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...