Being a Chinese Student

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I have actually been at university all this time, not only going on adventures! This blog will look at what it's like to be a Chinese student in both it's meanings: Firstly, what it is like to study Chinese, and secondly what is it like to be Chinese and study. Both are not particularly photogenic but hopefully interesting for those who aren't studying or being Chinese.

Chinese takes about three times as long to learn as European languages, because there is almost nothing about it that is similar. Those funny little characters represent roughly one word (or basic meaning) each, although many words are made of two or three, and there are no spaces separating where one word begins and one ends. In total there are 50,000 characters that can be learned, each one unique, although most Chinese 'only' know how to write 5000. In other languages, if you hear a new word you can use the alphabet to guess how to write it, and if you see a new word you can use the alphabet to guess how to say it. With characters you can't guess either, so each has to be actively learned as an individual little 'picture'. You can't just 'fill in the gaps' with guesses at pronunciation and meaning.

Luckily, some characters have tenuous visual links to what they represent, such as tree (木），hand (手）， net (网）above and below (上 and 下）, and many are a composition of various components, with one half hinting at the meaning, and one half giving a clue to the pronunciation. e.g. explode （"pao", 炮）contains fire (火）on the left and the phonetic clue "bao" (包) on the left, which rhymes with pao.

When temporarily giving up on the challenge of reading and writing with this ridiculous system and deciding to just speak, you realise this is no simple task either. Our whole European psychology of using tone of voice to express emotion and questions must be reversed, as tones in Chinese are used to completely change the meaning of a word. This means that if you say "MA" with a high tone it means mother, if you say it with a rising tone it is part of sesame or troublesome, with a neutral tone it turns the entire sentence interrogative, with a falling tone it means to abuse and with a dipping tone it means horse. You have to be pretty careful. The opposites "buy" and "sell" are distinguished only by a rising or falling tone, as are "sex" and "OK".

But if we think we have it hard, we need to look the Chinese. They have to learn English. That would be OK if their English teachers could speak English. It would also be OK if they had any chance to go abroad to learn it, or if there were any foreigners or foreign TV channels or radio stations like in most European countries. They have no English to soak up, crap teachers who learned English from teachers who learned their English from crap teachers who learned a few words somehow back when all foreigners and foreign influences were banned. When you meet someone who has managed to learn good English somehow you know they must be a genius or have worked pretty hard: it's pretty impressive.

Between doing the two week army training introduction and the swimming exam at graduation, Chinese students have to continue studies in areas as varied as our GCSE subjects, not just their specialisation. One of these subjects is war studies, where they learn not just the censored history of war but also the tactics, gun types and fighting techniques to be used if it comes to it. Students here live in dorms with about six people to a room in bunk beds with no mattress, no air conditioning and no hot water, and the electricity is cut off at 11pm every night to stop them all playing computer games. Girls are banned from boys' dorm buildings and vice versa. Lectures sometimes start at 8am or finish at 11 at night, and at 3 in the morning you will still see people sitting in empty classrooms having self-study periods, divided up by the bell that rings every hour all night.

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