Chinese lessons

I've been taking some Chinese language lessons while I'm here.  I've had six two-hour sessions one-on-one with a tutor, which have been enjoyable, certainly, but also a bit of work -- really, I can feel my brain tired after doing the various exercises she runs me through.  I didn't really expect to get to the point where I could/would say very much in Chinese to anyone, but wanted to learn at least a little about the structure of the language, sort of the logic behind the system, since it is so different from English and the Latin-based languages I have some familiarity with.  I was just intellectually curious, mostly, but since a culture is so inextricably tied to its language, I figured a better understanding of the language might also provide useful insights into the culture.

Chinese is made of characters that represent words, so they don't have letters in the way that English does.  Each character (as far as I know) is pronounced with a single syllable, and multiple characters are added together to create other words.  There are a couple thousand basic characters, and I have no idea how many combinations of these to make additional words, but it is no doubt thousands more.  I had one teacher for the first three lessons, and one of the exercises she gave me to do was to memorize a set of about fifteen characters that were relevant to food, some real basics like rice, noodles, soup, beef, chicken, pork, etc.  So I studied these at home, trying to memorize the picture, the sound, and the meaning of each of these characters.  She'd given me the characters on little one-inch squares, so I'd stare at if for awhile, looking at the lines in detail, looking for patterns in the lines, trying to create some little pictorial clues that would help me remember what that character meant, all the while trying to associate it with the sound that goes with it.  Then it was like I was back in elementary school doing flash card exercises -- I'd mix the characters up and then pick them out at a time and try to remember the sound and meaning, and after doing that a number of times, I could pretty reliably get them all right.  All well and good, until I realized that if I saw any of those characters again at a smaller scale and/or in a different "style" of writing, it was much harder to recognize them.  Whereas I had started the lessons a little more interested in learning about the written characters and less concerned about trying to learn how to say much, it became clear that this wasn't a good strategy, that "picture recognition" -- which I thought would be easier for me since I'm more of a visual learner -- was gonna be pretty hard and it would be much more practical to learn to say a few things. 

My second teacher has been working more on speaking, and this certainly has its own complexities.  Each basic character, or syllable, is comprised of an initial sound and a final or ending sound.  Simplifying things a little, say there are X initial sounds and Y ending sounds, for a total of X times Y possible combinations, although I don't know for a sure that they're all used -- I suspect most of them are.  But then it gets worse, because each ending sound has one of five tones, subtly different ways of saying the same basic sound.  The best analogy is how we change the inflection at the end of a sentence, make it go up a little, to signify that it is a question.  So, in Mandarin, you can make it go down, make it go up, make it go down then up, keep it high and flat, or have it kind of fall off.  So that means there are X times Y times 5 different basic sounds, and my guess is that that provides enough to cover all the basic characters in the language.  So we spent most of one lesson practicing the different tones, and some of the combinations.  Getting to the point of pronouncing them reasonably accurately is not necessarily so hard, but what does become difficult is trying to remember which tone goes with a particular syllable that represents a particular character with a certain meaning in English.  So, if I can get to the point of remembering that fish is pronounced "yu" in Mandarin, cool; and if I can also remember which character it is, since there are four little marks that look a bit like a fish tail at the bottom of the picture, great; but to get me to also remember that it is second tone, so I'm supposed to make the inflection of the vowel go up, well, that just adds a level of difficulty that almost makes you want to give up.  I had dinner last week with a group that included a Canadian married to a Taiwanese woman, and he confessed that he had essentially given up on worrying about trying to get the tones right.  I can certainly relate, although there are bound to be plenty of examples of how using the wrong tone for a word can change the meaning of what you are trying to say drastically, to the point of being pretty funny or rude or who knows what.  But the risk of me doing that seems pretty far beyond the point that I'm at now, or will be before I leave.  I can formulate a few trivial sentences in my head, but I haven't really uttered one out loud yet to anyone other than my teacher. 

The process of learning how to say the words is facilitated by the use of what they call "pinyin," which is essentially a system of phonetic spelling that shows how the word should be pronounced.  Great, except that whoever came up with the system didn't really do a good job of picking phonetic spellings that reflect how English-speaking people would say them.  There are a few deviations that I've learned over the years by getting to know the names of a number of Chinese students.  So, the sound 'eng' is pronounced more like 'ung,' and 'ui' is like 'way,' and 'ang' is like 'ong.'  I've been learning more of these deviations in my lessons.  For example, 'liu' -- the word for six -- is actually pronounced more like 'liou,' and 'mian' -- noodles -- is more like 'mien.'  So the whole time you're using pinyin to help you learn how to say the words, some part of your brain has to be keeping track of all those little variations at the same time, in order to pronounce the word correctly. Throw in the little markings they use in pinyin to indicate which of the five tones you're supposed to use, and trust me, trying to accurately read a sentence written out in the phonetic pinyin is not really an easy task.  If I get one right, and my teacher responds with an enthusiastic 'dui dui luo bo sen' (yes, yes, Robertson), I definitely feel a little sense of accomplishment!

A lot of the signage here in Taiwan -- street signs, stores signs, etc. -- includes both the Chinese characters and the pinyin spelling, although usually without the markings that indicate which tone you're supposed to use.  So, in theory, there could be five different characters that were all spelled 'yang' in pinyin, even though with different tones they would all be pronounced a little differently to clarify which word was being used.  I suspected as much, but decided to confirm that when I went to the doctor with Yungnane's assistant to get my Chinese herbal medicine.  The doctor's family name was Yang, as is Yungnane's, and in the set of little flash cards I had used to learn the food-related characters, one of them was 'yang,' meaning goat or sheep.  (I though that was kind of weird, using the same word for both -- like they think it's the same animal?  Or don't ever need to make the distinction?  Strange.)  I sort of assumed that Yungnane's name wasn't the same character as the one for goat/sheep, but when I saw the doctor's name I asked Charmaine if the character for the name was different than the one for the animal, and she verified that it was.  Not only that, but I guess there is a particular character associated with the name, so everyone named Yang uses that character.  Another word I learned was 'tang,' which means soup, but I'm gonna assume that my colleagues and students named Tang aren't really Dr. or Mr. or Ms. Soup, but use a different character as well.

Across my six lessons, I've learned a few common verbs, nouns, and pronouns, along with a few simple phrases that could be useful in daily interaction -- like 'mei guanxi' which means no problem.  I've learned the numbers zero to ten -- although it's surprising how hard it is to keep all those readily accessible in my brain at the same time; I guess that old idea about humans only being able to remember about seven bits of information may have something to it.  There's a pretty simple logic to the rest of the numbers above ten, so in theory, with a couple of exceptions, if I can remember 0-10 I can know the rest of them.  For example, two is 'er' and ten is 'shi,' so twelve is 'shi-er' and twenty is 'er-shi' and twenty-two is 'er-shi-er.'  I've also learned a couple interesting features of the language that further contrast it with English.  For example, to make it clear that a sentence is a question, they add a little word at the end of the sentence, either 'ma' or 'ne' (although there may be others as well that I haven't learned).  Now, some words have a question built in -- like the word what, I think, and probably when, where, etc.  If the sentence includes a question word, you don't need to add the extra word at the end, but otherwise you need to do so in order to clarify that you're asking a question.  So 'ni you che' is the statement 'you have a car' and 'ni you che ma' is the question 'do you have a car?'  My understanding is that 'ma' is used at the end of a yes/no question, and 'ne' is used at the end of other kinds of questions.  The second feature is that they have something called "measure words" which -- if I understand this right and I'm not sure I do -- are used in a sentence to indicate that you are measuring or counting something.  So 'wu' is five and 'ren' is person, but you say five people by saying 'wu ge ren,' with 'ge' being the measure word.  Apparently there are lots of different measure words, that are associated with specific things or maybe categories of things being measured -- so I think my teacher said that 'ge' is used only when referring to the number of people, whereas another measure word -- 'zhi' -- is used to refer, I think, to the number of animals.  I don't really understand why the use of a number itself isn't a pretty clear sign that you're counting/measuring something, but there must have been some reason once upon a time for adding these words into the mix.

The teachers have used some written materials for our lessons, and I have been transcribing all the words and phrases I've been exposed to into my own little notebook, both to consolidate all that information into one place and with the hope that writing it down might help instill it in my brain a little better.  After the first set of fifteen Chinese characters, which I did write in my notebook, I've stuck to just the pinyin and its English meaning.  Writing the characters takes a fair amount of time, when you're doing it for the first time.  I asked someone if they are taught a certain way to write the characters, ie a particular order to the set of strokes you need to make, and they confirmed that children are taught one specific way to write them.  It seems to me that that must be quite a task for Chinese kids, to learn how to recognize and write the thousands of characters that comprise the language, but I suppose cognitively it isn't all that different from American kids learning to recognize and write the thousands of words in the English language.  I've been told that, on the mainland, some time ago they started using a simplified set of characters, with fewer details and thus strokes needed to write them, but in Taiwan they have kept the old, more complex characters, and some of them really do have a lot of detail to them, and it takes a little effort to make sure you've transcribed them correctly.  The fact that there are now two different systems of written Chinese characters in use adds further complexity to the fact that there are lots of different ways the same written characters are pronounced -- different dialects, I guess you'd call them, all based on the same written language.  Mandarin is the dominant spoken version of these characters, but lots of Taiwanese folks also speak a Taiwanese dialect, and bounce back and forth between the two easily.  (It would be interesting to know what prompts that "code switching.")  If I pay attention, and the conversation is in one or the other, I think I can usually tell which of the two they're speaking.  I don't know how similar or different the pronunciations of the two dialects are, if they are sort of variations on a theme or if there's been wide divergence over the years (centuries).  In Mandarin, real good is 'hen hao' and I learned last night that in Taiwanese it is something like 'jin hou,' which is close enough that you can see how it could have come from the same starting point some time back.  But my understanding is that, if someone is able to speak only Mandarin, they would not be able to understand Taiwanese.

So, there are plenty of challenges one faces in trying to learn Chinese, and then of course there's the final hurdle of actually trying to use any of that knowledge in real life.  I went into a restaurant one night, and when I pointed to the item on the menu that I wanted to order, the waitress responded by saying 'mei you.'  I kinda shook my head and shrugged my shoulders, which is my clue that I didn't understand, from which it is easy to infer that I don't speak any Chinese, but she then just repeated herself, and I kept acting like I didn't know what she was saying, and I think at some point she may have even said 'mei you' one more time, but in the absence of getting anywhere, she then just turned and walked away.  Once she was gone, it dawned on me:  I recognized that phrase, I knew what that phrase meant -- it means 'don't have'!  Ha, now I understood the problem, they didn't have the item I had ordered, so when shortly thereafter a different waitress walked up and also said 'mei you,' I shook my head yes in understanding, pointed to another item on the menu, and she walked away with my order.  Alright, my first successful -- if slightly delayed -- use of knowledge of Chinese to deal with a little problem I encountered! 

Not surprisingly, learning some of the words and phrases associated with eating is the most useful place to start, especially here in Taiwan where eating really seems to dominate the culture.  Maybe I already mentioned in a previous post how, in talking this over with Jose, it seems that there really aren't a lot of things people here do for entertainment other than getting together to eat; or, maybe said a little differently, people here really enjoying eating and so it becomes a top priority for how to spend time with family and friends.  (One interesting aside is that there is almost a total absence of a "bar scene" here.  That's generally true of the country as a whole, but even around a major campus like NCKU, there aren't any bars and pubs that I've come across where the students gather to hang out and drink.  I've been told that really isn't something people do.)  Anyway, I learned that the word for eat is 'chi' and the word for rice is 'fan,' but if you refer to eating in general, without specifying what in particular you are eating, you use the phrase 'chi fan.'  So if someone showed up and you wanted to ask if they had eaten yet, the word for eat would be chi fan.  My deduction here is that, historically, rice has been such a basic staple in the diet that eating, in general, implies having eaten rice, such that the notion of 'eating rice' became synonymous with the act of eating.  Of course, if want want to be more specific, you don't say 'chi fan' but you would replace 'fan' with the item you are asking about.  So if you want to ask if someone had eaten chicken it would be 'chi ji rou,' with 'ji' meaning chicken and 'rou' meaning cooked.  Another interesting feature of the language is that instead of eating soup they drink it, meaning they don't say 'chi tang' for eat soup but 'he tang' for drink soup.  That certainly makes sense in a culture that uses chopsticks, as I'm sure historically the primary way of eating soup was to hold the bowl up to one's lips to drink the broth while using the chopsticks to grab whatever solid ingredients were in the soup.  It certainly remains a perfectly acceptable way to consume soup now, although spoons are not uncommon when soup is ordered in a restaurant.  In this context, I was amused when I learned the word for spoon a little while ago:  'tangchi,' or soup eat.  Of course.  It's the utensil you use to eat your soup instead of drinking it.  Funny.

Actually, that's the kind of thing I was interested in learning about the language, to see how they combine simpler basic words/concepts into more complex words and ideas.  Like the word for weather is tian qi, with tian meaning sun and qi meaning air.  I would love just to sit down and go through a list of words that are interesting or important to me, to see how -- like with spoon and weather -- they are formed by adding two or more basic concepts together to come up with a representation of something more complex.  I've only got a couple lessons left, so I don't know how many more of those I will have a chance to learn before I'm done, but regardless, it has been an interesting experience already, even just the few basic things I've learned, and I'm glad that I decided to allocate a little of my time and attention while I'm here to taking these Chinese lessons.