My life in China, Part 25- Learning Chinese

Do I speak Chinese? Well, yes, some, but it’s complicated. I’ve been an attentive student for fifteen years, but I am not fluent (as hard as I’ve tried). Well, that is not exactly true. When it comes to cursing, I am as eloquent as a Chinese sailor. But in any real use, I suffer. I have a fairly extensive vocabulary, and I can understand a conversation reasonably well. I can even read and write a bit. Still, I can’t for the life of me hold a real conversation. I’m basically at the level of a 3-year-old in that regard. Namely, it’s my pronunciation. It’s rather atrocious. I also suffer from recall blocks. Several years ago, I certified as a level-two speaker, or “limited working proficiency” on the ILR (Interagency Language Roundtable) scale as a requirement for my master’s degree. I’m relatively proud of that, but that was also several years ago, and without constant study, I doubt I could pass that level now.

Ninety percent of failure comes from excuses, and I have a lot of them. You see, I am terrible at learning languages. I envy those that can pick up a lexicon in just a few months, and I’ve known quite a few who learned Chinese remarkably well. But, for me, learning foreign languages just isn’t my cup of tea. I discovered this early on.

In high school, I took three years of Spanish, and it consistently kept me off the honor roll with a 79, my only C, time and time again. I am terrible at math too, but at least I could pull a strong B in Algebra. As hard as I studied, I couldn’t get that one measly point, and it was incredibly frustrating, a source of shame, and frankly, a waste of time. Most of my peers who had made it through the 3rd year of Spanish went on for the fourth year, but not me. I had enough, and in my senior year, I refused to continue, switching it out for honors English. It was a good thing too. I received the best grades of my whole high school career, and it bumped up my GPA considerably. I distinctly remember being so relieved that I wouldn’t have to study Spanish again. That was until I found out that I had to take another full year in college as a requirement for my psychology degree. Ugh. As you’re probably thinking right now, I’ve developed a bit of a phobia of languages.

It is not that I haven’t tried. Unsurprisingly, I made some of my best progress immediately after landing in China. It was a matter of survival for a while, and being a foreign teacher, Hebei University provided free Chinese lessons. I immediately signed up and attended all the classes, and did all the homework. I’m probably stating the obvious here, but Chinese is a hard language to learn for westerners, and this study took all of my free time. For my first month or so, it was easy enough. Then, I started working. I suddenly found that I was spending half my time preparing for and teaching my classes and the other half studying Chinese (actually, it was probably a one-to-three ratio). I remember working late into the night writing characters repeatedly, trying to get them just right. I created flashcards, learned from the text, listened and practiced the audio, etc. People would stop by my room and be like, “Hey Scott, we’re going to explore a new market, want to come?” and I would have to say, “no, I need to study for a quiz I have tomorrow.” I hated that, and it began to feel like I was missing out. I was young and in a new and exciting land. I wanted to get out into the city and have adventures. Then I got a computer and discovered pirated DVDs. Thus, I began to study less and less until I eventually stopped. At the time, I justified this by thinking it was better to learn from life and not the classroom (big mistake).

Right around this point, I also met my wife, and she became a bit of a crutch for me. We were almost always together, and it was far easier to let her communicate for us both. In hindsight, I wasted many chances to immerse myself in the language, and yes, I regret it, but I don’t regret using that time to experience other aspects of the country.

Experts suggest that Chinese takes about 2,200 class hours to reach relative fluency. If you spent 5 hours a day, every day, it theoretically would take you 440 days. But give me a break. Who has that drive? For most, it takes about four years of dedicated study. Even then, we’re talking like a four-year college degree majoring in Chinese kind of focus, not an hour here and there like most of us can dedicate to such things.

Why does learning the Chinese language require so much study? It mostly comes down to two things—first, the tones. Mandarin has four of them (five if you count the neutral tone) that change the meaning of a word utterance (and correspond to different characters). There is a leveled pitch (1), a rising pitch (2), a falling and rising pitch (3), and a falling pitch (4). Take, for example, the utterance ma (the classic example). The official romanization of the Chinese language, called Pinyin, represents these four tones as such: mā (mother), má (hemp), mǎ (horse), and mà (scold). But as you see, depending on the pitch, the same utterance can have four (and frequently more) meanings. Thus, pronunciation is critical—much more than learning a western language. A non-native speaker of English can completely butcher the pronunciation of a word, but a native speaker can typically still understand. In Chinese, if you are not entirely accurate, you will get the dreaded frown of confusion. If you’ve studied Chinese, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Second, learning to speak is one thing, but reading and writing is a whole other complexity level and makes mastery of the language difficult. Written Chinese is a pictographic language comprised of what we call characters. It has no alphabet or compact syllabary (a fancy word for a language that uses syllables). Literacy, therefore, requires memorizing a vast number of characters that may have a visual representation of meaning (not always) but no direct intuitive connection to pronunciation. This leads to some fascinating things. For one, many Chinese have a seemingly superhuman ability to memorize (at least in my experience). Another is that everyone in China can read Chinese characters, but there are seven distinct dialects with hundreds of local varieties. We call them dialects, but, verbally, they are entirely different languages, and thus, one dialect speaker generally can’t understand another even though they both read and write the same language.

Most begin their Chinese language study by learning Pinyin to understand the pronunciation basics of Mandarin (this is a western invention to romanize the pronunciation). They then build a vocabulary and learn the grammar. After a few months of gaining these basics, you start learning how to read and write characters, and everything slows to a crawl. If you begin a Chinese course, you’ll find that everyone loves it and moves along just fine until you get to characters, and then class attendance will drop to a dedicated few.

Learning Chinese is, of course, more complicated than that, but for the sake of space and time, this should suffice in demonstrating that it is one of the hardest languages to master. I purposely don’t say learn here because the grammar, although different than English, is relatively easy and, in many cases, quite practical. Chinese has few exceptions to the rule, something that plagues the English language. Vocabulary is also relatively straightforward, as there only so many verbalizations (it is the tones that are difficult), and you can gain much from context clues. For example, I might not have a perfect ear to differentiate between the different tones of ma in conversation. Still, I generally can tell if someone is talking about their mother, hemp, a horse, or scolding.

It’s funny (not really, more like embarrassing) that most of my Chinese study was in the states. My master’s degree program required a level 2 proficiency in a 2nd language, as I mentioned above. I could have used Spanish, and it probably would have saved me time and energy. I had taken years of the language and, with a little study, I could have brought it up to speed relatively quickly. But, I tend to choose challenging routes in life and felt that it was more important for me to continue learning Chinese. I had a good foundation from living there and prior study, but I was nowhere near level two. I needed something intense.

Luckily, I work at one of the world’s best universities and happen to have educational benefits that would cover tuition. So I signed up for a Chinese language course at MIT and took two semesters of drinking from the firehouse (MIT’s unofficial motto). It was indeed intense, but it got me to the level-two I needed. A few years later, I took Chinese courses at night in Boston’s Chinatown for about two years until I got my current position at MIT and no longer had the energy or time. I then utilized the apps Duolingo and HelloChinese on my phone every day on the subway as I went to and from work. I am also married to a native Chinese speaker with in-laws and other family members who do not speak English, so I regularly contact the language.

So, you’re probably asking yourself, “then what’s the problem, Scott?”

For me, it’s threefold. One, as I mentioned above, I have developed a fear of languages. I don’t have a good track record of learning them, and that history creates a lot of anxiety for me. I’ve found in life that I don’t learn unless I like what I am learning, and these negative feelings make it hard for me to “like” to learn Chinese (or any language). Learning because I want to, should, or even have to has never been a strong motivator. I need to like it, and I need immediate positive reinforcement that I am learning it, which doesn’t often happen with Chinese. Why is that important? That brings me to two- I don’t have the best short-term memory. My long-term memory is like a vault. Once in, it’s there forever, and I annoy my wife with my info dumps of endless facts, but it’s hard to get things into this vault when you keep forgetting the combination. The third reason is that I’m shy by nature and probably suffer from a bit of social anxiety. For language, you need to use it and use it often for it to stick. This point is even more crucial when you have poor short-term memory like yours truly. Thus, I’ve struggled.

The best language learners are fearless, like my wife. Many people don’t even realize she is a non-native speaker. She doesn’t care when she makes errors and certainly doesn’t take people’s opinions of her to heart. Culturally, criticism is a part of her life, so that doesn’t stop her either. She is part of that group that can walk right up to perfect strangers and practice. She has mastered a second language and thrives with it, earning multiple degrees and having a successful career.

I know this fearless use is the key to language learning, yet I can’t do it. When my in-laws ask me a question, I clam up, and my mind goes blank. I almost always understand what they ask me, but I can never find the words to respond (until after the exchange is over). These experiences bring me anxiety and shame, which only increases the likelihood of it happening again. I know that to solve this problem would be to use it and strengthen those connections, but every time I find myself in the situation, the same thing happens. I call it the loop of despair. I guess it’s the fight or flight response in a strange sort of way. Some are confronted with the anxiety of language learning and fight it. They keep fighting until they win. For others, like me, when faced with this anxiety, they choose to flee.

Huh, that is an intriguing way of thinking about it. I might be able to use that way of thinking to help me in the future, anyway…

You may be asking, what about your wife? Yes, it’s true. I have access to a native Chinese speaker 24 hours a day. She even has experience teaching Chinese, but as many intercultural couples know, this is easier said than done. Learning a language takes lots of practice, thorough correcting, and plenty of negative feedback. That’s hard coming from your wife, and it’s difficult not to let emotions muck everything up. My wife’s an excellent teacher because she’s strict. For a stranger, that’s great. But for a couple, it gets confusing. Is it the teacher correcting me, getting frustrated with me, maybe even scolding me for errors, or is it my wife? See? Complicated. Trust me, we tried. We’ve even gone long periods where we only spoke Chinese, but man does that get frustrating quickly when you need to have meaningful conversations.

We still use Chinese. A lot, come to think of it. You find that some things are just easier to say in another language, or there is a concept with no easy translation. I also sometimes dream in Chinese, where I can speak it fluently. I even remember what I was saying, which seems to tell me that all those years of study were not a complete waste. It’s all in this strange brain someplace- it has to be, right? I hope that one day a door will open, and it will all just pour out. Who knows. Stranger things have happened. Anyway, it’s been a challenge and will likely remain a challenge for the rest of my life. But I keep trying, and that’s what’s important, right?

If you’ve had challenges learning a language or maybe some tips (it doesn’t have to be Chinese), I’d love to hear them. Feel free to comment below!

Cheers!