Chinese / Zhōngwén / 中文

---

I took a six-week class (if you're looking for Mandarin, ask for Jonathan; he's superb) and met twice a week with an excellent tutor over the summer, learning about 125 words (for maybe 25 of which I knew the character) which I could say very, very slowly and could understand if said to me even slower than that. Much to my chagrin, I've not yet been able to set aside regular study time, but simply living here, learning some of the survival and high-frequency stuff, and really being very interested in the language, has upped my totals to about 175 words and 75 characters, and my comprehension (of those 175ish words) and pronunciation quite a bit.

As with Spanish, I've tried to be diligent about pronunciation and I pretty much know the tones and pīnyīn on a theoretical level, though my mouth is still prone to go rogue. But the same two seemingly irreconcilable things have been happening to me ever since I've arrived. One is that I'll say something in Chinese and people will compliment how good (how "standard") it sounds, and often it's clear that they're not just being polite but really mean it. But the other is that I'll say something and get looked at like I'm speaking Greek as I repeat it, and eventually someone else will figure out what I mean, and say it EXACTLY the same way I said it (at least to my ears), and only then will the person I was talking to understand, exclaiming, "Ohhh!"

Being in a place where I speak almost none of the language is much less mentally strenuous than, for example, my first few weeks in Argentina were. At first, this seemed counterintuitive (at least to me), but it actually makes sense. Once you study a language for even a year or two, you're beyond the point at which you'll ever allow yourself to speak in caveman-talk ("Me food") even if by doing so you'd be understood. But that means thinking about a lot more things: word order, grammatical rules, picking the most appropriate word among the synonyms you know, etc., and therefore speaking more slowly and sometimes getting stuck. It's exhausting to do 24 hours a day. But with Chinese, caveman-talk is usually the best I can hope for! If it's anything beyond the little I know, I just put together any combination of words and gestures that could possibly lead the person in the right direction. Lower standards mean less effort, which means it's less tiring. And of course, the point at which I simply give up trying with a Chinese speaker is so much earlier than I'd ever give up with a Spanish speaker.

---