I spend most of my time in Beijing attending class and studying Chinese. Instead of doing this at a university, like I did last summer, I study at a place known as Taipei Language Institute Wangfujing, a language school in downtown Beijing unaffiliated with any university. TLI specifically teachers Mandarin to foreigners, mostly Japanese, Europeans, and Americans, and they're the school that the Luce Scholars program has been using for the China Scholars for the past several years. The Taipei in their name comes from the fact that they were initially founded in Taiwan, I believe, but no one in the Beijing office is from Taiwan; they're all from the mainland. This is more than slightly confusing, and I've yet to meet anyone, including some of my Chinese teachers from Oberlin, who has heard of TLI before, as they're very small. However, they are great.
There are about 10 teachers working at TLI, I believe, and our classes consist of one-on-one sessions with a teacher, for fifty minutes at a time. We rotate through the teachers, changing teachers every hour or two and we're currently attending five hours of class a day, three in the morning, followed by a lunch break, and then two more in the afternoon. This is absolutely exhausting, but fantastically helpful, as it allows us to cover a lot of ground and get a lot of practice in each day. Since the classes are all individual, Ben, Martin, and I all move at our own pace and can specify which material we want to study. Ben and Martin are currently working through the basics, while I'm working on intermediate level Chinese, both of the more written, formal variety, as well as the spoken vernacular. And we're all studying with an eye towards learning some of the specific vocabulary for our areas of professional interest: Martin is looking to start business Chinese soon, while I've been (very slowly) reading a review article on the understanding of language in the brain, published in Chinese by my boss for the coming year.
This is as good a time as any to give a quick overview of Mandarin Chinese, as I have been continually posting small snippets in Chinese throughout my blog posts and plan to continue to do so. Mandarin is the dominant language in China, officially supported by the government and taught in all schools throughout the country. It is not the only language in China, not by a long shot, but it's the one that you would learn as a foreigner and is generally what people refer to as "Chinese." From an English speaker's perspective, the difficulty in learning Chinese lies in three major areas, two of which are not nearly as bad as they appear at first.
First, Mandarin is a tonal language, which means that one syllable can have many different meanings based on the pitch of your voice when you pronounce it. Mandarin has four tones: a high flat tone, a rising tone, a down-and-up tone, and a falling tone. If you've never studied a tonal language, this sounds absurdly difficult and ridiculous, but it is something that you get accustomed to as time goes on. There's no real way to hasten the learning process other than constantly listening to Chinese and attempting to speak it, inevitably leading to hilarious mispronunciations that either carry no meaning, or a separate, often hilarious meaning.
Second, Mandarin is written with characters, not a phonetic alphabet. Therefore, every character represents a whole syllable, a complete sound, instead of only one component of it. On the plus side, this makes Mandarin a very compact language. Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, which weighs in at 309 pages in the American English version, is a slim 191 pages in Mandarin. The downside of this is that when you see a character you've never seen before, you do not know how to pronounce it. It's not entirely true that you have no idea how to pronounce it because, since the simplification of the Chinese writing system undertaken by Mao in the mid-20th century, there are some phonetic components to characters that you get a feel for as you study more, but you are never entirely sure. So then how do you learn how to pronounce a character without consulting someone more learned than you? There are several romanization schemes for Mandarin, but the only one really still in use in the mainland today is pinyin. Each character has pinyin associated with it, which tells you how to pronounce it, with an accompanying mark above one of the vowels that tells you the tone.
The classic example used to demonstrate the importance of tone is the syllable ma. 妈/mā (first tone) means mother, 麻/má (second tone) means flax or hemp, 马/mǎ (third tone) means horse, and 骂/mà (fourth tone) means scold or curse. You can notice the slight phoneticization of the characters by looking at these, with 马 showing up in three of the four. If you can't discriminate between the four tones while speaking or listening, you will be pretty much unable to communicate. Speaking from experience, it's quite easy to be lazy with tones in class in the US, where you're speaking with teachers who have lots of experience with students and can still often understand your meaning. However, when you come to China and talk to random people on the street or in restaurants, you have to pay attention to your tones or no one will have a clue what you're saying. A classic beginner mistake that I've been told constantly amuses teachers is in asking the question "excuse me," as in when you want to ask someone a question. This should be 请问/qǐngwèn, but if you mispronounce it as qǐngwěn, then your meaning becomes 请吻, or "please kiss." So, pay close attention to your tones.
While characters seem ridiculously archaic and unhelpful, you get used to them gradually. And you reach a point where you realize you couldn't get rid of them. Reading a wall of text in pinyin is pretty much impossible, because Mandarin has an absurd number of near to total homophones. For some reason, I find differentiating between them in speech significantly easier, and if they're written (where context is a little harder to determine, potentially?), characters are absolutely necessary.
The third reason that Mandarin is difficult for English speakers is relatively banal in comparison, but it is, in my opinion, the major sticking point. Mandarin is very different from English and there are next to no cognates. The only words that sound similar in the two languages are those that have been borrowed from one by the other. Because most of the early Chinese immigrants to the US were from Southern China, many of those in English are from Cantonese, not Mandarin, which doesn't help in the slightest. And Mandarin, unlike Japanese but similar to French, prefers to take foreign words and localize them, so that email becomes 电子邮件/diànziyóujiàn or electronic mail, and the like. So pretty much the only cognates between the two language are place names. Beijing is 北京/Běijīng (though you do have to pay attention to the tones) and 克利夫兰/Kèlìfūlán is Cleveland (try saying it out loud), and so forth. While at first this seems like a relatively simple point to bring up, it definitely does make learning Chinese a slower process, because, unlike French or Spanish, you can't rely on a word sounding similar to the English when you don't know what it is.
But it's not all bad learning Mandarin. The grammar is relatively simple, especially when compared to the Romance languages and Japanese. There are no tenses in Chinese, with the time course of the verb being shown by the use of time words (such as yesterday, today, tomorrow afternoon, and the like) as well as special markers that show aspect, which I don't really understand at all. This means that you can speak a bunch of words together and, as long as your vocabulary and pronunciation are good, people can most often understand your gist.This leads to the saying among teachers and students of Chinese as a second language that Mandarin gets easier the more you study it, as compared to languages like Korean or Japanese which, due to their complicated grammar and importance of formality, get harder the more you study them.
Mandarin is also, as I mentioned above, super compact and has an absurdly rich literary history that manifests itself in the form of 成语/chéngyú, set phrases of four characters that often summarize a story and carry a fairly complete meaning. They're seen as fairly literary or formal and so aren't used all that much in day-to-day speaking, but they are used occasionally. For example: 入乡随俗/rùxiāngsuísú or "enter border follow custom," is the Chinese way of saying "When in Rome..." Unfortunately I don't have an example of a nice, complicated Chengyu, but if I learn one I will make sure to keep you posted.
And that's my way too much of a surface-level summary of Mandarin Chinese. It's a really incredibly cool language, and everyone should learn some of it. Cursing in Mandarin is also relatively strange. In English, most curses have to do with bodily functions, genitals/sex, or religious subjects. In Mandarin, it seems that they almost all have to do with genitals or sex. And tend to be what I would consider pretty strong. So that's interesting...
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