Study Chinese for 2 months

Studying Chinese

I have been in China for almost 15 months now. For the first 11 months I was working a lot and trying very hard to study chinese in my free time but I always felt tired when I finished work and wanted to get outdoors and do something. So I only made a little progress.

Then in June my contract ended unexpectedly and I suddenly had lots of free time. So, after travelling around China for a few weeks and then going back to America for a few weeks I returned to LiuZhou at the beginning of August and hired a private tutor to teach me chinese.


Her name is Wendy and she is a great teacher. She is very patient. I have had many friends try to help me learn and other teachers i have paid. They were very nice but it has been really cool to learn from a professional teacher. Also nice to have the time to concentrate on it full time and really make some progress.



When I was in Shanghai I found a box set of books and CD's called Interactive Chinese. It had 8 books and 16 CDs. The first book teaches Phoenetics and the basics of Chinese Characters. Then there are 3 text books containing a total of 62 lessons. There is a mock HSK proficiency test and 3 books for practice reading which are not all that useful actually. The box said that if you finish this course you should be able to pass the first level chinese language proficiency exam called HSK. Each lesson started with a new conversation. It introduced some new vocabulary and also had a grammar lesson.

For the first 3 weeks I studied for 3 hours in the morning with the teacher and then spent 5-8 hours in the evening reviewing what I just learned and all the previous material and prepared for the next day's class. I really want to learn to read and write chinese as well as speak chinese, so this was a big challenge since I was learning about 40 new words every day. After 3 weeks my head was so full of chinese words that I just couldn't learn anything new.

I took a week off and just tried to review and maintain what I had already learned. Then I decided that learning to write so many characters wasn't realistic and I stopped trying to write, but continued with reading and speaking. After 2 months I finished the 62 lessonsand I have a vocabulary of approximately 1500 words. I can definitely get by in normal conversation and chinese people are so surprised to hear me speak good chinese. My vocabulary is still pretty small but if I can get them to speak slowly to me I can do ok.

I haven't tried to take the practice tests yet but I have looked at them and they still look really hard. There are a lot of words I don't recognize. I have two books now (maybe 4 or 5 practice tests). I plan to keep reviewing my vocabulary and try one of the tests. See how well I can do on it. Then learn all of the new vocabulary that I find in it. Then try again... Hopefully I will eventually be ready to take the test. :)

I want to tell you a few things about the chinese language now.

Like everything in China, the chinese language is ancient and has a whole culture behind it.

Spoken Chinese

There are 1.3 billion people in China. The official language of china is Mandarin or Pŭtōnghuà. This is the language I am trying to learn. This language basically comes from Beijing, the capital. It is taught in the schools and should be understood by all chinese.

Haha!! Read on...

There are 56 nationalities in China. 92% of the people are of the Han nationality but there are 55 minorities as well. These minorities are like the American Indian tribes. They have their own language, customs, festivals, dance, music, crafts, foods, and traditional clothing. As well as the nationalities having different languages different regions or even different cities have their own dialects.

From city to city or city to countryside the people speak different dialects. People from the north can't understand the southern dialects. In some areas (in the South and East), you can cross a hill or a river from one village to the next, and the inhabitants will not be able to understand each other. The differences between the spoken languages of the South and the North are greater than those between Italian and Spanish.

These are the major dialects:

• Pŭtōnghuà (Mandarin): the common language (over 1 billion speakers), based on Beijing dialect. The official language of China since 1913.
  
• Wú: spoken in Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces and in Shanghai and Hong Kong by about 77 million people. I should learn something about this language since I will be moving to Zhejiang province.
  
• Yuè (Cantonese): spoken by about 66 million people in Guangdong, Guangxi and Hainan provinces, and also Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Malaysia and many other countries.


• Mĭn Nán (Southern Min): parts of Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan, Zhejiang and Jiangxi.


• Jìnyŭ: Shanxi province and also in Shanxi and Henan provinces by about 45 million people.


• Hakka: south eastern China, parts of Taiwan


• Xiāng (Hunanese): spoken by about 25 million people in Hunan, Sichuan, Guangxi and Guangdong provinces.


• the list goes on...

I live in the city of Liuzhou in the province (state) of Guangxi. Most people who were born here don't speak Mandarin in daily practice but a dialect called Liuzhou hua or (Liuzhou language). The nearest big city is Guilin (2 hours away) and they speak Guilin hua. They both share some words with Putonghua so I can understand a little. But in the capital of this province, Nanning, 2-1/2 hours away, they speak Cantonese which is very different.

Last weekend I went home with my friend. She is from a small village east of Nanning. In that area most people can speak Bai hua which is maybe like cantonese. But in her specific village of shuang ma they speak Shuang ma hua. I have to say I didn't understand them and they didn't understand me. :) Made me feel like maybe I was wasting my time with Mandarin. It is mind boggling!

Chinese Characters

However, there is one common written language which is pretty amazing. Hanzi is the name for the chinese characters. There are supposedly about 80,000 chinese characters. But only about 3000 are commonly used. Chinese characters are basically one syllable, and many words are made up of two or more chinese characters or syllables, like in english. So I may know 2000 words but only 500 or 600 characters.

Chinese characters are not phonetic. Just by looking at a character you do not know how to say it.

Pinyin (pronounced 'peen-een')

Pinyin is the english (or romanized) spelling of the chinese words. Pinyin is a phoenetic system that tells you how to say the Chinese words. Learning pinyin is the first step in learning chinese. Pinyin is pretty easy to learn. It is interesting that even chinese children learn Pinyin before they learn to write chinese characters.

The hardest thing about speaking chinese is tones. There are 5 tones.
1 neutral tone... high, not rising or falling
2 rising... like english uses for questions "huh?" rises at the end
3 falling... then rising like we would say "well..." when we are thinking
4 falling... like we would use when angry "damn!" or a command "stop!"
5 no tone... very short, not rising or falling

Here are a few examples:
English .........Character..... Pinyin ..........Note:
thing..............东西............... dōng xi ........netral tone and no tone, the characters mean 'east west'

thing............. 事情............... shì qing....... falling tone, no tone, a different word meaning 'thing'
to be............. 是................... shì................ falling
but................ 但是.............. dàn shì......... falling, falling
laboratory... 实验室.......... shí yàn shì... rising, falling, falling

The really confusing thing is there may be 80 thousand chinese characters but the english spelling pinyin for many are the same. My favorite example is the pinyin word shi. I gave a few examples above.

Shi can have 4 different tones, but in my 1300 page chinese dictionary there are 18 pages of the pinyin spelling 'shi' . 8 characters with neutral tone (but used in 108 words), 9 characters with rising tone (used in 208 words), 6 characters with falling-rising tone (used in 52 words), 28 characters with falling tone (246 words). That's over 600 'shi' words or words with a 'shi' character or syllable in them. When you hear somebody say 'shi' it could mean 600 different things!!!

Learning Chinese is a fascinating experience. I remember how proud I was when I first got here and made friends with some chinese people. They all spoke good english, but as I got a little more confident with Pinyin, I started sending them pinyin text messages. And they often didn't know what i was saying because the pinyin spelling can mean so many things.

So i had to learn the characters. And now i have to remember which of those 41 shi's is the right one. Shi is just one example - I have to do that with every word. And then I have to get the words in the right order because of course chinese grammar is not the same as english. I try to practice my chinese with my chinese friends but they want to help me and they always correct my many many mistakes. That just frustrates and depresses me. I actually get much more reward from talking to people who don't speak english. We may not be able to understand each other very well, but they can't do any better in english, they appreciate my efforts, and best of all, they can't correct me. HAHAHA

So, my goal for my next adventure in Ningbo, is to find some friends who don't speak good english to practice my chinese with. It shouldn't be that hard. I am surrounded by them. There are over a billion mandarin chinese speakers in this country. And maybe less than 5% of them speak better english than I speak chinese. I have a billion teachers!!! I just have to get over the fear of failure and talk!!!

Stay tuned... I am sure I will keep learning interesting things about this language, culture and people.