I thought it's about time I started blogging as I'm counting down the days- 10 until exams are over, and 35 until China. With five weeks exactly until I depart for China for the Global Fellowship and the excitement kicking in, I thought I'd recap on my initial thoughts on learning some Mandarin Chinese.
At first, the prospect of taking up a language with an apparently "easy" grammar seemed blissful; I could forget repeating all those hours learning genders and I could skip such stumbling blocks as learning the difference between la tour and le tour. Plurals, agreement and cases could be forgotten as well. Even verbs and tenses seemed blissfully straightforward.
So it was with high hopes I decided to order myself a copy of "Beginner's Chinese" by Yong Ho.
The first few lessons didn't disappoint either- it remained straightforward. Even learning the characters began as a leisurely process, and I soon learned to write Ni hao (hello/ how are you?) as 你好. It was still logical: 你 meaning "you" and 好 meaning "well", which is composed of the characters for a woman 女and a son 子 (interestingly, even the language relates to the stereotype that sons are well looked-upon in China!). After building upon a few set phrases it was all surprisingly straightforward and followed a logic I'd never come across in human language.
Unfortunately it wasn't meant to be that simple. I have yet to practice with a native speaker, which as past experience told me too well may open a Pandora's Box of problems. Last year in a school in Normandy I learned the hard way as my pronunciation of juin (June) sounded more like joint- a spliff, resulting in an embarrassing eruption of guffaws.
Harmless as
it was, I've found several potential blunders I could make in Chinese- a language with so few sounds that they use different tones to differentiate between words. One example is cāo, to speak- it's not out of the realms of possibility that I'll use this... Maybe I'll say something along the lines of "nǐ cāo yīngyǔ ma?"-"do you speak english?" That's fine, but if I were to slightly mispronounce it, and say "nǐ cào yīngyǔ ma?" I'd be asking " do you fuck English?". Maybe there's a reason people say Chinese is difficult...
And there's Chinglish as well to deal with. If you've ever been on the website www.engrish.com you'll see what I mean. However, I can to a degree sympathise with our Chinese friends when badly translated signs, at least after looking at the above website, seem to generate more interest than sights of natural beauty and thousand year-old temples. I'm sure there was something of cultural importance behind the slightly sadistic sign in the picture.
I sympathised more with them when I decided foolishly to try to decipher one sentence of a dual-language Pride and Prejudice: "Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts.", using my basic dictionary translated as "Mr. Bennet really eccentric man, aspect like sincere mixture.".
I think it's going to take a lot longer than 35 days to get any grasp of this...