Chinglish

Let me start by saying I’m no linguistic expert and I don’t feel that I have any facility with languages. In school I always did well and I enjoyed a lot of my classes, but there is something about learning a foreign language which, although fun and interesting, is particularly head ache-inducing. So after three years of working on my Spanish and only getting to a “survival” level of proficiency, I was not exactly looking forward to having to start a whole new language. But here I am in China and it seems just silly not to try.

Learning Chinese is very different than learning any European language. There’s the obvious problem of the alphabet vs. Chinese characters, but let’s not even go there. So far I’ve learned 2 Chinese characters - needless to say we don’t spend any time on that in class. Luckily for me, a long time ago some Western settler in China decided to develop a “translation” of the Chinese words into our alphabet. This became known as “pinyin” and although infinitely easier that learning by characters or just by ear, it still is not purely phonetic. You still have to learn how to pronounce each letter combination of which there are 24 vowels sounds and 23 consonants. Sounds like a lot, but a lot of them sound the same to me.

The next big hurdle are the tones. The tone is the inflection that you give to the vowel and there are four different ones: starting low and lilting up, starting high and going down, going down and them up, or just a flat, even tone. It’s what gives Chinese that kind of sing-song quality. It’s hard to explain in writing, but hopefully you get the idea. So basically for every vowel sound (remember, there are 24 of them!), there are four different tones for a grand total of 96!

So you can have two words that are spelled the same, but because of the tones are pronounced differently and have two totally different meanings. This is tricky and can get you into a lot of trouble. Memorizing what tone to use with each word is hard enough, but I also find it difficult to speak it correctly. After spending time with lots of people from all over the world, I’ve come to realize that Americans speak in kind of a monotone. We are not big on enunciation, use little or no inflection, and as a result, I almost feel embarrassed when I try to make those sounds. Strange to say, but it just feels weird and holds me back from using the language more.

But it’s not all bad news. Aside from the tedium of the pronunciations, Chinese is a very efficient, straight-forward language. Anyone who has ever tried to learn another language should appreciate this one: NO VERB CONJUGATION! I almost jumped up and cheered when I heard that one. The verb is always the same no matter who the subject or even what tense. Love it! Pronouns are always the same, too. None of this I/me, he/him. In fact, they don’t even have a separate “he” and “she”, it’s just the gender neutral pronoun “ta”. So of course there’s none of that feminine/masculine crap I had to learn in French and Spanish. Hooray!

I’ve just started my second session of classes and feeling a little more familiar with the language though I’m really not even up to “survival” level yet. My big problem is I don’t have anyone to practice with. The kids are no help and Russ is still working on counting up to ten. The only other person around is my driver, so I’ve been using my Chinese with him when I feel like it. He’s very good about not laughing at me (not too much anyway). But he’s a real quiet guy and there’s not much to talk about - his English is about as good as my Chinese so we can’t really chat. “Chatting” is a level well past “survival”. But I guess I must be getting better because one day he looked back at me and asked me a question in Chinese. My immediate reaction was “Oh, crap” because speaking Chinese is hard enough, listening and understanding it is still impossible. That shut me up for a while.

Even though I don’t expect to improve much, I do enjoy going to the classes. We very often get side-tracked into cultural discussions in which our teacher fills us in on fascinating tidbits about Chinese life and we can ask questions like “Why is it so hard to get a cold beverage in China?”(they believe cold drinks are bad for digestion) and “What’s up with all the spitting?”

So I’ll keep plugging away and hope we don’t move to Botswana next because this is it for me and languages - I mean it this time….