Beginners". There's enough Chinese resources here you can get on the cheap (books, libraries, media and the people) while having the safety of falling back on English when you feel like you're going crazy.
2) You can't escape rote memorizing
Many have commented that the learning curve at the beginning is steepest and it gradually gets easier as you ease into the grammar and gain traction with the tones. I would say the first year is akin to jumping off a cliff into a black abyss and then climbing back up again and repeating this another 5 times with every new word. Alright, I'm exaggerating it, but people who hate memorising and got by learning their French and German and Spanish relying on the alphabet system and cognates should take me seriously. The steep curve at the beginning for all novices is due to the fact that you must learn to recognise and pronounce enough individual words to have a basic conversation about the weather. Many students think it's sufficient to speak Mandarin and they choose to be illiterate. This is well and good if your aim is simply to have a couple weeks holiday in Taiwan or Shanghai. My view: Chinese is the hardest thing you're ever going to attempt to learn, may as well go the whole hog.
Native speakers have the advantage of having been exposed to the language since birth, so that syntax and all that grammar stuff becomes second nature. You instinctively know how to form sentences and express yourself in the native lingo. This might take the non-Sino learner maybe a year or two, depending on how much practice, interest and determination you have. But if you are doing this at the same time as you're learning new vocabulary (and this is the labour intensive part), it really feels like you're heavy-lifting all the time because you are consciously acquiring the entire system of word recognition, memorization, pronunciation and sentence formation all at once. It can be really daunting and I get it. I've given up learning German grammar because it's too hard. German isn't my passion and neither is cracking the magician's code that is their grammar. Hell, thinking about the genders in German is enough to make me take a sleeping pill. I need enough German to be understood and to understand and nobody has any problem with that. So if you're bent on becoming fluent and proficient in Chinese, make sure you're doing it because you have nothing else in your life that's more important than devoting the next 3 years of your life to this project. Because it WILL take that long, at the very least.
3) Give it up if you're tone-deaf
I'm serious. Daniel is as close to tone deaf as one can be, but to his credit, the man tries hard. He gets by being understood even with his atrocious tones, but he can't really understand someone who's speaking in Mandarin because he can't tell the difference. This is crucial. I've had many conversations with Daniel that went like this:
Me (speaking to Juju): 帮妈妈把垃圾丢掉 bang Ma Ma ba la ji diu diao (Help Mummy throw away the garbage)
Daniel: Why did you ask Ju to throw away the spicy chicken? (辣鸡 la ji)
Me: It's 垃圾 (la1 ji1) not 辣鸡 (la4 ji1) !
But to Daniel, all the la ji sound the same. Here's a fun sentence to demonstrate tones: Lao3 shi1 lao3 shi lao1 dao1. If you know that Lao3 shi1 means "teacher" and lao1 dao1 means "nag", you could figure out that lao3 shi is probably "always" = "Teacher is always nagging". Western learners make a big deal of the tones, but I always tell people there are only 4 plus one neutral tone, it's not so hard, as long as you figure out those 4. It's really like singing in only 4 or 5 notes. Which brings me to my next point:
4) Learn to read
Yes, we have tones and it's a real pain to have to memorize every word with its exact tone. That's why you need to learn to READ THE CHARACTERS. Hanyu pinyin is a romanised form of the language which makes it really convenient to type on the keyboard, look up a word in the dictionary and figure out how to pronounce the word, but only if you already know how to read and write! It's really not a solution for learners who can't read. I'll tell you why: learning solely with Pinyin is like playing the piano without seeing the notes on the score. You're half blind. Think of the piano keyboard: it has several octaves but only 8 white keys and 5 black keys representing a note in each octave. There are 8 possible C keys and 7 possible C sharps. You can't possibly know which C sharp to press unless you can read the note on the scale. It's the same for Chinese. My previous pinyin example, la1 ji1 on paper doesn't make any sense unless you read it together with "ba3 la1 ji1 diu1 diao4" and you figure out that diu1 diao4 means "to throw away", by which you understand that I meant 垃圾 the garbage and not spicy chicken. But if you could read the characters, you would have no doubt about what I meant. In fact, when I learnt French, I would make it a point to look up every new word I heard to make sure I knew the spelling. I am a highly visual person and seeing the French or German word in my head reinforces my memory of it so I can pull it up again in future. If you can see the word in your head, you can remember it a lot better, and this is even more critical in a tonal language with pictograms in place of an alphabet.
Take the word 老 which on its own is an adjective which means "old". If you heard someone say 老百姓 (lao3 bai3 xing4) you would naturally guess they were referring to someone old or something which was old. In fact, you would need to know that the three words go together to make another word: commoner or common folk, which has nothing to do with being old. Again, 老板 lao3 ban3 (the boss) has very little in common with being elderly (although some bosses could be aged) nor a wooden plank which is what 板 is. Wait till you get to 4 word proverbs like 老当益壮 lao3 dang1 yi4 zhuang4（to gain vigour with age). So you need to learn individual characters and words that are composed of 2 or 3 characters and then proverbs and idioms (there are more but I won't go there).
The Chinese don't like to get to the point. Even after they've finished the sentence, you still have to figure out what they meant because there are not tenses that resemble the Germanic or Romantic languages. It's worse than the Germans making you wait for the verb at the end of the sentence. When you're deciphering Mandarin, you need to replay the entire sentence in a split-second to work out the meaning because the context sets the meaning. Take this example: "Wo3 qu4 de2 guo2" and "Wo3 qu4 le de2 guo2".
Context A:
Question: Ni qu na li du jia? (Where are you going on holiday?)
Answer: Wo qu de guo (I am going to Germany).
Context B:
Question: Ni qu le na li du jia? (Where did you go on holiday?)
Answer: Wo qu de guo (I went to Germany).
Context C:
Question: Ni qu guo na xie guo jia? (Which countries have you been to?)
Answer: Wo qu le de guo (I've been to Germany).
Context D:
Question: Shang ge xing qi, ni qu le na li? (Where did you go last week?)
Answer Wo qu le de guo (I went to Germany).
Without the question (which sets the context), you would not have any idea if I was going to Germany or I had gone to Germany; whether I've been to only Germany on holiday or if I went to Germany last week. But then again, some people find the lack of tenses totally refreshing, since there are fewer arbitrary rules to learn. There isn't any better or worse here, it's just a completely different way of orienting your comprehension of what is being said. Instead of relying on tenses, you rely on an intuitive reading of the context.
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If you aren't put off already, I'll throw in two more cents on the arduous learning of Chinese. It's true what they all say about immersing yourself in an all-Chinese environment and memorizing every single word. But if you can see yourself making this commitment, the other reasons for learning Chinese is just as compelling as the challenges I've just listed. That's why I love the language, it's like the Tao of Ying and Yang: what is black is also white, and what is agonizing is also beautiful. Learning to write is a wonderful skill and the journey can be an endless puzzle of discovery for those who love puzzles or a perpetual endeavor of frustration. I've written elsewhere in this blog about how to write Chinese characters. In school, it was typical for students to write pages and pages of "xi2 zi4" (Writing Practice) for every new lesson. This was anything from 100 to 1000 repetitions (we would write 10 repetitions per new word) a week, sometimes twice a week. It does get easier because once you learn enough, you can use what you've got and this reinforces your long term memory. Your "core" 2000 word vocabulary will get you by in most situations.
As students, we also read a lot (out loud), what is called "lang3 du2" (recitation) to practice our enunciation and pronunciation. In Primary school, our teacher would get the entire class to recite the entire essay (sometimes 3 pages) three or four times per lesson. If we didn't recite with quite enough expressiveness or if our tones were too flat, we'd have to do it from the top. There is only one word for this: arduous. At times you wanted to bash your 10 year old head on the cement floor you were sitting on. But I must say the 6 years of reciting ensured that I have perfect tones. This is the shit of Chinese poetry reciting, it's an actual art form. To become fluent, you'll need to do this a lot, and the best part is you can actually practice lang3 du2 on your own. Of course, having feedback is a lot better, so you'll need to attend class or get a tutor. It's like playing music, you really need someone to correct and encourage you.
Finally, if you can get through all of that, you get the satisfaction of connecting with any Chinese speaker in the world (and there are many), discovering the magnificence of a 5000-year-old culture and just taking simple pleasure in being able to read stuff that, to any other person, looks like hieroglyphics. You do need a certain amount of proficiency to be able to do this, but like the circle of Tao, if you love the language, you'll master it eventually, and then you'll love it all over again.
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