Advertisement
Published: March 29th 2011
Edit Blog Post
Before I came to China I bought a book which promised I could learn Mandarin in fifteen minutes a day if I studied from it for twenty weeks or so. This, unsurprisingly, is bollocks.
The problem with the book, and I would venture, the problem that anybody starting to learn this language will have is that there are four different tones for each word. Essentially, this means that every syllable has four different meanings and if you say a sentence and you don't get at least a few of these tones right, you are risking being, at best, borderline incomprehensible and at worst, massively offensive. This is almost impossible, to my mind, to get the hang of without hearing it, and in any event it was barely mentioned in all of the one hundred and thirty pages of this utter waste of money.
The tones are all about the intonation of your voice on particular words or phrases (like the way, when asking a question, our voices go down at first and then up at the end of the sentence). Here, the first tone is a flat one, where your voice starts and finishes at the same level. The second - the voice gets higher. For the third it starts high, gets lower, and goes high again (a bit like Jimmy Saville if you're struggling to imagine it), and the fourth, it starts high and descends. On every syllable. Everybody clear? Good.
It isn't quite as impossible as it sounds because a lot here is derived from context and so it isn't necessary to get all of these right everytime or risk being chased from the city like a common pygmy but you do need to get at least a couple in the right place to give whoever you're talking to a fighting chance. Of course, we have this in English to an extent - anyone who's seen Dylan Moran's brilliant routine on the various ways to say the word 'John' will know this - but it is an extra part of the language, rather than an integral aspect that is part of the basic make up of it as it is here.
Hearing the tones is difficult enough by itself but saying them is a different thing altogether. The natural way to speak in a language you're not familiar with is in a flat monotone - if you listen to a young child reading out loud or an adult doing the same but in a tongue they don't know that well you can hear this. The problem here is that to say something in this way, is to say it in the first tone, which for all you know could be the difference between saying "Thank you for your hospitality, that was a lovely meal" and "Just seeing your face and hearing you breathe makes me want to vomit." Undoubtedly two useful phrases, but not ones that you would generally want to mix up.
I have discovered that the only way I can say words in the four tones accurately is by moving my hand in the direction I want my voice to go in. So, in the handful of Chinese conversations I have had so far, it looks as though I'm conducting myself like some kind of one-man-choir. It is difficult to do it without that though, try it now with any foreign word you know. I guarantee you will at the very least move your head up and down as you do the tones. It's one of those things like trying to describe a spiral staircase without doing that circle motion thing with your hand - you can't do it and anyone who can, can, I think, legally be burnt as a Witch.
I mentioned last time about the friendliness of people in the city, this has translated itself quite easily and nicely into people offering to teach me Chinese, even before I express an interest in learning it. So far, just in general conversations in the street with strangers it's happened six times, with countless others asking me to teach them English. I have only taken one of them up on their offer so far and already I'm far beyond where I ever could have been with a book.
In addition to all the speaking issues there are somewhere in the region of 40,000 Chinese characters (as in written symbols, rather than eccentric zany people) but apparently in daily life you actually only need to know a fraction of them to get by. One of the challenges of this is the way phrases are put together. For example, the literal meaning of 'train station' (huǒchē zhàn) is fire vehicle stop and is three separate symbols - one for fire, one for vehicle and one for stop or stationary (my understanding so far is that it is a symbol per syllable in the written language) but as far as I can tell, there are no spaces between words or phrases so, at this stage, it makes it something of a challenge to establish what any sign longer than three or four characters is on about, and which characters and words should be grouped together at any given time.
The written language here, the one that uses the alphabet as we would recognise it, is called Pinyin. If you know this, it can help massively with pronunciation of words. Although obviously, just being able to see the words doesn't always make that much of a difference - I could read the phrase 'Wǒ xǐhuan tī zúqiú' until I'm blue in the face but I still probably won't be able to say it. There are also more words that start with 'z', 'x', and 'qi' than I'm comfortable with, but it's a rough guide if nothing else which at this stage is very welcome.
All that said, in some ways, strangely, Mandarin is quite a simple language. There are no really long words, no tenses or conjugations of verbs to deal with, and context is all, so if you can get your head round the tones then you're set. There are a variety of dialects all over China and in the South East and Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese, which seems to be like advanced level Chinese, to Mandarins' basic. One of the reasons it seems to be considered to be more advanced than Mandarin is that Cantonese has anything up to nine tones at it's most complex - I might have to grow a couple of extra hands before I take a trip down there.
Pura Vida.
Dave
Advertisement
Tot: 0.095s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 9; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0619s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
chris lloyd
non-member comment
language barrier
Well not barrier exactly more like a hurdle and until you're as proficient as Colin Jackson or Sally Gunnell were (maybe still are for all I know), I guess you'll have to keep conducting yourself - not painful is it? But persevere as I am sure their are openings for excellent radion presenters. Just thinking of sense and non sense and laughing! I certainly sounds like it would make my brain ache, plus arms too, if I tried to learn the lingo. I'm having enough problems trying to get back to speaking French which as we all know is just a series of eeehs and aaws shrugged shoulders turning of the hands palms up and turning of the mouth down all at the same time... Dave your choice is easier methinks... adios until the next time oh and PS more piccies please