An ego-killer

I felt that this post has probably been a long time coming, but as I have just finished up writing yet another set of flash cards, it is now appropriate. As most of you who know me at least a little bit, a small ego is not something I have had for quite a long time. My quasi-rock star status as one of about 12 or 13 foreigners on a campus of 15,000+ hasn't done much to keep it in check. But, don't worry, an old, non-assuming foe is taking my ego to the cleaners. That foe is known as Chinese. Or, more academically correct, the Chinese language family. I see and hear it constantly, even in my classes, despite my strict English only rule (as a college level oral language class, I think it's quite a reasonable rule). So, with the helpful introduction in the CIEE orientation classes, I have made a reasonable (well maybe not quite) effort at learning Chinese.

Learning Chinese isn't really all that necessary here. It's not that too many store owners or sales clerks can speak English, because they can't (or are too shy to admit they can) it's more due to the fact that I live on a campus with roughly 15,000 willing translators. I am not saying that every student is enthusiastic about learning English, although many are, but most have at least some enthusiasm towards hanging out or spending time with a foreigner. Add this to the incredible generosity and hospitality of most Chinese people, and I really don't need to learn much Chinese. On the other hand, being here is a great opportunity to learn the most spoken language on Earth and I do have a small desire to have some independence; thus I have tried to learn some Chinese.

As alluded to earlier, Chinese is not actually a language, but rather a family of languages or dialects, the terminology isn't agreed upon as it is socially and politically charged (for more info see Wikipedia). I am learning Mandarin, or putonghua, which is the official dialect used in all schools and government proceedings, as well as being the most widespread dialect. It only came to generalized use during the last century, and currently not much more than half of Chinese people know it. Ideally, it should be the common language used in all business, travel, and other general interactions. Ideally. Instead, travel between various provinces has exposed me to vastly different pronunciations of even the most basic words. Well, even as the common, simplified, standard language, Mandarin still clocks in as one of the three or four most difficult languages in the world for an English speaker to learn. According to the US government's foreign service departments, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin make up the selective group of super, duper, crazy hard to learn languages (they used slightly more academic terms). I have to give a shout out to my grade school buddy Sean Noonan, who, already speaking Mandarin, is tackling Arabic. Needless to say, the journey has been slow and painful (I don't even want to imagine the words my tutors would use).

For all of last semester, I decided that I didn't want to learn the characters, but just how to say them, as well as the pinyin, which is the written approximation of a character's pronunciation with the Latin alphabet. Luckily, all college students know the pinyin, as it is how they now teach children Chinese, as well as the most efficient way to type and text Chinese characters. This was my first mistake. I thought that as long as I could order my food at the restaurant and have a conversation with someone, I would be fine. Well, in order to order food, you generally need to be able to read the menu. Even without trying to memorize the characters, which can get pretty complex (题, title, one of the 100 most common characters), it's not an easy language to master. This is because in Chinese, intonation is used for meaning, not for emphasis. Thus, a single vowel sound (within what appears to me to be the same word) changes the meaning. There are four tones in Chines, plus a neutral tone, so any single vowel can change the meaning of a word into five different meanings. Additionally, because the meaning is derived in the character, there are countless (and I mean countless) homonyms in Chinese. The sound equivalent to 'shi' in Latin characters has 28 different meanings in my pocket dictionary. Using the tones to whittle it down, 'shi' in the fourth tone has 11 different meanings. That is, if you can differentiate the tones. It's an uphill battle. My approach has been 'tone-less' Chinese, as recommended to me by Clark, one of the teachers here last semester. It's been working out pretty well for me. Instead of wasting time trying to say tones I can't even say, I have just accepted defeat and moved on.

At the beginning of this semester, I had finally shaken my head enough times to convince myself that learning the characters was beneficial. And it has been. Initially, they just look like a bunch of lines randomly thrown into a square. After some studying, though, there is a system to the characters, due to the simplification process that the current Chinese government has implemented. Because I have no real attachment to the ancient culture, the simplification has been wonderful for me, as it has standardized many elements, so that the meaning or theme of a character can be guessed based on its parts. Mainly though, learning more characters has allowed me to recognize them more as I am about, repeat it to myself, and constantly learn. There are lots of characters to learn, but I am trying to learn a few each day, or whenever I make myself do it.

All in all, I can say that if it weren't for a lot of helpfulness, patience, and general kindness on the part of my Chinese friends, I would be where I started. But luckily, many friends have been all of the three, so I am making small, small, baby steps. It's a big hill to climb, but I'm not at the bottom, so I am going to keep climbing.
(picture: www.symbols.net)