Learning Chinese: Oh Help Me God

A tattoo reading, indeed, "Fuck, everyone!" courtesy of Hanzi Smatter.com and BMEink.


It is often said that Chinese is a difficult language.

This is a vast understatement. Chinese seems to be contrived by some malignant force to screw with Westerner's heads. You go through life happily learning about grammar, past tense, dangling participles and all those other exciting aspects of the English language, and then you begin Chinese and, pysche, none of that applies anymore. You had better get really really good at memorizing all the various and exotic uses of "le", pal. Tones become of infinite importance, turning how you say something into a direct reflection of what you're saying. It's oft-repeated, but in Chinese, you really can accidentally call someone's mother a horse. (How awkward!) Mandarin, the official language of China, gives you four tones to contend with. Cantonese, the dialect common in the south and in Hong Kong, features six or seven. But of course, that's not all. A dizzying array of local dialects spread across the vast landmass of China, and that's not even taking into account the accents that can make two speakers of good ol' Mandarin mutually intelligible. One might feel compelled to give up.

I was stupid and, despite knowing all this, decided I would learn Mandarin.

Mandarin had romantic appeal to me. My mom majored in East Asian studies and speaks it, and since I wanted to go into international journalism, learning to speak a language a good billion people use seemed like an obvious choice. Sure, I knew it was difficult. I also knew that I had a profoundly lousy track record with learning other languages, exemplified by nine years of Spanish giving me the ability to haltingly ask for a beer and the location of the bathroom. I also am completely incapable of properly pronouncing words in English, yet alone in Mandarin - my mangled, horrific pronunciation is the source of much family amusement. If anyone shouldn't have bothered, it would be me.

Yet I was hopeful. Perhaps Mandarin would be different.

It wasn't. Mandarin was just as hard as I'd heard it was and probably more so, hastened by the fact that my college, true to its egg head routes, offers no "leisurely pace" language courses. No, everything was accelerated, which meant daily quizzes, drilling, and endless sheets of characters to memorize every night, regardless of parties, fatigue, or simple profound frustration.

It sucked. It sucked hard. I began to hate the mere sight of those crisp little flash-cards I would make for myself every single night, began to loathe the poorly drawn cartoon characters that narrated my text book. I would stay up late at night and plot Li You the foreign exchange students gory death at the claws of a rampaging panda bear. I came to the deep and startling conclusion that the Chinese ancients were actually, specifically, out to get me, a conviction that only deepened as my test scores got grimmer and grimmer. It seemed like all the work I put into Chinese seemed to retroactively worsen my grade. My smarter friends and classmates experienced momentary frustration but still breezed past the quizzes, picking up characters in five easy minutes. It took me two hours and I would still forget the little twisty thing at the top of the character for "student." Confucius say: Give it up, roundeye!

But I couldn't give it up. I needed a language class to get my Associate's Degree, and I had to see this thing through to the bitter end. Anyway, I was fully aware I was going to be spending the summer in China, and I'd be damned if I couldn't order a beer and find the bathroom in that language too. So I stuck it out, watching grimly as my eyes crossed over on themselves in yet another late night attempt to remember the character for "soy sauce glazed beef." (Who the hell cares?) If I got an F, it would at least have an apologetic panda sticker, for "You sure tried, dipshit!"

And things did get easier. I'd heard from my teacher that Chinese took him a while too. He had to rewire his brain from his English sensibilities and turn it over to those used in Chinese, had to get to a point where he could quickly process characters, associate the shape with the meaning. But after about half a year, something clicked, and characters and words came more easily. Everything stopped seeming so willfully, nastily, perverse.

He was right. Lo and behold, a few weeks into the second semester, something clicked. I could learn characters, even stupid ones, and actually remember them. I could slash and burn my way through oral exercises with a minimum level of competency. I could even speak Li You's parts on our spoken dialouges without choking on my own angry, angry bile. I was never going to be The Interpreter but yeah, I would probably be able to order a beer and find a place to pee in Beijing. Improvement had occurred.

Will being in China proper improve my Mandarin? I imagine it will. A language gains a lot more importance in one's psyche when it involves basic survival (or at least getting fed.) Being able to recognize essential characters will doubtless matter more when it means the difference between the men's and the women's bathrooms, or the difference between the ginger fish and the ginger fish testicles. I will grow as a person, grow as a learner of the world's most ancient, and perhaps most prestigious, language.

Or at least I will learn as many Chinese cuss words as humanly possible.

Examples of the many dangers of poorly used characters found here: Hanzi Smatter


THE Mandarin.