My teacher is wonderful, a young 20-something who is from northeast China and I have one-on-one classes with her every day for two hours and then she gives me homework each night. The intensity makes my brain hurt. Each sentence I think about saying I think in English, then ask myself what's the Chinese word and then have to figure out the sentence structure. It takes me a good minute to say, "I like to eat noodles."
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| A view from my Chinese textbook. |
The other night, I dreamt in Chinglish -- I'm not sure if that means my brain is learning the language or just getting confused. I was dreaming about some meal and I found myself saying things in my dream like, "The soup hen chi and the pi jiu fai chen he," (meaning the soup is tasty and the beer is very good). It was the weirdest experience ever. Scott, who has been taking Mandarin for three months now, said he had a similar Chinglish dream experience when he started classes, too.
I find my English is suffering a bit; the other night I was talking with Scott and found myself using a grammatically incorrect sentence. Part of that's because of how Chinese is spoken; often it's a weird construction like subject + verb + question. So we'd say, "Where do you want to eat?" and they say "You want to eat where?" Time is always put at the front of the sentence, so even saying "How are you today?" turns into "Today you are how?" Anyway, it's somewhat confusing and makes me realize how incredible little kids are at picking up languages. There are two year olds here who have better Mandarin than me and can also say hello and ask how I am in English.
The hardest part is the tones. There are four tones in Mandarin and a word must be said with the right inflection or it can have a completely different meaning. The word for buy, for example is mai, said in the third tone of a down and up (măi); the word for sell is exactly the same -- maì -- but said in a fourth tone of short and down. And there are worse ones to mess up; bĭ is the word for pen, but bī is a very derogatory word for a certain female body part.
Already I've said certain words in the wrong tones, and the waitress or cab driver looks at me like I'm nuts. Luckily, I've learned to say I'm sorry and excuse me, which goes a long way. The Chinese seem to understand how hard their language is and even trying to speak it goes a long way in goodwill with them.
I'm also learning to characters, which I find fascinating. It's an exact science and if you draw one stroke before a different one -- even if you have the same outcome -- it's frowned upon. Horizontal strokes, for example, always are written before vertical and left before right. So if I'm drawing a box the top line is what I would normally first draw. In Chinese, the left side is one stroke, then the top line and right side is the second stroke and the final stroke is the bottom line, drawn left to right.
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| Character practice. |
Han zi (pinyin for characters) really is an art form and practicing each character, stroke by stroke, reminded me of learning cursive (you can read about the dying practice from my friend Claire). Like our cursive endangerment, the Chinese are feeling han zi is being eroded by pinyin (Roman alphabet for Chinese words) and computers. There was a great WSJ story about a TV show here in which students compete to write the Chinese characters correctly, similar to our versions of spelling bees. I wonder if a U.S. version of a cursive show could be a hit in the states.
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