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For three years, I have been in China teaching Swing Dancing. Now I'm wandering yet again...
2005-08-19
Language tutor
My language tutor is an interesting person. She's very tough. She puts me through learning a lot more words than I'm comfortable with. In my ad, I asked for a slow-paced learning schedule. I said, five words per session. Any more than this and it's pointless, because it's too hard to remember in the long term.
Well, technically she does put me through five words. But today it was many more. Like about 20. Plus, every time she uses an example, she uses about two or three new words which we've never talked about. For instance, the Chinese word for "do" is "zuo", pronounced zwau, with a downwards inflection (as if you are saying, Darn!). So I say, how do you use it in a sentence, and she'll say the Chinese equivalent of "They did nothing since the business closed." Of course, the problem being, she's never explained 'nothing', 'since', or 'closed'. She'll tell me the meaning of these additional words, but it makes every example quite painful. That's a bit of a down-side.
On the plus-side, she's pushing me. If I haven't properly prepared for class, she gets sincerely perturbed and scolds me for it. Makes you wonder who's working for whom in this arrangement, but in fact it's probably a good thing. Today she said about 12 new words, once in Chinese, then once in English. Then she read the Chinese to me and asked me what each meant. I was a bit frustrated. I almost stopped her, saying that I could not possibly memorize twelve new Chinese words just by saying it once. I did, actually, explain this to her after the second time we went through it. She said we'd go through the whole list a few times and at the end I should have it all memorized. I knew this was not possible, but what else can I do? I considered for a moment that perhaps she's not the right teacher. She's giving me material far to challenging, and I don't learn well in this method. But I went along with it. By the end, she identified five words that I have as 'homework', which I should memorize for next time. Those words are:
office bangongshi
building lou
post office youju
bank yinhang
hospital yiyuan
shop shangdian
Plus, Chinese is a tonal language. There are four different possible tones, or inflections for every syllable (plus sometimes 'no tone'). These tones are numbered, cleverly enough, 1 through 4. The first tone is flat and high. Like as if you were announcing your presence by saying "Here!" when someone is doing a roll call of names. The second tone is rising, like if you were saying "huh?" in a confused state of mind. The third tone first falls a little then rises, as if you were expressing great hesitation by starting a sentence with 'Well...". The fourth tone falls quickly, as if you were definitely saying "No!".
In theory, anyhow. In practice, the Chinese do not actually speak these tones so clearly. I have a very difficult time distinguishing between the second and third tones, because in reality the so called 'rising tone' actually does seem to drop down a little first. Also, when spoken, some words are more heavily emphasized than others, and their tone is more clearly pronounced than other words' tones. If you pronouced every word with the tones as they are written, you would end up sounding like a "Mr. Speak" talking machine, in which you'd type a word and a machine voice would say it.
I used the word 'cadence' to describe this aspect of language - the actual emphasis and volume changes used in a spoken conversation. The problem is, 'cadence' is never taught. It is not even truly written down, and the rules of spoken language - though they may exist - are merely just understood by those who know the language. Think back to learning English. At what time did you read in a book or were taught by the teacher how to emphasize different words, change volume and pitch, and so forth? A small amount of it is covered, such as how the meaning of a phrase changes when you stress a particular word. Take for example the English sentence, "I walked to the store". Now, add *emphasis*. '*I* walked to the store' (implying some one else did not). 'I *walked* to the store' (meaning I did not take a car). 'I walked *to* the store' (meaning I have not walked back). 'I walked to the *store*' (meaning I did not go to the movie theatre). These are relatively simple examples, but if you say each one alound, you'll observe that not only does the emphasized word change, also the volume, tone, and speed of speaking the other words also changes.
In Chinese, this is becoming a difficult part of understanding spoken language. The theoretical tones actually do not sound anything like their listed rules. People use tones sometimes, and sometimes they don't. Also, in a long sentence the many quickly-spoken, non-emphasized words are very difficult to pick out if you haven't heard them very frequently. No to mention the differences in dialect; perhaps 50% of the people in Shanghai are not Shanghainese. They each have their own accents, and even if you know the words they are saying, you may not recognize them.
The next problem is the pronounciation. Chinese has several sounds which simply do not exist in the English language. Years ago, bad movies would use Chinese speaking English by having them mix up their "R's" and "L's". "Would rou rike some flied lice?" However now, I can tell you I understand the difficultly much more. There are several consonants and vowel sounds which have no English language counterpart. One is represented in Romanized characters by the spelling "U" (with two dots over it.) This makes a strange sound, a cross between 'ooooo' and 'eu' (as in euphamism). In the end, it sounds something like the sound a kid would make when playing and simulating the sound of a race car. There are about five sounds which are completely new.
Also, there are certain sounds which in English only appear at the end of a word. Take for instance the word, "That's". The 'ts' sound at the end is actually a very common beginning sound in Chinese. The Chinese word for toilet (a very useful word, if you ever should visit) is pronounced something like "tsouwh swoau".
And so forth. Another unusual thing about Chinese is that you have the equivalent of vowel and consonant sounds, but you are not free to reorganize them in any way you wish. Every character in Chinese has a single-syllable pronounciation. But while the "ts" sound may be able to end in "ouwh", it is not allowed to end with the "ee" sound. The beginning "ch" sound may end with "ee", but not with other sounds.
The end result is, you have a limited amount of possible total sounds. In English, you may rearrange any letters and make up a completely new word with a new pronounciation. Chinese, however, is not based on an alphabet. It is based on a set of complex characters, and it so happens there's only about a hundred (?) different possible sounds representing all those symbols. That's part of the reason the tones come into play. With four different tones, this multiplies the amount of distinct sounds four times.
Now here's the odd thing. You may remember how to say a word, but you can't remember the tone (happens all the time, let me assure you). If you are in a conversation with a Chinese and you use the right sound but the wrong tone, they will not understand you. In fact, if they realize you are not saying the correct word and they try to guess what you are trying to say, they almost always keep the TONE you used and change the SOUND to something else, asking if this is what you meant. It's odd. There seems to be a deeper frame of mind based on tone than their is pronounciation.
And last, there's the characters. If you've ever passed a Chinese restaurant, you've no doubt seen a crazy squiggle of lines and dashes in the name of the place. This name is made up of Chinese characters, of which there are some 3000 commonly used. I used to think that characters were each a completely unique work of art, but thankfully this is not so. There are some 83 different 'radicals', or smaller basic symbols which are combined and rearranged to make up the more complex sybols. Sometimes the combination of radicals makes sense. For instance, the word for 'good' is 'hao', pronounced 'how' with the third tone, falling then raising. The character for this is a combination of the character for female "nu" and male child "zi". Because, back in the old days, apparently it was the thinking that 'female' with a 'son' was 'good'. I can remember that one.
And even furthermore (sorry, I said 'last' before, but...) within the characters there are a finite number of different possible strokes - only 20 or so. A stroke may be a straight line or a complex curve, but in essence it would be the action of putting an ink brush on the paper then lifting it up counts as one stroke. Each radical, and in turn each character, has a specific defined order in which you must write the stokes. Similarly, each stroke has a defined beginning and ending point; you may not draw a line right-to-left if that line is supposed to be drawn left-to-right.
I started learning these characters. I have about 20 now. Strangely enough, it was relatively easy for me to learn the characters. I think it is a combination the fact that I worked in computers, and I am a very visual person. I appreciate the artwork behind the characters, and when I search through my memory I'm more likely to recall the look and stroke order of a character than the definition and pronounciation of a word I'd only verbally learned.
So anyhow, that's the scoop in Chinese. It's hard. I can't keep these tones straight, I can't hear what's being said half the time (and the other half I don't understand), and my pronounciation is still bad enough that people don't understand me once I start speking outside my core group of commonly-used words.
But, keep at it.
-J
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