Magus – the short answer to your question about my year-long experiment on trying to learn Chinese informally (i.e. without signing up for college classes) is that the Fun Factor has been high, but my rate of progress leaves room for improvement. On the other hand, if I look back to learning English as my mother tongue, it took me about a decade to become reasonably fluent – and that was with the twin advantages of a child’s more plastic brain and 24/7 immersion in the language.
I will try not to bore you with the long answer – but here goes. China being China, language learning is quite well organized. China has a program called HSK which grades foreign learners into 9 levels, from raw beginner to near fluent. People can make arrangements at Chinese Consulates and take a test to get a certificate.
My goal is HSK-3, which corresponds to a vocabulary of about 2,000 aural & written words. At that level, one should be able to read a newspaper, tell a taxi-driver where one wants to go, and understand his response. After about a year of modest efforts, I am at level HSK-1 (about 500 words) – but so far only in pinyin (Chinese characters transliterated into the Latin alphabet). I have only recently started to transition into reading Chinese characters.
As children we learn to listen & talk before we learn to read & write. Apparently, our human ancestors underwent anatomical changes about 150,000 years ago (seven & a half thousand generations ago!) which made complex speech possible. But they only started to write things down about 5,000 years ago.
Long before the modern educational argument about whether to teach children to read via phonics or via “whole word”, Chinese scholars chose the “whole word” approach. Each Chinese character represents a specific spoken syllable; many common words are of course bi-syllabic or multi-syllabic, requiring more than one character. Characters themselves are based on combinations of a mere 214 radicals (memorize them!), which can convey subtle hints about the meaning & pronunciation of the character.
We might think of phonics as a tremendously helpful path to “whole word” understanding. Certainly, as adults knowing English, when we see the word “cat”, we don’t sound it out letter by letter, but know to pronounce that word shape as “cat” – which puts us basically in a similar position to a Chinese person seeing “猫” and knowing to pronounce it “māo”. Either language, we think of a furry animal with four legs, a tail, and sharp teeth. It seems best for the raw beginner in Chinese to start with “phonic” pinyin and then transition to “whole word” characters.
But vocabulary and characters are only the warm-up for learning Chinese! The grammatical structure of the language is totally different from what we are used to in English. Something as simple as asking for “a table for two” can be mind-bendingly challenging in Chinese. Further, spoken Chinese requires retraining the muscles of the mouth & tongue to produce sounds in a different way from English. And Chinese is a tonal language – well, so is spoken English; but we use tones to convey sentiments like surprise and doubt, whereas Chinese uses tones to completely alter the meaning of those sounds. All good fun!
To be honest, learning vocabulary can be a slog. However, there are amusing surprises about the directness of the Chinese language – the word for airplane translates directly as “fly machine”, while a cell phone is a “hand machine”. I have been using Anki to create my own computer-based flash cards of words, phrases, and sentences – and that seems to have been very helpful.
Psychologists recommend the process of see it – hear it – say it – write it as the best way to learn vocabulary, since this triggers connections between different parts of the brain. The main resource I have been using (after trying some other less satisfactory material) is something I came across in a used-book store – “Learn In Your Car – Mandarin Chinese”. It is focused on the raw beginner, and comes with CDs (remember them?) in which a word or phrase is spoken in English and then twice in succession in slow careful Chinese, with gaps in between to allow the learner to repeat the sounds.
Additionally, there is a plethora of resources on the internet, both paid and free. YouTube has a cavalcade of attractive Chinese ladies posting all kinds of videos on speaking & writing Chinese. Yabla.com has a Chinese language section with an incredibly useful Chinese/Pinyin/English dictionary and graded videos with subtitles – where one can learn about today’s Chinese culture (such as marriage markets) along with the language. To try to keep the Fun Factor up, I have also been using some of the limited vocabulary books specifically written to help with learning, such as “Chinese Short Stories” from the Daily Language Learning series. Digmandarin.com also has useful resources, such as “750 Chinese Sentences Commonly Used in Conversations”, with audio, pinyin, and characters. Still, running once through those 750 sentences takes about 10 hours. Language don’t come easy!
In summary, trying to learn Chinese certainly stimulates those little grey cells which Poirot used to talk about. If you are interested in trying, come on in! The water is warm.
