Learning Chinese: current state of play

31/10/2016

About linguistic baby steps, pinyin, changing schools and how Chinese characters are opening a whole new world to me.

Now where were we? Back in February I wrote about the language barrier. Something which cannot be ignored when living in China! I concluded that learning mandarin is extremely useful and that I was still determined to do my best to learn it. So how have I been getting on?

Timeline of classes, change of schools and change of teachers

From February to June 2016: Just over a month after I arrived in Beijing, I started taking classes at the School for diplomatic missions. The name is fancier than the facilities but I loved my teacher Zoe!! I took group lessons with 3 lovely ladies. We were all absolute beginners. We started with the pronunciation of vowels and consonants, combinations of the two and the four tones in Chinese language. I remember thinking "can we just move on to vocabulary now" but I've later realised just how important it is to pronounce syllables correctly and that it's FUNDAMENTAL to know which tones to use! As a beginner, you normally start with learning pinyin. Pinyin is basically Chinese written in the latin alphabet. It was only invented in the 1950's (published by the Chinese government in 1958) hence people who went to school before the 60's have never learnt it. So pinyin is really only useful to a certain extent and as you advance on the levels of Chinese learning, you completely stop using pinyin! What's very useful, on the other hand, is conversational Chinese! A lot of our lessons were spent on learning really useful everyday Chinese. Time, negotiating prices, directions, colours and even "Ayi vocabulary", Simply because most families in Beijing have an Ayi (house help) and they rarely speak any English, Ours is no exception!

August 2016: I'm back in Beijing after 2 months of break from studying Chinese. And yes I did bring my books on holiday in Europe and no I did not open them at all.
So a lot was forgotten but I wanted to pick up again and continue, Unfortunately, due to different plans, interests etc., we could not start up as a group again and since I was keen to be in a group class, I decided to change schools.

Mid September 2016: On my friend Alessia's recommendation, I contacted "the Bridge school" and luckily there was a group class for level two starting just a week later. A total of 6 lessons per week (2 times 3 hours) Perfect! The group consisted of 5 women including myself and we clicked from the first moment we met. And more importantly, although I definitely feel like the weakest link, we were more or less on the same level. But the enthusiasm didn't last long. Despite her being a very sweet person, we had to agree that the teacher was not living up to our expectations. The school took our complaint well and promised to find someone with much more teaching experience for groups.

Mid October 2016: And that's when Yǔ Laoshi walked through the classroom door. I was blown away by her energy from the first lesson. 3 hours of high pace and of speaking Chinese around 80 percent of the time. She gives (and checks) homework, is friendly and funny but firm. No mercy, no messing about, picks up immediately if we try to check our wechat messages in class. Exactly what I needed :-)

Learning the characters: I almost get emotional

Starting to learn the Chinese characters, was a moment I had dreaded and looked forward to at the same time! On the one hand, it seemed like an unmanageable task and on the other hand, it felt like a natural (and unavoidable step) if you really want to learn mandarin.
There are tens of thousands of characters but, according to Wikipedia, with "only" 3000-4000 you can obtain "functional literacy" in Chinese. Piece of cake, right?
A character corresponds to a word or a syllable, Not to a letter. For example; 马 (mǎ) means horse and 门 (mén) means door.
The way some characters are written makes sense! For example 人 (rén) which means person. Can you see how it's a little man walking?
Learning characters is both fascinating and useful! I would even say that it's the part of the lesson I now look most forward to! My aim is to learn enough characters to be able to read public signs and possibly "decode" a simple newspaper article in the very far future! Now I've said it. No turning back!

Linguistic exchange:

I am blessed to have quite a few Chinese friends and acquaintances so a linguistic exchange with someone who was keen to learn English, seemed like a perfect idea.
I met Lǐ Lìn at rehearsals with the International Festival Chorus, and we decided to meet up to chat partly in Chinese, partly in English. I casually brought my unfinished homework to our first meeting and luckily she didn't mind helping me. We drilled Chinese vocabulary and characters and she talked to me in English about her passion for travelling. We'll hopefully manage to meet again next week after she's back from 伦敦 (Lúndūn) - European capital - have a guess :-)