I am about a month into my Mandarin class, which I am enjoying much more than I thought I would. Don't get me wrong - it is a very difficult language to learn, even when you're not trying to learn the characters. The sounds the letters make are not sounds easy for an American tongue to create - at least, not this American tongue. Of course, the Austrian and German women who sit next to me in class would say the sounds are not easy for a German-speaking tongue to make either. :)
While I don't think any of the 7 people in my beginner level Chinese 1 class will be proficient by the end of the class in a month, we are having a good time struggling through the pronunciations and rules together. It makes me feel better that everyone else seems to have the same difficulty as I do remembering what the words are and how to say them. I'm very much a visual learner, so it's hard for me to study a language that I can't really read. But, I do think I'm making a little progress.
After only a month, I have given some thoughts to the things that strike me as most unusual so far. Here goes, in no particular order:
* There are 21 vowels and 16 consonants. In English, we have 5 vowels and 21 consonants, so there are a lot more letters to remember how to pronounce.
* For each of the 21 vowels, there are 5 different tones that the vowel can make and each word, depending on the tone, has an entirely different meaning. The first tone is flat, the second tone rises from low to high, the third tone drops and then rises, and the fourth tone falls. I say 5 tones because a vowel can have no tone at all, which is different from the flat (first) tone. Then, throw in rules like the 3rd tone followed by another word turns into a descending tone similar to, but not exactly like, the 4th tone, or that if 2 3rd tones follow one another, the 1st one is turned into a 2nd tone, and it really becomes overwhelming.
* A lot of the time, I have thought that the Chinese people speaking to each other, or to me, for that matter, were angry a lot, because the 4th tone is very abrupt and sounds a bit like yelling. On the other hand, the first tone is high and sounds a bit like singing. I feel self-conscious saying both of these tones, for separate reasons, so it makes it even harder to get the pronunciation right.
* Because the tone on the vowel changes, the tone of the sentence doesn't change if you're asking a question or making an exclamation. You can tell someone is asking a question if they include a question word in the sentence, such as "ma" at the end. Not because their voice goes up at the end of the sentence.
* In Mandarin, unlike horseshoes and hand grenades, close is NOT close enough. If I want to say the number ten, shí , which has the 2nd tone, I might mistakenly say shi with no tone, which translates to the verb "to be," such as "is" or "are." If I say shì, with the 4th tone, it means something altogether different (although I don't know what yet) and the Chinese person I'm speaking to will have no idea what I'm talking about, which is usually what happens. Our Mandarin teacher says that many Chinese people, native-speakers, pronounce things differently or, in her words, incorrectly, so no wonder they can't understand me either.
* After weeks of class, Chris asked me how to say "yes," and I couldn't really answer him. In Mandarin, the way to answer a question is to reply in the affirmative or negative form of the verb. So, the answer to "do you want something?" is not "yes" but "I want" or "I don't want." I've heard a lot of English-speakers here using "méi yǒu" (pronounced may yo) when they want to say "no," but it really means "I don't have." Often, this will suffice, such as "Will you have the chicken feet?" Definitely méi yǒu!
* While I am learning pīnyīn, which is the phonetic system for transcribing the sound of Chinese characters into recognizable alphabet, it is not how the Chinese learn to read their language, so whatever I write in pīnyīn will not be able to be read by the average Chinese taxi driver. If I want to print out the address for where I'd like him to take me, I have to translate to characters and pray that Google translate knows what it's talking about. Fortunately, many businesses, housing complexes, and even individuals have address cards made up with their addresses printed in English and Chinese characters, in addition to a crudely-drawn map, to help taxi drivers get you to the right place. Nearly everyone I know has a business card manager app on their smart phone to keep all of these cards organized, so you can simply pull it up on the phone and show it to the taxi driver.
This is just the first level of Chinese classes and, as I said, I am only a month into this class, but I am finding the language interesting. I don't know that I'll ever be very conversant, but at least, right now, I can give the taxi driver basic directions, such as turn right or left, do a U-turn (you have no idea what a common occurrence this is), go straight, or stop. Of course, when my nephew Peter, his wife Nickle, and their daughter, Kennedy, were here 8 years ago, Kennedy, who had just turned 2 at the time, could say these things to the taxi driver as well. I'm not sure I should be bragging about my language skills as of yet.
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