Class 5: Magic 8-Ball Head

My head is turning into a novelty item. A snow globe, or maybe one of those magic 8-balls that you shake to reveal your future.

Mandarin words are floating around there, popping unexpectedly into my consciousness at odd moments. The worst part is, I don’t know what they mean. I can hear exactly what they sound like. But, for whatever reason, the words that pop up are always the ones I don’t really know.

Still, this seems like progress. For the first few weeks it was Spanish words they kept popping into my head. It’s a cerebral thing, my Emma explained, human brains keep all languages other than the mother tongue lumped together in one spot. My guess is that when I started learning Mandarin my brain started looking into that section and bringing back… “hola!” and “qué tal amigo?” That, at least, has stopped. Now I just have this weird 8-ball effect to deal with.

The words usually come one at a time and sit in the back of my mind until I remember what they mean. Sometimes I think it is my subconscious playing tricks on me. All yesterday and today I had “wǒ bù zhidào” hanging around. Finally I asked Wen Wei, and he smirked and said “I don’t know.” Great, I thought, even a native speaker doesn’t know. It turns out that “wǒ bù zhidào” actually means I don’t know.

Funny brain, reeaal funny.

I figure it could all be caused by of one of three things: one, too many words packed in too fast and my brain is overflowing; option two, my brain is quietly filing away the words that I have learned and every time it hits one that it can’t quite place it spits it out into my conscious mind; three, my psyche is in some kind of existential crisis. Learning a langue is strange because it forces you to look at the basic rules that you take for granted in you native tongue – it reminds you of how these linguistic systems actually have rules and aren’t just manifestations of some innate magically functioning ability to communicate with each other. But now I’m getting into a whole other debate.

I think I’ll stick with option two.

~@~

Class 4: Mt. Boogley Eyes

I’m getting a kick out of other people’s reactions when they find out that I'm learning Mandarin. It seems to be some kind of linguistic Mount Everest in our collective view of the world. Eyes get all boogley and they say thinks like “Oh, Mandarin… that must be really HARD” while they gently shake their heads left and right. I think I probably did the same.

I admit, it’s not the easiest thing I’ve ever done. But once you stop expecting it to suddenly start behaving like English with a funny accent learning gets a lot easier. There a some things about Mandarin that are particularly difficult, but then others that are much much easier than English or French.

Unlike Spanish or French there aren’t related words for you to fall back on, but at the same time those can just be confusing (like that Spanish word that sounds a whole lot like embarrassed, but actually means pregnant).

There are strange grammatical elements, like the long list of different counting words (i.e. gè and wèi) that have to be used to introduce specific types of nouns (wèi for example is just for people). But then on the other hand you don’t have to conjugate verbs, not at all. The tense is inferred from the context. Why didn’t we think of that?

One of the main things that people as about is tones. There are four tones in Chinese, similar to the accents used in French. It does seem to take people a while to be able to say and hear the differences between tones. But once you’ve got it things become much easier. Words pairs like there and where, or that and what are the same word, just with a different accent. And to make things easier the third tone is used for questions and the fourth tone for statements. So there is nàr and where is nǎr. Two words for the price of one.

~@~

Meal 2: Grinning Groceries

So I noticed a few weeks ago that the cashiers at my local grocer speak Mandarin, which fits nicely into Plan 2 (outlined earlier). But I’ve been hesitant to try my skills.

The biggest barrier is knowing that I can’t really carry on a conversation. What if I say “Ni Hao” [hello] and suddenly they think I can speak fluent Mandarin and flood me with strange words leaving me confused and looking dumb as a post? It sounds silly (a tall white guy with terrible pronunciation – whose going to mistake him for a native Mandarin speaker?) but those are the kinds of things that run through my mind when an opportunity comes up.

Then came the magic sentence “Wo shuo yidiar hanu” [I speak a little Mandarin]. In practice I rarely use it, but knowing that I can explain my limits and switch back to English if I need to makes it easier to try out the basics like “Shei shei” [thank you], zaijian [bye], and “dze she shenme?” [what’s this?].

It’s not an all or nothing game -- particularly if you also speak English. You can switch back and forth between two languages as you need to and still be understood. It’s the same with English and French in Montreal; there’s a kind of rotating linguistic tennis that people play that is part of the fun of living there. You start in French and finish in English. They start in English, slip into French and then back to English again. Sometimes you’re not sure who is most comfortable in which language.

So that’s pretty much how it went yesterday. At the cash with three red peppers, some bananas and a few other things I decided to go out on a limb and test my 12 word vocabulary: “Ni Hao…”

The other worry that has been holding me back is the opposite of the first: that I will so obviously and brutally butcher whatever I am trying to say that it will be painful for the whoever I am talking to. Again, at this level at least, it’s a silly worry; “Ni Hao” isn’t so hard to say, and besides so what if I get it a bit wrong?

Both worries were quickly shelved by the reaction that I got.

“Oh, [confused smile] You speak Mandarin?”

“Dui, wo shuo yidiar hanu”

“Hen Hao!” [very good!]

It was perfect. I had imagined my way through a bunch of reactions, but I hadn’t expected so many smiles. Maybe I should have though – if you spend a chunk of your time trying to learn someone else’s language and to understand their culture maybe it seems like a compliment if some of them do the same. Once I’ve got the necessary vocabulary, I’ll have to ask.

~@~

Class 3: Number None - The Rain's Command

The Chinese characters appear along side the phonetic Pin-Yin words in our textbook. We don’t deal with them, but something caught my eye while learning to count. The characters for 1 through 10 are simple, almost like Roman numerals. But zero stands out like a tree on the prairies. Beside the simple lines of 1, 2, 3… it looks like some kind of complex bug, or a bush with it’s roots exposed. It is also the only character in the counting system to have a second meaning: the upper half means ‘‘rain’’ and the lower half “command.”

Pictographs are like nested Dutch dolls. There is the surface layer that you see – the everyday meaning that you use – but when you pull it apart there is something else waiting inside to surprise you.

Early Egyptian hieroglyphs are similar. The sign for happiness, for example, is a Cow suckling her calf. Crocodile is the symbol for deceit. The sign contains both a literal meaning, and a story that conveys a way of seeing the world.

Imagine if the symbol for “risk” in your language was a picture of a bridge. Could you look at a bridge without seeing it in that light? It is like digging for the Latin, Germanic, or Arabic roots of Western words, only the roots are not other words, but things here around us.

The word zero comes from the Arabic word “sifr” which means void. The ancient Greeks were using the concept of zero in 130 CE, but it only reached Europe in the 12^th C., traveling by way of China and the Islamic world. From “void” to “rain’s command” is an interesting transition. From total absence to a place for beginning and growth. At least that’s how I’ve deciphered the riddle. What else does the rain command, except that things grow?

It is a bit of a frustration to know that I won’t be learning these characters for a long time. The Pin-Yin makes it easier, but I wonder how many other double meanings and picture stories I am missing out on?

~@~

Meal 1: Face First

I think the problem is my face. And, to a lesser extent, their faces.

The meal was delicious. Steamed rice with battered fish, Chinese brocolli, deep fried tofu and tea. And later a soft, fresh jam bun sprinkled in coconut. But I only used 4 Mandarin words. Damn, that’s not a lot. Here they are: Ni Hao (hello), xie xie (thank you), hao ch (delicious food), fan (rice). I tried for a longer conversation, but my face was against me. Let's take a look.

You are a rushed restaurant employee, a tall white man comes up to your counter and makes some noises – the last thing you expect is that those noises are supposed to be Mandarin. White face = English, at least that’s true more often than not when you are in a mall in Vancouver. So you speak English to the white face. The white face speaks English to you, peppered with a couple of other strange noises that you realize, as you hand it it’s tray, are Mandarin. How odd.

The flipside is that not every Asian person speaks Mandarin. This is obvious in the abstract, but hard to sort out in the concrete. From the outside it is hard to tell who does and who doesn’t. Phrases and signals that might guide a native speaker to use Cantonese or another dialect are lost on me. So, faced with Asian faces in grocery stores, restaurants, and tea shops it’s hard to know if I should launch into my limited store of phrases. It’s not the easiest thing to speak in a foreign language to someone, even less so if you don’t know if they speak the language you are mouthing at them.

So, I have two plans. Plan one: Make a T-Shirt that says

“Hi, I’m Learning Mandarin – Please Help.”

Plan two: Pick two or three places and go back regularly – or at least until it becomes clear that they are tired of listening to my funny requests. I’ll start in reverse order. If plan 2 doesn’t work then we’ll see about the T-Shirt.

~@~

Class 2: Food, not Angst or Sex

Well, that’s the second class done and all I can say is that all language teachers must have been born from the same mother. Learning French, Spanish and now Mandarin I’ve noticed that they all seem to share the same battle plan: steamroll the students with a smile while flooding them with a torrent of words they don't understand. It can’t be easy to look cheerily out into a class of confused faces and to know that you are the reason they look so dumbfounded. But it works and I guess the looks of joy on our faces when we order our first meal in Mandarin will make up for it.

Food. Words for food seem to be the ones that stick most firmly in my mind. I suppose the same thing would be true for words about sex, or existential angst. But, both of those topics always seem to be off limits in beginner language courses. Maybe there is a market for it:

“Oral Adventures in Mandarin – Level 1”
or
“Mandarin Soul Searching for Beginners.”

Until then though, we’ve got food. Hao Ch = “this food is delicious” ; Xiang = “this smells or tastes good” ; Xi Gua = watermelon ; Kende Ji = Kentucky Fried Chicken; Mai Dang Lao = Mc Donald’s.

That seems to be another element of beginner language courses: words for things that come from your culture. Maybe it is an effort to make you feel more comfortable. If they have words for KFC in Mandarin, it can’t really be such a hard language can it? The people can’t be so different. Maybe it’s true. But on the other hand, I’m certainly not learning Mandarin so that I can order a Big Mac. So, here goes – it’s time to test out both my new vocabulary and my new theory about common words indicating a common understanding. I have a date with a noodle shop in Richmond this Saturday. My goal is to eat a whole meal in Mandarin, or at least to order it in Mandarin.

~@~

Class 1: Crazy Noises...

My head feels like a radio tuner randomly scanning an all Chinese bandwidth. Class number one was three hours of making sounds. There were some words thrown in for spice, but me and my seven class mates largely just did our best to wrap our lips around the consonant and vowel sounds that fit together to make up Mandarin. Now they are all whirling around in my head like the white plastic bits in a snow globe.

Part of the challenge is imaginary. The noises the teacher modeled for us are just so different that it’s hard to imagine that they are really the ones that I am supposed to be making. The word for hungry sounds just like someone getting poked in the stomach – “uurgh” – maybe that makes some king of metaphorical sense but it takes a while to trust your ears and believe that that is really what you are expected to say.

I wonder if there are noises that Asian people make when you poke them that sound like English?

The extra-easy version is called Pinyin. It’s a phonetic substitute for Chinese characters and uses the standard roman alphabet. The only problem is that it is a romanized, not anglicized system; so even though the letters look familiar the sounds they are supposed to make are a real surprise. “Q” for example sounds like “tchi”, “C” sounds like “tse” and “Zh” sounds like “gue.” Rumour has it that some of these pronunciations come from the fact that the first developers of Pinyin were Russian.

So, I’m learning Mandarin via a Russian phonetic system presumably put together to facilitate Cold War exchanges between the two Communist Super Powers. It hardly seems like the most direct route – still it sure beats having to start straight off with characters. That would be a completely different world. It already is actually.

I’ve never had this feeling learning a language before. If you are an English speaker, or a French speaker then learning Italian or Spanish, or German is basically just becoming a more complete part of the culture you have been in for your whole life. It’s fine tuning. Learning Mandarin is like building a whole other machine.

A seeing machine.

There’s a huge Chinese population in Vancouver (17%). Suddenly, practicing Mandarin with a friend on the bus, I start to really see them, and they start to see me too. (I got quite a few funny looks)

I think there is something that makes you look for similarity at home, maybe the flip-side of the way you hunt out difference when you are abroad. Well now I’m doing the opposite. My teacher asked me if I was learning because I wanted to travel to China – I’d rather just go to Richmond.

~@~