Permanently itemised in my Life’s To Do List,
learning mandarin was placed front and centre when a Groupon offer came about. I took up a 3 month beginners Groupon-grade Mandarin course with a buddy (in hopes that a buddy system will pull me through). This was my chance to right my failed past endeavours.
In the past, my on again off again approach to learning mandarin was not really seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. I only had 3 years of P.O.L. (Pupil’s Own Language) in primary school. It wasn’t enough to reach a self-sustaining ‘critical mass’ of words and grammar to really survive. I tried enrolling in a language class before starting university, although it was sold to me as a beginner’s class, it actually wasn’t. I got lost in the mandarin chatter and practically after every class, suffered extreme mental dehydration. It didn’t work. I bought books and audio tapes, but that too failed because I needed interaction, a class of equals.
One
horrid interview made me realise how important Mandarin can be in today’s world. But I was ‘lethargic’ and ‘passionless’ when it came to learning new languages following my less than successful attempts. My short stint with learning sign language just rekindled my sputtering flame. I was now ready to take on new languages.
The centre I joined is called the Global Hanyu and Culture Center. The unique thing about it is not a typical language centre; instead it is more of a cultural exchange centre between Malaysia and China, equivalent to a non-governmental British Council that offers language courses.
The Groupon class I joined was specially crafted to be simpler than their normal beginner’s course, focussing on common conversational language rather than the more conventional formal approach. Also they would not be teaching the written form of mandarin at all.
Be that as it may, coming from an English speaking background, Mandarin is hard! Buy all the books you want, take up those enticing online courses but you’re not going to learn Mandarin that way. You need either immersion (live with the natives), lots of observation (watch lots of Chinese movies) or join a class full of people roughly the same proficiency as you. Since immersion requires very patient friends and observation requires an undying love for that foreign culture, the third option seemed like a simpler solution for me.
Why is this Language so Hard?
Mandarin is the national language of China. However there are many other dialects that use the same writing system as Mandarin but have different grammar, different norms and expressions and sound completely different word for word.
Chinese is written in a string of monosyllabic characters, where each syllable corresponds to a Chinese character. But Mandarin is rampant with homophones – same sounding syllables, different character, and some heterographs - characters which have a few ways to pronounce depending on meaning.
Mandarin pronunciation is represented by the common pinyin system using Romanized alphabets. This is probably what you would start with when you are learning Mandarin. Although pinyin uses alphabets, it may or may not have any relationship to the English counterparts. The pinyin alphabet ‘z’ sounds more like a ‘ch’. In fact there are 6 initial consonants (z, c, ch, zh, j, q) that sound similar to ‘ch’ but they do not sound the same to the Mandarin speaker. A g is actually a soft k, a b is a soft p. Furthermore, the pronunciation set is so constrained and limited; there are only a fixed amount of syllables you can make. As a result., many English consonants and vowels do not have counterparts.
Mandarin is a tonal language. That means a single syllable like ‘feng’ can be pronounced in 4 different ways according to the tones they are spoken with (tones as in musical tones) and instantly be recognised as four different words. Yup, you can say Mandarin is not spoken, it is sung! (But no one says that). That adds a whole new dimension to speaking a language. For beginners, listening to people speaking rapid fire Mandarin, words jumble up and sound the same. Confusion is inevitable. And a nagging question I have is “Are tone deaf Chinese basically deaf in the ears of the Chinese?”
The written form of Mandarin is represented by an abstract pictographic ‘character’, with seemingly no alphabets in sight. Each character is made up of many strokes of the brush. Most people shudder at the thought of learning the Chinese characters, worrying that the infinite combinations of strokes of characters might overwhelm the brain. Also since the written form has no relationship to the way it sounds, you have to memorise the pronunciation, the characters and the matchup between the two. So learning Mandarin is actually like learning 2 languages, and that’s why some courses just offer conversational Mandarin, because one language is maddening enough.
Mandarin reuses too many syllables/characters. To all who say Chinese doesn’t use alphabets, this fact challenges that claim. You see in Chinese, words can be 1 character, 2 characters and however many characters that word needs to be. The problem is in the words which are 2 or more characters in length. In a 2 character word, the individual characters themselves have their own meanings but when they combine they would mean something else.
So you have to be armed with complete Mandarin grammar, local culture, knowledge of regional adaptations and a large vocabulary of words in order to understand certain scripts. Dangerously, you might get into ambiguous territory where a combination of characters may mean one thing, and another might mean something else. It’s like deciphering internet URLs. I hope you see the innocent side of “thispenisforyourconvenience”.
Mandarin transliteration of foreign proper nouns poses an issue. In most languages, when foreign words enter the vocabulary, native speakers would probably find local pronunciations that sort of match the original. For instance the ubiquitous ‘Starbucks’ name from America; Americans themselves could identify with that translated word (give or take a second). But not so in Mandarin where you have such a limited set of syllables.
Starbucks is “Xing ba ke”, Xing – means star while bake – is phonetic translation. Carrefour is ‘Jia le fu’ – phonetic translation. Microsoft is ‘Weiruan’ – translated literally as micro + soft. Google is ‘Guge’ - phonetic translation. Transliterations into Mandarin are neither uniform nor do they sound like their original pronunciation. Worst of all, in Mandarin text and speech, there is no hint of the word being a proper noun, and that’s a headache considering proper nouns are constructed using everyday words and characters.
It has been commonly claimed that all you need to know is around 2000 characters, because characters can join up to form compound and complex words, but is that really enough for full mastery?
In my Groupon introductory class, the disparity is great between the know-a-lots and the fresh meats. The know-a-lots have one thing in common; they already know a lot of Cantonese, a Chinese dialect very similar to Mandarin. At the fast pace of each lesson, the clueless fresh meats couldn’t follow at all and end up skipping class (all except one – Qishin Tariq).
I was a fresh meat too, 10 years ago at that language class. I lost all enthusiasm and drive to learn when ‘expert’ students hijack my so called beginner’s class. It took me another language, some self-reading and perseverance to enrol in this class again. I had only wished they have a true beginner’s class where all, especially the fresh meats can follow.
Learning Mandarin is hard, and if you are not living in a Mandarin speaking environment, impossible to master. But I guess it’s ultimately worth the effort just to reach that ‘critical mass’.
