Mandarin Study

Hilda and I study Mandarin every day from 9-11:30 AM. Our program is offered by the Overseas Education College of Xiamen University. Thus all of our classmates are all students from abroad. There is actually a word for “student studying abroad” in Mandarin – liúxuéshēng. I have learned enough of the pinyin, so that I know how to pronounce that word just by reading it – and let me tell you that it is not pronounced like it looks! So pat myself on the back. I can also tell a little bit about what it might mean, even if I didn’t know the word, because I’ve already learned that xué means to study and xuéshēng means student. So, sometimes, I can even apply logic to it. But by the time I do that, the rest of the class has learned another three words.

Our Classmates

Speaking of the rest of the class, as far as I can tell, they have ALL studied Chinese before. And, even if they hadn’t, most of them arrived with a home court advantage. The Thai students speak Thai, which has six tones, so intonating properly comes relatively easy to them. They seem to have no trouble rattling out full sentences without hesitating over the tones. I just found out that Japanese characters are very similar to Chinese characters! Actually, it’s more complex than that, but the bottom line is that the Japanese students could probably get the gist of a Chinese newspaper article without even knowing Chinese. How could I go through fifty years on this planet and not know that? I haven’t asked the Korean students about their language, but I think Korean shares a good portion of its vocabulary with Chinese. Then there’s Hilda. She knows a good chunk of Mandarin and is fluent with what she knows.

The upshot of all this is that I am constantly in a a fog as to what the teacher is saying. And everybody else seems to understand just fine. Generally, when I find myself in this situation, I just ask a lot of questions, until everything is cleared up. This strategy is not working that well this time round. We have two teachers. One teacher focuses on writing. The first week she explained new vocabulary, pronunciation, writing, and a wee bit of grammar - all in Mandarin! Then, at the end, she would say “Understand?” Well, no, I don’t know any Mandarin and I’m not even sure what page we are supposed to be on. She is so sweet that it’s hard to be critical. Just recently we worked out this kink. She explains everything in English now. Our other teacher focuses on listening and speaking. By the end of a class session with her, I have amassed, on the order of, thirty new vocabulary words. Even a young person, with a young brain primed for language learning, would have trouble integrating that much new material.

Our Teachers

Complain, complain. Despite my near constant fog, I am learning something. And everybody, including my classmates, is exceedingly patient with me. I still think the Chinese need to get their act together and get a phonetic alphabet, but until then, studying the characters is actually rather interesting. Here’s one for you. The Chinese characters for mother are 妈妈. 妈 is actually made up of two parts: 女 means female and 马 means horse. I will leave you to interpret this on your own.