(Note: my references throughout are to Mandarin Chinese, or the standard dialect of Chinese which I learned and was exposed to. Cantonese and other major dialects I did not live with nor learn.)
Anyone teaching English as a foreign language, anyone living in a foreign country, in my opinion, ought to make the effort to learn a new language.
Per teaching English, it is crucial that the teacher understands how to think through language, how to deconstruct sentences and convey meaning to people who have never lived in the context of the language’s home culture, whose ears do not hear the difference between a syllable’s sounds or a word’s feelings. If a man intends to teach, he should be humble enough to learn. Doing the work of thinking through a new language enlightens the teacher to the obstacles before the language student and, I should think, teaches him empathy for those who are learning.
For those living in a new country, the benefits of learning the native tongue should be obvious to anyone. Consider buying medicine from a row of bottles labeled only with foreign script, calling a phone directory to ask for assistance, scheduling an appointment, asking for directions or any kind of help; imagine the need for holding a conversation, interacting with a fellow human being in a meaningful way, or ever participating in the native culture and society. At the very least, learning the natives’ language shows them you are serious and respectful about your stay in their country, and it clears you from charges of hypocrisy should you ever lose patience with an overseas customer service call center and tell the representative on the other end to learn English.
These reasons are enough to induce any serious English-as-a-second-language teacher (there are a few reported to be in existence) to give learning a new language a noble effort. The mountain is a tall, steep climb though, so the new language learner will need a high level of constant motivation (and that from within, not necessarily without) to steel his discipline. He has to want to learn the language. I had, as mentioned, a fascination with East Asian cultures, and a curiosity- shared by most, I suppose- for the artful brushwork of Chinese handwriting. Plus, the dissimilarity and difficulty of Chinese did not intimidate me, it intrigued me. I can look at a food label in Spanish and work out what “sal” and “azúcar” mean by comparing them with English, but when looking at the Chinese symbols on the same food label, I have no idea which of the little dots and dashes to start with. The intricate characters are impressive, but equally abstruse. There is no way for a foreign speaker to sound them out or even begin to guess their meaning. So I wanted to learn the key to unlocking Chinese symbolism. I wanted to satisfy the many questions I had about a language I could not fathom yet which functioned as the communicative and cultural medium for well over a billion people.
For instance, what do the pronouns “I,” “you,” “he,” “she,” and “we” sound like in a language with no connection to Latin? And how are they written? Is there simplicity and significance in their sound and appearance? In English, “I” is written and spoken as simply as is possible, and the rationale for this is axiomatic- in spoken language no other word is used so frequently. The word I use to refer to myself, “I,” ought to be able to be spoken rapidly; there should be no effort in saying it or writing it. I wondered, does Chinese follow this same self-evident logic?
Could I distinguish words by their sound, by onomatopoeia? “Onomatopoeia” comes from the Greek term for the “making of words,” so how did the Chinese make words? In English, the words “fast” and “quick” sound fast and quick, and “slow” and “languid” sound slow and languid. Could I extract the meaning of Chinese words from their established sounds? That is, would the Chinese word for “love” sound soft and expansive? Would harsh verbs like “kick” and “cut” sound as, well, as they were supposed to? Or would they be indistinguishable and (completely) arbitrary as the sounds for plain adjectives like “tame”? And with China’s writing system, famed for its exotic beauty, what would the special words look like? I mean, they could write the word for “sign” however they wanted, but the words for “tiger” and “dragon” and all that Chinese glamour, and big words like “love” are supposed to look… um, I will draw on my juvenile vocabulary here: cool.
So let it be known that I entered into my Chinese studies with a deep well of enthusiasm and interest. I had the self-motivation necessary to begin a new discipline and overcome the obstacles and setbacks inevitable along the way. There are so many languages and cultures that I could not summon the effort to spend an honest hour of study on (and I wager my readers who examine themselves will admit the same). Chinese was a language and culture I had a thirst to know more about.
Aunt Fong and I, ready to take on all things China.
My Studies
I mentioned that my first Chinese friends, Caili Ma and Aunt Fong, were my first Chinese teachers. Caili had experience teaching Chinese as a foreign language, so she would work with me in practically the same way that I learned to teach English, which was focusing on one piece of language and drilling it until I became comfortable with it. Caili would take turns asking me questions and having me ask her questions, always on one language focus or one sentence structure. An example, translated from Chinese: “Who is he?” “He is a man. He is my brother. He is 24 years old.” “Who is she?” “She is a girl. She is a child.” And so on.
My other teacher, Aunt Fong, had never taught language before, and her English skills were sorely lacking, hampering even basic communication with someone who did not intuitively understand her expressions and body language. Aunt Fong and I did intuitively understand each other, so we could get along and palaver our points with patience. I thought of our pairing like Han Solo speaking to Chewbacca, where we had an emotional bond and mutual understanding despite our exclusive languages. In this analogy, I was the tall spectacle in China, more than six inches taller than the average Chinese man, and differing in skin and hair, and Aunt Fong was the charming one with social ease that allowed her to approach anyone and start a conversation, once even getting us invited into a stranger’s KTV room for food, drinks, and singing, so I suppose that makes her the Han Solo and me the Chewbacca.
Aunt Fong’s ebullient personality affected our study time together; we would jump from topic to topic, never settling on one piece of language or ever establishing a plan. She would print off Chinese language study sheets online and give them to me, and after a haphazard four-hour session, I might pick up some new vocabulary through exposure. Exposure is helpful to get used to the sounds and rhythms of a language, but I was certainly unprepared for asking or answering questions when I arrived in China months later.
Once there, I began a much stricter study regimen with Aunt Fong’s husband, Uncle Jiang, a Chinese language professor. He had never tried to teach an adult to speak Chinese, but he was well-learned in Chinese language and literature and had studied English to an advanced beginner level, so he had the knowhow, ostensibly, to teach me. We began meeting two nights a week for two to four-hour study sessions.
Because China is a strongly patriarchal society where the teacher or the father of the family holds court, dictating or occasionally throwing a tantrum as everyone sits passively in uncomfortable silence, and because I am too meek and polite to ever voice an objection, our study sessions lasted for as long as Uncle Jiang wanted them to. This meant I would be sitting at his wooden table as he paced around the apartment, chewing sunflower seeds, spitting out their shells, and commanding me “Again!” whenever I paused long enough from my recitations to swallow and clear my throat, reading and re-reading lesson stories about friends going to a bookstore until Uncle Jiang was likewise exhausted and dismissed me around ten o’clock.
The first lesson, he grilled me and grimly shook his head after I tried to pronounce the four basic tones of Chinese for him (I will explain the four tones momentarily). “No,” he grumbled in a low voice without inflection. When I had practiced with Caili Ma, I was able to mimic her tones, but there was a gap of half a year between then and when I demonstrated for Uncle Jiang, so the mental impression I had of Chinese had rusted and warped in the meantime. He would have me repeat the four basic tones and the consonant sounds of Chinese over and over, telling me without gentle euphemism, “No… No. You…are wrong.”
I once sat with him for ten straight minutes, staring at his mouth as he had commanded me and repeating the Chinese sound for “c” without pauses. Ten minutes isn’t such a long time, but those minutes passed “c” by dreadful “c,” Jiang modeling and me repeating hundreds of times. I thought I knew how “c” was supposed to sound in Chinese, but Uncle Jiang got frustrated with me right away and insisted we drill it and drill it. Eventually, my brain turned to mush and I stopped thinking, only reacting and- I swear a tape recorder would back me up on this- exactly emulating the sounds emitting from Uncle Jiang’s mouth. He finally gave up on correcting me and shook his head. A day later, the university’s Foreign Affairs Officer, Amy Hu, whose English is excellent, told me that “c” in Chinese pinyin script (I will also explain pinyin in a moment) sounds like “-ts” in the words “lights.” That’s what I thought in the first place. I kept that in mind and from then on my supposed “c” problem was solved.
For my homework from Uncle Jiang, I would repeat the sample sentences from my workbook a set number of times until I could speak them at a fairly rapid pace. With his exacting pronunciation critiques and my repetitive drilling, I attained a decent beginner’s level of Chinese. Certain phrases were imprinted on my brain that will stay in my memory, ready to be called up for near-fluent use until the day that I die.
There was something that I quickly forgot and will forever lose unless I pick up my workbook again: the written Chinese characters. Chinese has no alphabet and no phonics. Chinese words are not built up out of parts, they come whole, so every word must be memorized individually. (Technically, it must be said that the written characters are built up out of parts because the simplest symbols and shapes are combined to form new symbols, and all characters draw from the same pool of standardized stroke movements. This means that Chinese characters have similarities and roots- it would be impossible for them not to- however the root symbols are usually not reliable for pronunciation or even meaning, and memorizing word by word is still very difficult and time-consuming.) To memorize a written word in Chinese, a student has to learn the proper stroke order (i.e. pen or brush stroke), which essentially leads the hand to draw the character. In English, young students need only learn how to write the 26 characters A-Z. After struggling with the difference between “b” and “d” and likewise making sure to face the loop of the “p” on the right side, any moderately bright kindergarten student is ready to write any letter at will in only a few weeks of training. Then, using phonics and familiarity, any word can be spelled.
For comparison between the two languages, let’s look at the word “good.” To do so, I will need to begin a new section which anyone who is already learned in the Chinese language will find tedious and unnecessary. I urge these readers to skip past this next section and save me the embarrassment of having my mistaken explanations and generalities corrected.
Continued in “The Basics of the Chinese Language.”
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