The last time I learnt a new language was when I was 9, when we started learning German at school. It's the only language I actually remember learning - I learnt the others at too young an age to remember anything but snippets (although I do know - because my mother keeps reminding me - that I made a terrible start at English. Apparently, when she went to collect my school report, my English teacher told her, "so, your son has learning difficulties, right?". My mum was like, "what do you mean?" "He's not learnt anything in a trimester, and all he does is draw power rangers and dinosaurs in his notebook". My mum came back home furious, and asked me what that was all about. I told her that it's okay, because English is not a "real" subject, it's more like art class (which is another sad story - in high school, again while collecting my report, my mum overheard some other parents talking about how demanding our art teacher was, and how their children spent hours doing art homework. When she came home, she asked me how come I wasn't spending hours doing it too. I told her I was just not doing it at all. She told me that this was totally ridiculous, and I should start doing it, and that she would supervise. My grades actually declined, from 17/20 in the first trimester, to 15/20 in the second to 12/20 in the third. I believe the reason was that when I wasn't doing my homework, the teacher didn't have any record of my work, and being unsure who I actually was, she just gave me a 17. Once she started collecting proof my artistic inability, she (justly) lowered my score. The more proof she collected, the lower my score. The fact that when I had to do a collage my dad decided to help by cutting out kite-shaped pieces from an adult magazine probably didn't help), and anyway I know French and I don't need to learn English. That didn't placate her - she forced me to study the language, which turned out well, as it meant I went to England to study and married Jessi. Years later, I met my first English teacher, who was shocked to find out I studied in the UK. Okay, closing this parenthesis - the problem with nested parentheses (as every programmer knows) is that it's sometimes hard to keep track and ensure you've closed all of them - I think I made that mistake in a previous post).
Anyway, as I was saying, I do remember learning German. Learning Chinese doesn't begin to compare in difficulty (and not just because my German teacher was one of the best teachers I've ever had). In fact, I can't remember if I've ever been challenged to this extent. Some of my university courses were tough (I don't ever want to see vector equations and light diffusion physics for graphics ever again), but firstly, even in the toughest courses I took at school or uni I at least had a foundation on which to build (it's not like I moved from simple arithmetic to integrals from one day to the next) and secondly, by the time I started learning difficult concepts in mathematics or computing, I had spent years in an environment that was continuously intellectually challenging, so I was prepared for it. In contrast, I've spent the past 5 years doing a job that, though I loved it, and it was very challenging in some ways, it was hardly rocket science. If a brain is like a muscle, mine is like Schwarzenegger's biceps - world class at its prime, but flabby from misuse now (jk, sadly I don't think my brain ever quite qualified as world class, and to be fair I haven't watched Terminator Genesis (as it is actually spelt) so I don't know, perhaps his biceps are world class again).
So I now find myself trying to learn a language which has no links to Indoeuropean ones (it's hard to overstate the effect of this; it's not just that languages like English, Greek, French and German share many words - more importantly, the sounds are quite similar, which makes learning new words easier, even if they are not similar to any you already know), with a brain that's a bit rusty and unused to being challenged. Which is extremely interesting and rewarding for several reasons:
a) learning the language itself is very fun. Many Chinese words are formed by combining other words. For example, the word for university is the combination of the words "big" and "school"; the word for film is the combination of the words "electric" and "shadow". I think that's pretty cool - at least to me, it sounds pretty rad saying that I will watch "electric shadows".
b) misusing the language is also very fun. Chinese has four tones (plus no tone), and the same word, but with different tone, may mean very different things. With a slight change in tone, "please excuse me" becomes "please kiss me". A friend told me that she accidentally asked a Chinese person how her sex life was, when she meant to ask how hot the food was. (Even more amusingly, the Chinese person responded to the question...) EDIT: apparently, ancient Greek worked in the same way. I knew Ancient Greek had two tones, but their function in pronunciation was never explained to me in school.
c) because of point (a), I think that the more words one learns, the easier it will be to guess the meaning of unknown words. Of course, that's not always the case - the word for hotel is the words for "alcohol" and "room" - I imagine because hotels evolved from inns and bars. But I'm looking forward to the day when I will have a rich enough vocabulary to be able to at least understand the components of new words, and play guessing games (in fact, that could be an amusing road trip game... give a Chinese composite word, and try to guess what it actually means).
d) learning a language like Chinese is very humbling - I feel very vulnerable, and like an idiot, when I talk to my teacher, and I have to pause every 2 seconds to go "ummmm". But it's sort of an interesting experience, being suddenly placed in a position where you really aren't very confident, but you have to persevere anyway. Most of us avoid situations where we feel vulnerable, so being "forced" into one is a novel experience...
e)... and it's very rewarding when you succeed (in very small ways in my case). I felt very proud and empowered the first time I went to a cafe and asked for a menu, and what the price was, and understood it. Or when I got into a taxi and managed to understand that the taxi driver was asking me if I were American (it dulled my enthusiasm though when I proudly said that I was Greek, and he had no idea what that was. I had to compromise for Italian, which he knew). Or (less happily) when we had a cake we hadn't ordered delivered to our place, and managed to identify the intended recipient, and ask them in Chinese were they live, and give them the cake.
A few notes on the language itself, in case anyone is interested in linguistics. The grammar is dead simple, with no tenses or verb subjugation. That said, it's quite rigid - word types have specified places in a sentence (e.g. subject first, then location, then verb, then object), and you cannot move them around. Adjectives don't take verbs - e.g. in English you say "she is beautiful", in Chinese you'd just say "she beautiful". Apparently Chinese is the source of ungrammatical English phrases such as "long time no see". Random note, but fun fact - the Chinese have different words to describe one's place in a family. There is no word for "brother": there is one word for "younger brother" (didi, which I plan to establish as my brother's new nickname) and one for older (gege).
Though everything official is written in Chinese characters, they have the equivalent of Greeklish - i.e. words written in Latin characters. That's what I'm learning at the moment - I figure, first I will learn to speak, then I will learn how to read and write characters. Let's see - hopefully by the time I leave China, I will be able to write the above in Mandarin... (I avoided using complex words on purpose!)
Anyway, as I was saying, I do remember learning German. Learning Chinese doesn't begin to compare in difficulty (and not just because my German teacher was one of the best teachers I've ever had). In fact, I can't remember if I've ever been challenged to this extent. Some of my university courses were tough (I don't ever want to see vector equations and light diffusion physics for graphics ever again), but firstly, even in the toughest courses I took at school or uni I at least had a foundation on which to build (it's not like I moved from simple arithmetic to integrals from one day to the next) and secondly, by the time I started learning difficult concepts in mathematics or computing, I had spent years in an environment that was continuously intellectually challenging, so I was prepared for it. In contrast, I've spent the past 5 years doing a job that, though I loved it, and it was very challenging in some ways, it was hardly rocket science. If a brain is like a muscle, mine is like Schwarzenegger's biceps - world class at its prime, but flabby from misuse now (jk, sadly I don't think my brain ever quite qualified as world class, and to be fair I haven't watched Terminator Genesis (as it is actually spelt) so I don't know, perhaps his biceps are world class again).
So I now find myself trying to learn a language which has no links to Indoeuropean ones (it's hard to overstate the effect of this; it's not just that languages like English, Greek, French and German share many words - more importantly, the sounds are quite similar, which makes learning new words easier, even if they are not similar to any you already know), with a brain that's a bit rusty and unused to being challenged. Which is extremely interesting and rewarding for several reasons:
a) learning the language itself is very fun. Many Chinese words are formed by combining other words. For example, the word for university is the combination of the words "big" and "school"; the word for film is the combination of the words "electric" and "shadow". I think that's pretty cool - at least to me, it sounds pretty rad saying that I will watch "electric shadows".
b) misusing the language is also very fun. Chinese has four tones (plus no tone), and the same word, but with different tone, may mean very different things. With a slight change in tone, "please excuse me" becomes "please kiss me". A friend told me that she accidentally asked a Chinese person how her sex life was, when she meant to ask how hot the food was. (Even more amusingly, the Chinese person responded to the question...) EDIT: apparently, ancient Greek worked in the same way. I knew Ancient Greek had two tones, but their function in pronunciation was never explained to me in school.
c) because of point (a), I think that the more words one learns, the easier it will be to guess the meaning of unknown words. Of course, that's not always the case - the word for hotel is the words for "alcohol" and "room" - I imagine because hotels evolved from inns and bars. But I'm looking forward to the day when I will have a rich enough vocabulary to be able to at least understand the components of new words, and play guessing games (in fact, that could be an amusing road trip game... give a Chinese composite word, and try to guess what it actually means).
d) learning a language like Chinese is very humbling - I feel very vulnerable, and like an idiot, when I talk to my teacher, and I have to pause every 2 seconds to go "ummmm". But it's sort of an interesting experience, being suddenly placed in a position where you really aren't very confident, but you have to persevere anyway. Most of us avoid situations where we feel vulnerable, so being "forced" into one is a novel experience...
e)... and it's very rewarding when you succeed (in very small ways in my case). I felt very proud and empowered the first time I went to a cafe and asked for a menu, and what the price was, and understood it. Or when I got into a taxi and managed to understand that the taxi driver was asking me if I were American (it dulled my enthusiasm though when I proudly said that I was Greek, and he had no idea what that was. I had to compromise for Italian, which he knew). Or (less happily) when we had a cake we hadn't ordered delivered to our place, and managed to identify the intended recipient, and ask them in Chinese were they live, and give them the cake.
A few notes on the language itself, in case anyone is interested in linguistics. The grammar is dead simple, with no tenses or verb subjugation. That said, it's quite rigid - word types have specified places in a sentence (e.g. subject first, then location, then verb, then object), and you cannot move them around. Adjectives don't take verbs - e.g. in English you say "she is beautiful", in Chinese you'd just say "she beautiful". Apparently Chinese is the source of ungrammatical English phrases such as "long time no see". Random note, but fun fact - the Chinese have different words to describe one's place in a family. There is no word for "brother": there is one word for "younger brother" (didi, which I plan to establish as my brother's new nickname) and one for older (gege).
Though everything official is written in Chinese characters, they have the equivalent of Greeklish - i.e. words written in Latin characters. That's what I'm learning at the moment - I figure, first I will learn to speak, then I will learn how to read and write characters. Let's see - hopefully by the time I leave China, I will be able to write the above in Mandarin... (I avoided using complex words on purpose!)
nice
ReplyDeleteIt is a tonal language with thousands of characters and a mysterious writing system. Mandarin is not a phonetic language which means memorising the words and writing can be taxing. It is possible if you can spend 10 hours a day for 2 months to learn Mandarin Chinese. Once you have learned the tones, you can start learning new vocabulary and phrases while learning pinyin Romanization. Reading and writing Chinese characters is the last step. For students there are some ways to learn Mandarin language. They will be able to learn easily.
ReplyDelete