This
language – Mandarin – is a tonal language belonging to the family of
Sino-Tibeton languages, which might or might not have had a common ancestor with
our Indo-European languages some 15 000 years ago (one of the reasons it’s so
strange to us). It’s the mother tongue to an estimated 1 billion speakers, more
than twice the number of the second most common one in the world, Spanish. It
is also the major reason I came to China. I’m not a linguist or sinologist, so
this is not going to be a scientific introduction, but rather a report of my
personal experience enriched with a few facts.
We all
heard that Chinese is a difficult language to learn. Think of those weird
characters and the words that all sound the same to foreigners! For everybody
keen on the Chinese culture and language I would love to deemphasize its
difficulty, but I really can’t. It’s just a fact that Chinese is nothing like
Spanish, French or any other European language you might have studied at
school. Any self-titled multilinguist telling you how to learn to speak
Mandarin in just 3 months (or 6 months, or a year) is probably just trying to
sell you their shit. After more than two years of studying, I drew two
conclusions that I think apply universally (unless you’re a language genius or
come from a language that’s similar, like Japanese):
1. Chinese,
especially its written form, takes a shitload of dedication
2. to speak
fluently, there’s just no other way than living in China/Taiwan, I’d say for at
least a year
Before I
extend on those points, let me make my point clear. I dare say I have a modest
talent for learning languages, but I’m far from a wunderkind. I don’t think
that Chinese requires an exceptional amount of talent or intelligence anyways.
What you’ll need is dedication and diligence. Which brings me to reasons for
which it is not a good idea to start learning Chinese:
-
Your
career:
This is probably one of the most common and
equally wrong motives for a multitude of reasons. First of all, your career has
not really a direct connection with China or Chinese, since the intrinsic
motivation is not learning the language, but getting a good job / a lot of cash
/ power / whatever. If you’re down this path, you’re probably good at making
cost-benefit analyses. In the same time you need to get your Chinese on a level
that has any relevance in a vocational context, you could do an MBA at a
prestigious university and work 3 gruelling years as a drone in some office
tower to repay your student debt. That MBA also has the advantage of providing
you with a great network and signaling all employers that you want to make it
to the top. Chinese on the contrary is much less of a qualification for top
jobs than most people think. First, despite the overall low proficiency in China,
the international businesspeople there usually speak English, most likely
better than your Chinese will ever become. Second, if you’re working on the
Chinese market in an international company, you’ll always have Chinese
colleagues whose English/German is most likely better than your Chinese will
ever become. If you’re climbing up the career ladder, you’re getting your own
assistant/translator, whose English/German is definitely better than your
Chinese will ever become. If your goal is to work at a Chinese company, you
might want to reconsider (In the words of our Business Chinese teacher:
“Working culture at Chinese tech companies? [Laughing] Overtime, overtime!
That’s the working culture.” There’s also the so called 6/12 or 6/14 rule at
those companies, dictating working 12 or 14 hours a day for 6 days a week.) Ultimately,
Chinese is not an important asset because in situations that are crucial for
your company/institution like negotiations or meetings, there’ll always be
people whose whole job is to translate. Is that an argument against learning
Chinese for work? Totally not, your Chinese colleagues will like you a lot if
you’re able to chat with them in their native tongue and if you’re happen to
work in China, not knowing Chinese guarantees that you’ll stay an alien in the
expat bubble forever. Just don’t start learning under the assumption that it’s
going to be a career booster.
-
Kind
of a general interest in languages / giving it a shot / finding Chinese culture
somewhat fascinating
That’s the stuff that you often hear from
exchange students, who happened to pick a Chinese or Taiwanese university and
are now wondering if they should take the language classes offered. It depends
on the goal: If it’s getting a glimpse of a language that’s fundamentally
different from your own just out of curiosity, it makes sense. If it’s learning
Chinese, you better have more than a bit of interest, because the one semester
is but the kick-off to years of studying. After I stayed in Taiwan for half a
year, taking the additional language classes offered, I could finally ask for a
bus and not understand what people replied, that’s how far I got.
The best
reason to learn Chinese is because you really want to learn Chinese, that’s
what I’m convinced of and that’s what it’s like for me. I can’t even lay out
exactly why I want to do it, there are many reasons plus some sense of purpose
in the process. I want to understand China better, after all it’s becoming a
global power. I am deeply intrigued by how different Chinese works from the
languages I knew before. I have many Chinese-speaking friends who brought me
closer to the culture. I want to be able to speak the language that 1 billion
people are speaking, most of whom don’t know any other. There are many other
small reasons that combined outdo the more frustrating aspects of learning
Chinese. There are many.
The most
obvious is the pace of progress. After more than two years, at least one of
which I studied a lot, I still can’t have a normal conversation. Neither can I
read texts that aren’t dumbed down for students. The same effort put into
Spanish or French would’ve gotten me to C1 level, in Chinese I’m somewhere
between A2 und B1. When you’re hanging out with Chinese, you’re inevitably
feeling stupid at some point, because you’re always losing track of
conversations, no matter how hard you’re trying to focus. Another factor is
that just learning characters isn’t enough and it’s not even the greatest
challenge (it’s actually far easier than I imagined in the beginning). The
biggest obstacle is the overarching vagueness of Chinese. Characters are vague,
sentence structures are vague and even content can be vague. Take the common
character 才 (cái). It
means talent or ability, but also describes a person that has talent or skill,
serving for gifted persons as well as a suffix for a few professions. It
furthermore is used as “just” in certain sentence structures, sometimes also as
“only” or “actually”. This vagueness doesn’t seem to be a problem if you learn
it from early on. Anecdotal evidence shows that bilingual kids often prefer
Chinese over grammar-heavy, structured languages like German. If however you
happen to grow up in this frame of reference, the seeming arbitrariness of
Chinese can drive you crazy. It means that often, despite being able to recognize
every single character, I don’t know what the f*ck I’m reading. A little
comfort: It was even worse in ancient times. Modern Chinese is less dense,
often using two syllables with similar meanings to create a word that is less
ambiguous. For example, 树 and 木 both have „tree“
as a meaning, so if you put them together to 树木, “tree” becomes the only possible meaning. Normal Chinese people are in
fact not able to understand ancient Chinese either, when I recently asked a
woman to translate an inscription of Lao-Tze’s life on a statue, she couldn’t
help me.
The other
big challenge is listening comprehension and correct pronunciation. Compared to
English or German, the Chinese language offers little creative leeway for vocal
expression. Despite there being 75 000 characters (of which even an academic
however won’t use more than 10 000, less than half that for the normally
educated), there are only 413 possible syllables for pronouncing them. This
number goes up to 1522 if you account for the 4 (+1) tones – and this is where
the fun starts. If you’ve never learnt a tonal language in your life, to grasp
the concept of syllables meaning different things according to how you
pronounce them takes at least half a year. It takes a lot longer until you’re
actually pronouncing words the way you should, unless you’re in steady contact
with native speakers. A little mind-boggling example: The two syllables qizi can mean, depending on their
pronunciation: Wife, wife and children, adopted son, flag, piece in a game of
chess or bottle opener. Of course, often context allows to make the correct
guess. But even then, Chinese people are not very forgiving when it comes to
pronouncing words. It makes sense to pay close attention to the tones when you
can – by nature – use them correctly. So quite often you find yourself in
situations, where you as a foreigner - knowing their struggles - can actually
understand what another foreigner is trying to say in Chinese, but the Chinese
cannot, because it’s mispronounced. Another feature of the very limited amount
of syllables is that having just an idea of how a word should sound like is not
enough to understand something, because hundreds of words will kind of sound
like that. The last annoying thing I need to mention (there are so many more,
but these are the major ones I think – if you’re reading this and learning
Chinese, feel free to tell me about others) is that there’s no such thing as
standard Mandarin (I just realized I used Chinese and Mandarin synonymous,
please excuse this culturally insensitive mistake, I’m too lazy to skip through
the whole thing again), every place has its own accents. In Taiwan for example,
people don’t really care if they’re supposed to pronounce a sh-, ch- or zh-, it
all sounds like s. In Beijing, people love to add heavy Texas-like r’s to the
end of some syllables in patterns I will probably never be able to understand.
After
reading the last paragraph, you might be wondering why the hell any Westerner
would want to learn Chinese when the world is full of joy and beautiful things
to do. Well, in my case, I think part of the reason actually is that it’s so
damn hard. It sometimes really feels like learning to speak again. Minor
achievements like being able to read a menu and order in Chinese at a
restaurant feel epic. The realization that you’re actually able to write a
simple letter consisting of nothing but characters that 2 years ago were
completely enigmatic to you is fantastic. It really is more than another
language, because by learning it, you’re learning another culture and another
way of thinking alongside.
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