Learning Chinese

So, whoever told you that learning Chinese is hard lied. It isn't hard...it's HARD!!!!!

After 'studying' (okay...okay...taking a lessons for a few months, listening to some tapes for a few more) for almost a year, I came to China sort of able to introduce myself, count and tell time and that's about it. After living here for four months I can more-or-less give instructions to taxi drivers and find at how much stuff costs. Not a lot of progress.

Forget about learning to read and write (how on earth is anyone here even remotely literate?!)...just learning vocabulary and grammar is hard enough. Start with the fact that even taking the 5 different tone variants (4 + the neutral tone) Chinese still has a very limited range of syllable sounds. Words generally consist of two syllables, although each syllable also has its own meaning (or usually several, one for each character you can use to spell the syllable) and can sometimes be used alone; words occasionally also have more than two syllables. Although each character generally has one pronunciation (including tone), the tone of the succeeding syllable can alter the tone used (so, for example, if a third-tone syllable is followed by another third-tone syllable, the first syllable is pronounced in second tone). The consequence of both the limited range of sound options and the tonal variation produced by sequencing means that there are an inordinately large number of homophones (different words that sound alike) - even assuming you can distinguish between the tones which is no easy feat for those of us who speak basically atonal languages (English isn't strictly atonal - for example, a rising tone at the end of a sentence indicates a question - but is minimally tonal in relation to Chinese). I consider myself pretty good at making educated guesses as to meaning from context and the words I can pick up, but the degree of homophony in Chinese makes it quite a challenge. First you have to be able to figure out where one word stops and another ends and then figure out enough words to make educated guesses as to the rest. Not so easy with the extensive homophony.

Then there's the grammar. Trying to make sense of the grammar is rather like trying to cross the Pacific Ocean in a leaky inflatable raft with no means of propulsion. Even determining whether a word is an adjective or a verb is a meaningless endeavor - words can be both. For example, if I want to say "I am tired," I don't construct the sentence using the pronoun the indicates me, the verb that indicates to be and the adjective that indicates tired (in any order), instead I use the pronoun that indicates me, the adverb "very" and the adjective "tired." This results in a sentence that translates directly to "I very tired," thus the origin of the all-too-common verb-less sentences we hear from Chinese speakers learning English and a major source of confusion for English speakers trying to learn Chinese. Sometimes you need a verb and sometimes you don't - not only don't need one but can't use one, adverbs and adjectives often serve instead.

Now suppose you've got more than one of something. You can't just say "two things" or "seven things" - every noun has an associated "measure word." The measure words acts sort of like an article ('the' or 'a') and goes between the number and the noun. The measure word for any given noun depends on what category it belongs to and the categories are anything but intuitive. The one thing you can always be sure of is that if you guess at a measure word by using the word you know goes with something that seems similar you're likely to be wrong. It seems obvious to me that there might be a measure word for people, another for animals, one for foods, etc. Not so...the measure word for 'river' is the same as the measure word for 'snake.' That makes perfect sense if you think of snakes and rivers as examples of long, skinny things, but not much sense at all if you think of a river as a type of place or terrain feature and of a snake as an animal. So, guessing measure words is pretty hopeless. Omitting them is no good, people really can't figure out what you're trying to say. I'm not sure why this should be since I can generally figure out what someone means even when the forget to preceded the noun with "the," but so it goes. Your next best option is to use the measure word "ge" which is the generic measure word that applies to anything that doesn't have some other measure word. About 75% of the time if you use "ge" in place of the proper measure word the person you are speaking to will figure out what you mean. So that leaves just two more problems with amounts of things. First, you have to remember that for mysterious reasons if you have two of something you don't use the counting word for "two" (as in the word you use when you say "one, two, three, four..."), you have to replace it with a special word for saying "two things." This change is unique to the word for "two" and quite unusual in the language in general where substitute words or word alterations are quite rare. The second is expressing indefinite quantities (some, a few, a lot, a little, etc.). Some of these expressions take measure words and others don't. Some take measure words for some nouns and not others. Some use different expressions for different kinds of nouns. Some vary depending on whether you have an indefinite quantity that is smaller than 10 or larger than 10. Ugh!

Then there are dates and times. Unlike most Western languages, there is no such thing as verb conjugation in Chinese. Verbs (when you use them at all) don't change based on time, subject, object, etc. like they do in most Western languages. At first blush this seems like a great relief...no verb conjugations (and exceptions!) to memorize! As any English speaker who has struggled through the sometimes confusing process of learning to conjugate verbs in Romance languages (when do you use the past perfect vs. imperfect and what is a subjunctive, anyway?!) can attest, verb conjugations often seem the hardest aspect of learning a language. Ha! Wait until you try learning a language without them. Now you need to specify precisely when every action occurred. The verb form doesn't indicate whether it happened in the past, present or future. It turns out that's a lot more confusing. If time has any relevance you must include a time clause. That's ok if you want to be specific about the time (yesterday evening at 7:30 PM or tomorrow in the middle of the day at 1:15 PM). It gets really hard if the time is indefinite...sometime before now, sometime after something else, earlier than, later then, late, after, etc. I wanted to find out how to tell the taxi driver to turn right after a particular building - my teacher had no idea how to say such a thing. My husband told me what to say but 95% of the time the taxi driver tries to make the turn before the building not after, so apparently the phrase doesn't hold much meaning for them. Forget telling ayi "I'll be home later than usual tonight" or asking if she can serve dinner a little earlier than usual. Again, ugh!

And then there are all the mysterious sentence structures that must be used when they must be used (or you are either extraordinarily rude or completely unintelligible) but there is no definable rule for when to use them. There is, for example, the "ba" structure. I won't go into details of how the sentence is put together. Suffice it to say it includes the meaningless word "ba." I was instructed to use that structure when giving ayi instructions for what to buy at the store. It then materialized, however, that I am only to use it if I want her to buy an indefinite quantity of something (some mushrooms) and I tell her as she's leaving for the store (or call her after she's left to ask her to pick up the stuff while she's out). If I give her instructions about what to buy at the store later (tomorrow, next week, etc.) or to buy a specific quantity (e.g. 1/2 kilo) then I don't use that sentence structure. When I tried to generalize to other situations I failed spectacularly. It seems the only way to learn when to use it and when not to use it is by trial and error. Thrice, ugh!

No doubt it gets worse before it gets better. Yippee!

Zai jian (see you later or something along those lines) from Beijing...

Welcome to Take Beijing Taxi

"Welcome to take Beijing taxi" is the friendly recorded greeting I hear each time a taxi driver starts his (or, unexpectedly often, her) meter. Too bad the ride isn't always as pleasant as the greeting.

That's not to say all Beijing taxi drivers are bad - they're not. Taxi drivers here come in three categories: the good, the incompetent and the cheats. Taxi drivers here, like those everywhere, drive like madmen. That goes without saying (see my last post for a link to disturbingly accurate description of a typical traffic encounter). So, how do the good, the incompetent and the cheats differ?

The Good Driver Good drivers here cover a range from the merely "Wow! I actually got where I wanted to go in less than an hour!" to the "I got where I wanted to go in record time and I almost forgot I was in a taxi!" There are two minimum criteria for a driver to qualify as "good." First, he must actually sort of know his way around more-or-less and second, he must speak Mandarin well enough to understand where I'm asking to go even if my pronunciation isn't 100% perfect.

As to the first criterion, there was a time in the not-so-distant past (i.e. until shortly after I arrived in Beijing) when I would have told you that a good taxi driver knows his city backwards and forwards - that, given any address in the city, he knows exactly where it is and how to get there from his present location. I've lowered my standards. In Beijing a good taxi driver can, given an address, at least get you in the vicinity then follow directions received by phone from someone at your destination. Why the change? Beijing is an immense city covering an area roughly equivalent to the surface area of Mercury (ok...maybe a teeny-tiny exaggeration, but it really is huge). Aside from the 6 ring roads which, as the name suggests, form a series of concentric circles around the city center streets in Beijing follow no discernible organizational pattern. There are major thoroughfares spaced anywhere from a few hundred meters to a mile or more apart. Scattered in between these large streets (and occasionally freeways or toll roads) are a veritable rabbit warren of small streets and alleys some of which may only be long enough to serve one or two buildings while others go on for miles. Streets may or may not be straight, may or may not run in any distinct directions, and can be counted on to change names at frequent but irregular intervals. Just to make matters interesting, streets are frequently designated with a directional notation (e.g. East XYZ St.). In most cities of my acquaintance these directional markers are a good clue about where to look for the street on the map. East ... St. can generally be located on the east side of the city, usually east of some well-defined dividing line (e.g. 5th Ave. in Manhattan). Not so in Beijing. In Beijing the directional designation only tells you that the section of road it designates lies in the indicated direction with respect to some other thing that shares a name with the street. East XYZ St. may be the eastern portion of a street whose other portion is called West XYZ St. even if the entire street lies in the far western part of the city. It could also be the street that forms the eastern border of XYZ neighborhood or runs along the eastern side of XYZ park (again, regardless of where in the city the area it borders happens to lie). Furthermore, Beijing is divided into several districts and street names are not unique across districts. I.e. there may be an XYZ St. in Chaoyang District and another, totally distinct one in Haidian District. The two may never connect, not interesect, be of different shapes, sizes and directions and otherwise have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. Vastly complicating matters is the fact that Chinese possesses far more characters than syllable sounds (basically each character represents a syllable but there are many, many homophones) even considering each tone/syllable combination as separate (Mandarin uses five different tones or pitch inflections - any given combination of consonants and vowels will take on entirely distinct and unrelated meanings depending on the tone applied). The consequence to Beijing geography of the massive number of homophones is that there can be many streets whose names have identical pronunciations. There are three possibilities for distinguishing among streets with identically pronounced names (not to mention those those that are not identical to Chinese speakers, but are indistinguishable to tone-deaf foreigners!): describe the precise location of the street, write down the name of the street or use the common 'spelling' technique of identifying characters by word association (as in "mama de ma" meaning "the character ma that is used in the well-known word mama"). None of these comes easily to foreigners.

So, given that Beijing has about a million streets (no, that's not an actual fact - just hyperbole) which go every which way, change names constantly, and frequently share names (at least in spoken language), not to mention that many small streets do not appear on maps and have no signs, I figure I've got to cut the taxi drivers a break. Thus the criterion "get you in the vicinity and be able to follow directions from there."

Which brings me to my second criterion "be able to figure out what I'm trying to say." Even here I'll cut the taxi drivers a bit of a break. If I get the tones wrong on street names I really can't complain too much if I end up in the wrong place, after all, I could get the tones perfectly and still end up in the wrong place due to the homophony trick. To qualify as "good" a taxi driver needs to at least be able to interpret innocent mispronounciations of well known destinations (e.g. the airport, train station, Tiananmen Square, etc.).

If "get you in the neighborhood" and "figure out what I'm trying to say if it's a well-known destination" are the minimum to be good, what makes a truly superlative taxi driver? The answer is easy: improvements on both criteria. An outstanding taxi driver can not only get me more-or-less where I'm going, but can get me precisely where I'm going if my destination is a well-known location or on a big street. He can also do so by an efficient route which takes typical traffic patterns (and better actual current traffic activity) into account along with road closures due to construction (frequent), the Olympics (massively annoying just at the moment) or other more mysterious reasons. A top-notch taxi driver is also friendly and communicative. He likes to chat but also understands the challenges of communicating with a foreigner whose Mandarin is as stellar as mine (i.e. barely extends beyond "hello" and "turn left/right here"). He knows how to speak slowly, use simple words, find synonyms when I don't know a word he's used, and elaborate with gestures (but not to the point of making his driving any more dangerous). These rare but fabulous drivers are my very best opportunity to practice and improve my Chinese. They're delighted to have a foreigner in the car, ask me lots of easy questions (where am I from? do I have kids? do I like Beijing? etc.), tell me easy-to-understand stories about themselves and their families, point out landmarks, give me new words ("Hey...do you have those in America? What are they called? Oh...here we call them...or you can also call them..."). I think I actually understood almost 75% of what the guy who drove me home from the train station last night said to me! That's definitely a personal best. The final characteristic that separates the great out from the good is humility. Given the bewildering complexity of navigation in Beijing, even the best sometimes make mistakes. If they are really exceptional they apologize promptly as soon as they realize their error, ask how much the ride ought to cost and stop the meter when it hits the number I give them.

The Incompetent Driver The bulk of Beijing taxi drivers are what I would consider incompetent. If they have any idea at all where I want to go they have no clue how to get there and will often take a route twice as long as the obvious route. For example, suppose I am at a shopping complex on East 3rd Ring Rd. (the ring roads are roughly square, E. X Ring Rd. is the portion of X Ring Rd. that runs north-south along the east edge of the square) and want to go to a location at the NE corner of 3rd Ring Rd. A good taxi driver will go north on E. 3rd Ring Rd. and we'll be there in a quarter of an hour (give or take depending on how far south the start point is and how much traffic there happens to be). An incompetent driver might meander aimlessly around a lot of unidentifiable surface streets before finally arriving or, worse, might head the wrong way on 3rd Ring Rd. If he goes south instead of north on 3rd Ring Rd. he will have to traverse 3+ sides of the square (south to the SE corner, then west to the SW corner, then north the NW corner, then east to the NE corner instead of just north straight to the NE corner). Incompetent taxi drivers also often fail to understand simple directions that even their slightly more adequate cousins can manage (e.g. "take 5th Ring Road to the Badaling Expressway" which is about the easiest thing in the world to do from my apartment). They also have spent the summer driving around a city altered by its new Olympic landscape without having absorbed that all streets that cross through the Olympic zone are closed (and have been for two months or more).

The Cheats Then there are the cheats. There aren't many but they exist. These are the unscrupulous drivers who figure they can take advantage of helpless foreigners. Unlike the incompetent drivers who simply don't know their way around the city well enough to select sensible routes, the cheats will assume that a foreigner a) doesn't know how to get to the destination and/or b) can't communicate well enough to insist on a route and will take the opportunity to select a long, slow route guaranteed to rack up a hefty fare. I figure another week and I will no longer fall victim to the cheats on the routes I travel frequently (e.g. to/from work) and a few more weeks after that and I should escape their clutches entirely. I know the route to/from work well now, but am still not quite confident enough in my Mandarin to question why a driver isn't following the route I know. I'm close though. A little bit longer to feel confident challenging a driver who seems to be taking a questionable route when I can't give precise directions for a better one.

And there you have it...taxi drivers in a nutshell (okay...a very big nut!). The vehicles themselves are a story for another day.

Welcome to read Beijing blog...that's all for now.

An Intro to Traffic in Beijing

A friend of mine passed on this wonderful introduction to the intricacies of Beijing traffic. Enjoy!