Noodle Words

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Finally. The entry I've been waiting months to write. Since learning to speak Chinese has trumped every single option and defeated every other desire of mine since I stepped off the plane in Shanghai months ago, I could write a book about my experience on the subject.

One thing that I can very proudly say is that when I boldly stated I wanted to learn Chinese, I followed through. It would have been so easy to give up and write it off to a useless quest. But all year, I've have summoned an inner nerd I never knew existed (the likes of which would have landed me straight A's in school) and believe it or not I, Mark Keelin Wilson, can speak Chinese. I guess once I understood the mindset needed to learn Chinese and met enough expat friends who spoke fantastic Chinese (there's no such thing as a half-ass Chinese student - you either working towards fluency or content to never speak a word) that I knew it was possible if I just got after it. Since I had heard that you can sometimes get screwed taking Chinese courses (i.e. you pay up front and your teacher then has no incentive not to give you shit effort), I developed the Mark Wilson Method: move to China, find a bunch of free websites, memorize some characters and find yourself a cute, little girlfriend who doesn't speak any English and pretty soon you'll be speaking Chinese before you know it. You'd be amazed how when you break out a new word in conversation and your audience registers your familiarity with it, how often they will repeat it in all its grammatical uses. To learn a language, you really need to saturate yourself with this all-encompassing environment. I was amazed to realize that upon meeting a group of non-English speaking Italians in Yunnan province, I have completely forgotten how to speak Italian and the only way we could communicate was in Chinese - a testament not only to how all-consuming Chinese was in my brain, but also how quickly your language skills can disappear when taken out of that environment.

I go back and forth at least once a day, debating whether Chinese is the most sophisticated language I've ever imagined or nothing more than glorified caveman-speak. It is a complete study in contrasts: it is both the simplest, most logical and interesting thing I've ever learned as well as the most difficult, illogical, infuriating, hopeless endeavor I've ever been stupid enough to take up. Like nearly every experience a foreigner has in China, I've developed a complete love-hate relationship with the language, sometimes giggling like a school girl when I learn something cool and sometimes having my head hurt so badly that I cannot even remember my name anymore. The great thing about learning Chinese (as opposed to a language like French) is that you never have to worry about making an ass of yourself. Not only do they already think you are infinitely cooler than they are by virtue of your genetically superior skin color, but Chinese people basically assume no foreigner could ever learn their language and will give you a free pass and nothing but praise for trying. All you have to say is ni hao (hello) to anybody and I guarantee the second thing out of their mouth (after a giggling ni hao back to you) is "wow, you can speak Chinese!" Since this kind of positive reinforcement makes it very easy to get over whatever stage fright you can have, it's very easy learn by just walking down the street and practicing with whomever you feel like. Every now and then people want to practice their English with you, but so, so, so few Chinese people can speak English (well, outside of Shanghai at least). I've found random Chinese people fall into 3 categories: they either 1, listen to you, speak clearly and simply and try to help you along, 2, giggle like a school girl at the idea of a foreigner speaking Chinese or 3, don't comprehend why a foreigner would ever attempt to use their native tongue and just dismiss you as weird. That's why you can determine within the first 5 comments of a conversation whether or not this is someone you will ever be able to converse with. Some people you can understand and some you never will.

I started out with a just a couple websites to learn vocab and then got an incredibly cheap tutor, who could practically speak better English than I could and basically just chat, stopping every few words to ask "oh ya, how do you say __?" Pretty soon, I had enough words down to make some sentences and since Chinese grammar is pretty straight forward (at first), it was pretty easy to get myself off the ground. From then on it was just a matter of practicing and listening and not giving up. As Mao ZeDong once said: hao hao xue xi, tian tian xiang shang 好好学习,天天向上" - if you keep studying, you'll keep getting better (literally 'good good study, day day up').

Originally thought I would just study the spoken language until you realize just how many words you will learn pronounced shi or zhi or qi or zheng that if you don't study characters as well, you'll be completely lost once your vocabulary hits 100 words. And it's when you start to understand how characters are the building blocks of the language that your language ability takes off. The biggest misconceptions are that Chinese characters are 1) just pictures (that would be hieroglyphics) and 2) completely random. While it's true that some characters are picture based, the vast majority of characters are made up of a combination of sound and meaning radicals that can be quite simple to piece together once you get to learn the building blocks. Characters can be pictures, sound-meaning, meaning or sound-loan. It's easy to see why the pictorial character 山 means 'mountain' but it takes a different way of thinking to understand why 安 (peace) = 宀 (roof) + 女(woman): in other words, having 1 woman under your roof is peaceful. Also, certain characters can be linked to a sound and then have a meaning radical attached to give the meaning. 青 (qing - meaning green/natural) gives the sound in plenty of characters like 请，清，情 - adding the 'speech', 'water' and 'heart' radicals to the left side, give meanings of 'please', 'clear' and 'emotion', all pronounced qing. Once you train your brain to look at the language in this context, you realize it is not just silverware clanking together, but a puzzle with all the pieces waiting to be put together.

The same logic applies when taking individual characters (字 - zi) and turning them into words (词 - ci). I spent my first 3 months learning 10 characters a day - just ripping flashcards and memorizing radicals and stroke orders 'til I knew each one I studied like the back of my hand. But then I hit the point where I could start to recognize nearly every character in a sentence and realize I still didn't have the foggiest idea what they meant in combination. In Chinese, every syllable is a character and every character has a meaning. And just like how characters combine meanings of radicals, words combine meanings of characters. And the combination patterns are all tied to the context of the sentence to determine how it is used, which can be maddening to a beginner. Interesting character combinations examples include 中国: zhong guo (meaning 'China' - literally 'Middle Country'), 小吃: xiao chi (meaning 'snack' - literally 'small eat') and my personal favorite 避孕套: bi yun tao (meaning 'condom' - literally 'prevent pregnancy tube’). Some character combinations are refreshingly logical, others are downright hysterical and some infuriatingly make no sense - e.g. the word 'very' is literally translated as 'not at all often.'

But Chinese isn't all fun puzzle games and logical simplicity. Its lack of articles and prepositions and its simple subject-verb-object grammar belies a sometimes maddening syntax that can turn your beautifully constructed sentence into something you're more likely to hear from a Neanderthal after he's clubbed his woman and dragged her back to his cave. Sentences can be translated into monstrosities like "I very enjoy happy go north capital play" simply meaning 'I really like visiting Beijing.' Also, no verb tenses or conjugations! A beginner thinks 'how awesome is that?!?' until the first time you try to indicate the past tense. Add to this the fact that each noun needs a 'measure word' (equivalent to saying 'a pair of pants' for every noun). Chinese sentences are heavily contextualized and follow specific patterns to allow people to navigate through so many similar sounding words. So to speak Chinese well, you really need to say to hell with your conventional western ways of speaking and embrace thinking like a Chinese person, which is why often the foreigners you meet who can speak great Chinese also begin to act like little Chinese peasants themselves - you have to renounce your inner laowai to truly grasp the language. This also helps explain why Chinese people have such a difficult time learning English and other western languages. Any foreigner traveling in China will undoubtedly come across signs with hilarious 'Chinglish' translations that make absolutely no sense. If China is really using the Olympics as a way to prove to the world what an booming, international player their wonderful communist utopia has become, they had better do something about these Chinglish signs scattered everywhere across Beijing or get prepared for a hoard of snickering foreigners. I'm finding everyday I'm losing some English eloquence (like I ever had any) after months of transforming my speech to fit Chinese's simple patterns.

And this is all before we get into the Chinese's black hole from which no foreigner comes out unscathed. That pesky little issue of a thing called tones. Asian tonal languages are so different from what westerners are used to that, when you consider a slight mispronunciation can transform your entire meaning, making yourself understood can sometimes be downright impossible. It's not that a mispronounced tone leaves the listener with no idea what you're saying, it’s that your sentence actually had far too many legitimate meanings to possibly decipher which one you actually said. But tones get easier when you begin to see that it is the equivalent of ‘putting the em-PHAS-is on the right sy-LLA-ble’. Luckily, Mandarin has only 4 tones, unlike the Cantonese dialect which has 9 and is completely unintelligible to other Chinese people. Even my friend here in Chengdu, Dave Goodman, who speaks fantastic Chinese, will openly admit that his tones suck - a fact that his friends have gigglingly confirmed to me. I have actually been told that my tones are not horrible - a huge compliment. I guess this just all comes from having never learned out of a book and having every ounce of my learning coming straight from the horse's mouth. To speak well you need to imitate your teachers, regardless of how silly they may sound at first.

What this all means is that when you combine all these aspects, Chinese may be incredibly easy to get the gist. I am proof that you can go from zero to conversational in a matter of months, but it is incredibly difficult to go from decent to good and positively herculean to go from good to fluent. Chinese people will often ask if you've ever heard of a big, Canadian douche bag named Da Shan 大山 (what asshole names himself 'Big Mountain' anyway) who miraculously learned to speak Chinese ridiculously well and parlayed it into a career in Chinese showbiz as a 'holy shit, that foreigner can speak Chinese!' celebrity. At this point he's not the only fluent foreigner, but his mere existence is proof enough of how difficult it is to master this language.

And just when you're ready to take on the challenge and say "damn it, I'm gonna learn Chinese!" there's that tinsy, little problem that nobody actually speaks real Mandarin (it just keeps getting crazier, I know). Mandarin is the standard language that is really only spoken in Beijing and the northeast. Once you get anywhere outside Beijing, it's all regional dialect. Some dialects are easier than others (Sichuan dialect sounds like Wisconsin, Shanghai dialect is a clusterfuck spoken by countryside peasants and Cantonese is practically a different language). But since Mandarin is so heavily reliant on tones, it means that perfect Mandarin speaking Beijingers are befuddled by the butchering of these regional dialects. Beijing is also packed with foreign students, since it is by far the best place to learn Chinese. You can always tell the ones who have studied in Beijing from their accents and confusion when everyone around them in a new province doesn't speak perfect Mandarin.

But at least these dialects all claim to share the same writing system. Technically, every 'Chinese' speaking person uses the same characters. But wait, that's not true either now is? That would just be too simple for this damn language! When the communists came to power in 1949, they set about to revise the language in order to promote countryside literacy (see, they're not all bad). A romanized pinyin 拼音was standardized and the characters were simplified. That means in Hong Kong and Taiwan, they actually use more complex and traditional characters than anything you find on the mainland. About 100 years ago, there was once even an initiative to do away with the entire character system in place of pinyin, in an effort to modernize an inefficient institution that was holding China back. Apparently a Beijing University professor wrote a very poignant letter, written using characters telling a silly, nonsensical story about a poet, Gentleman Shi, who lived in a stone house and became addicted to eating lions. On the other side of the paper, in accordance with the government’s urge to use pinyin, he wrote the exact same story, which turned out to simply consist of one word repeated over and over again: shi shi shi shi…. In pinyin the meaning was unintelligible, and the overall message was clear: this is the beauty that would be destroyed in doing away with their writing.

The fact that I now speak Chinese and can even read and write to a certain degree is a source of unbelievable pride and a sign that I did not waste my year in China. I can think back to fumbling through my first tutor sessions trying to force out simple sentences and mere months later I have forged lasting friendships and passionate relationships all using a tongue that was incomprehensible a year ago. Chinese, simply put, is an incredibly fun language to learn and speak - a fact that is obvious from the passion released the minute a foreigner in China opens his/her mouth. With my first time really studying in years, I have never in my life felt more inspired or intellectually stimulated than studying Chinese - the source I attribute to my rapid improvement. I still make all kinds of grammatical mistakes that would drive a Chinese 101 professor crazy, but I can get past it knowing I can quote Confucius and Mao, discuss Cultural Revolution politics and modern economic advances and call out bullshit or joke with the laobaixing 老百姓 (common people) with no sweat.

Above all, what I've come to appreciate two main ideas: first is the unfathomable depth each of us has in our native language and attempting to learn this from scratch at the ripe old age of 26 is just unimaginable. Note, I just made a perfectly correct and poignant use of the word 'unfathomable' and I'm guessing that while 99% of you glossed over it without a second thought, there's not too many foreigners that wouldn't have a passing difficulty either understanding or using it correctly. Can you imagine how long and difficult it must be for foreigners to come to America and not only understand a Shakespearean sonnet but also know what it means to "get crunk?" And then, once they understand these meanings, know how to use and reference them appropriately, with correct accents in intonations?? It's unfathomable how well we comprehend our native tongue. When you take on the endeavor of learning another language, you have to understand that you in all likelihood can never be considered a native speaker. Learning Chinese is a lifelong pursuit that I hope does not end for me this summer.

Secondly, language is not about words. Using language is nothing more than a means of transferring information and culture from one person to another, of which language is merely a reflection. Americans greeting each other may ask 'how are you?' because we believe our day to day human emotions are important reflection of our lives. It seems strange that Chinese people often greet each other asking 'have you eaten yet?' until you understand the frequent, sad familiarity with famine in Chinese history. Seemingly every single family relationship has a distinct word in Chinese, giving a clear explanation of where they stand in the family's hierarchy. Would this be the case in a China where Confucianism had never taken hold? I used to laugh off people referring to their cousins as 'little/older brother/sister' as mere mistakes until I understood what a fundamental change the 1-Child Policy has had on a society that has fed off a 'procreate or perish' motto for 5,000 years. These families are being raised with names and relationships for people that do not exist. I often spoke in a manner that would sound ridiculous in English and therefore, the times I made my cultural mistakes (which were plentiful), it was often because I held on to an American way of exchanging culture. Saying 'I want to learn to speak Chinese' really means 'I want to learn to speak the way Chinese people speak,' which is probably why you rarely hear 'Chinese' referred to as hanyu 汉语, (literally 'Han language'), instead hearing mostly zhongwen 中文 or zhongguohua 中国话 (literally 'Chinese culture’ and 'China speech'). To understand China’s place in the world, is to understand its people and culture and the language is a fundamental necessity to achieving those ends. Plus, it makes it so much easier to hit on cute Chinese girls…

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Comments

[lars]

yo
Yeah! I lived in Shanghai 3 years, and while I certainly didn't learn as fast as you, I can relate to this whole article. Can also recognize those bar pics. Oh, and I f**kin hate Da Shan! What a tool.

[balzarfriesen]

So why can't you speak English, man?

[Terminology Pedant]

Chasing the Dragon
By the way, "Chasing the Dragon" actually means to smoke opium/heroin. You use it to describe travelling around Asia!! (Also enough with the Paris of the East and Whore of the orient overused and basically out of date buzz phrases. It might have have been true in the 1900's when the term was invented but I don't think it's relevant today).