In March I began to take Chinese classes with actual classmates. I haven't had classmates that I can see with my eyes in forever because so many of my studies have been online. I find the experience enjoyable, if not at times grueling. The process is also very rewarding when you begin to see the results. It was a wonderful experience to read a paragraph to my sister-in-law recently who only had to tell me how to pronounce a couple of characters when I sat down to do my homework at her house recently. She was surprised at how much I am now able to read! I was happy to surprise her. My literacy still doesn't apply well to restaurant menus and groceries, unfortunately.
It is also a milestone to observe that many of my thoughts come to me in Chinese, and I even find myself waking up in the morning speaking Chinese to Rex rather than translating my initial Chinese thoughts into English. It's interesting how versatile the mind can be.
Chinese is a different process than learning, say, French, Spanish or German. Those are languages with a phonetical system of writing. Each word sounds like itself, even though there may be words that sound alike. In those other languages you can see a sign somewhere, sound it out, and ask someone what that word means (or guess at its meaning.) In Chinese you see a character, and until you have been taught its meaning and pronunciation, it will mean literally nothing to you. Chinese has one syllable words which could have a plethora of meanings on their own, and context is necessary for people to understand what you mean.
An example of the reality of this might be something like this following conversation.
Me: What does "present" mean?
Teacher: *blank stare* Which "present"?
Me: I don't know. (I try to pronounce the word again applying all four possible tones, which you might be able to imitate by means of my punctuation) Present? Present! Present?!?! Present...
Teacher: Oh, do you mean the "present" like "gift"? Or "present" like the one that means you're here? Or "present" like the one that means "report"?
Me: Yeah, the one that means a gift!
So you get the idea. One time I said "pig" instead of "Lord" to explain a song I know in Romanian. I had to sing a line of a Chinese song in order to give her the context because I had no recollection of which tone "Lord" is said with.
Teacher: What was that Romanian song about?
Me: It's just saying that God is truly "pig" over everything
Teacher: *blank stare* You mean...
Me: *singing* Lord, I come before you...
Teacher: Oh, you mean Lord! That is in the fourth tone, not the first tone. Otherwise you're talking about a pig.
Chinese is also achievable; it just requires long, patient, persistent hours of effort in order to become literate. Each word has to be learned for itself, and yet the same parts of the characters are frequently recycled. One benefit is that there are words that you can "sound out" because it has a radical that often indicates a general pronunciation. But a character with that same radical might be said "zhong" "dong" or perhaps "chong". But it's helpful for guessing.
Chinese grammar is relatively easy especially compared to the Western languages we're accustomed to learning, but you do have to become familiar with word order and the logic about how to formulate sentences. We would say "I went to the store yesterday" but Chinese would say "I yesterday went to the store." We say an address starting with the house address, and ending with the State. Here they begin with the biggest thing first, for example: country, county, city, district, road, house number, name.
My listening and speaking in Chinese is still more advanced than my reading and writing, but I am happy to say that on both my final exams this year, I got 90 or 92%. I was surprised to get such a high grade in my August final exam because I had missed so much class time that semester due to morning sickness and/or an urgent need for sleep.
No comments:
Post a Comment