Thoughts on learning Mandarin

Well it has been almost two months since we arrived in China, giving ourselves up to absorb and indulge in this foreign experience. I wrote my first blog entry just a few days after getting to Wuhan and as such it reflects some of the immediate shock and nervousness I felt after realizing the extent to which China is different from any other foreign country I’ve been to in terms of the language barrier. Since then, I have found this issue of language to be no less pervasive but I have realized that I think it would be quite possible to live here for a year knowing only a few key phrases, numbers, and having a keen ability to both utilize and interpret the universal human language of pointing. This was indeed a comforting realization to come to for it took the panic out of daily interactions. However, though perfecting these kinds of basic communication skills has been important in settling in to life in China, both Nathan and I wanted to at least make an attempt at a deeper connection to Chinese culture and community. So we found ourselves a tutor and have begun the slow and arduous process of learning Chinese. This has been a simultaneously interesting, rewarding, and frustrating endeavor and so I thought I would share some of my early reactions to learning Mandarin.

Admittedly, I have not devoted a large part of my academic career to language learning. I took four years of Spanish in high school and a once a week Chinese tutorial with my roommate Maggie the last term of college. But one main difference I have been coming to terms with between learning Spanish and learning Mandarin is that in studying Spanish vocabulary, each word means something different. This may seem obvious, but consider then that in Chinese, one word has at least four different meanings, dependent upon the tone used with it. And there are some words with the same tone that mean completely different things. For this reason, Chinese people often have to trace the character for the word (because all the characters are different) in the palm of their hand in the middle of a conversation. The classic example would be the word ‘ma.’ With the first tone, pronounced high and level, ma means mother (妈). With the second tone, which starts medium in tone and then rises to the top, ma means numb (麻). With the third tone, starts low, dips to the bottom, and then rises to the top, ma means horse (马). Finally, with the fourth tone, which starts at the top and falls sharp and strong to the bottom, ma means scold (骂). With the way my mind works, it is a whole lot easier for me to sit down and memorize a hundred different vocabulary words than only twenty five words with four different tones and at least four different meanings each.

This brings me to the next problem I’ve encountered with my Chinese language learning—actually using the tones and using them correctly. This problem takes two forms. First, when speaking English, I have what some would describe as a fairly monotone voice and so I am not naturally inclined to use different intonations in order to express my emotions fully. Because of this, I might be really excited about or interested in something, but unless you know me, you may not be able to tell this simply from vocal cues. This is problematic when every word in Chinese demands tonal attention. Nathan and I were discussing which would be worse—a monotone inclined person like myself having to overemphasize every word, or a hyper-tonal person trying to funnel their excitability into the correct tones. We didn’t come to a conclusion on this point. However, recognizing this personal challenge, in my study I am overemphasizing the tones until they begin to flow more naturally off of my tongue.

The second major tonal problem so far is one that I think most English speakers would have with Chinese. My confidence with the new words I am learning is still pretty low, especially because I’m not always sure if I’m remembering the correct tone to use or if my pronunciation is understandable. Sometimes I am understood, but sometimes when I’m out at a restaurant or a market and I try to communicate beyond saying “hello,” “goodbye,” or “thank you,” I am met with a tilted head or confused look from the waitress or storeowner. So I will repeat myself, but at this point I am questioning whether I am saying the word correctly and so, as I would do in English, I inadvertently add a lilt to the end of the word, intimating a question (“am I saying this word right?” or “do you understand what I’m trying to say?”). However, this does not work because it changes the word entirely if it was not meant to be said with the second tone (the low to high, lilting tone). Instead of the end-of-the-sentence-lilt, the Chinese add a neutral tone “ma” to the end of a sentence to ask a question. So in this whole process, I end up further confusing whoever I am communicating with. This also happens with the general arc of a sentence or a group of sentences. We have a certain way we phrase our thoughts and use tonality to express an emotion or emphasize an intention, and though I’m sure there is some sort of equivalent in Mandarin, it is not the same as it is in English largely because of the different usage of tones.   

I have noticed the inverse problem holds true for my students, which makes me feel a bit better about my own struggle. With the exception of one or two students, when they speak English, it is with an unbreakable monotone. Each sentence is flat and you do not get a sense of whether they are making a statement, exclamation, or posing a question. And I think this is for the same reason I am struggling with the flow of Chinese sentences—we simply use tones for different purposes in both languages.

Anyway, those are a few of my initial thoughts on learning Mandarin. Progress is slow, but it is certainly rewarding when I am able to communicate with or understand someone in a way I was not able to previously.

National Holiday Trip

One of the adjustments to living in China has been changing my expectations for a holiday schedule. By this I mean the realization that we are teaching classes on Thanksgiving and Christmas, two days I am used to having 1 to 3 week breaks scheduled around, having time to spend with friends and family, eating food, playing games, and just generally relaxing.

However, as one would expect, China has its own national holidays, one of which took place just two weeks ago. The National Holiday begins on October 1^st and is a 7-day holiday that includes various festivals, fireworks, concerts, and general government organized celebrations. The Holiday itself is to celebrate the founding of the People’s Republic of China which took place on October 1, 1949. All of China, including Hong Kong and Macau, recognize this week-long holiday, and most people do not have to work during this time.

Luckily for us, teachers and students fall into the category of people who have the entire National Holiday off. As such, Nathan, Becca (another American teacher here at CCNU), and I decided to take advantage of this vacation time and plan a trip. Nathan has a friend studying at a university in Chengdu, Sichuan province so we did a little research on the area to see if it would be a worthwhile place to visit. It did not take us long to discover that Chengdu is one of the few places you can see pandas in China and so our decision was pretty much made for us. We booked a few hostels and a train ticket and were on our way a week later.

Trains in China, slow trains at least, have three different seat types: hard seats, hard sleepers, and soft sleepers. Both kinds of sleepers were sold out by the time we bought our tickets so we were left with the hard seats, which we weren’t too upset about since they are the cheapest tickets. The seats were pretty cramped but certainly provided more leg space than an airplane. None of us set too high of expectations for the train ride and we knew that we were traveling over the Holiday so it would be crowded. We had been told by other teachers to expect people to be sitting and standing in the aisles and that we would probably have to kick people out of our seats when we boarded. Our expectations fell even further when, after we had been on the train no longer than five minutes, a toddler squatted down and peed on the floor right next to us. This all got cleaned up and the child was scolded by his parents, but we kept all our belongings on our laps after that. Overall though, it was not a bad experience. We left around 8pm Thursday night and we spent most of the 15 hour ride playing cards and dozing on and off. For the first half we had some very friendly Chinese people next to us, one of which spoke some English, so we chatted with her and played with her friend’s baby (who was enchanted by Becca’s blonde hair). By around noon the next morning we were in Chengdu and we set off to check into our hostel and meet up with Nathan’s friend, Clay.

We spent the next couple of days exploring Chengdu with Clay and some of the friends he had made at his University. We went to a couple of markets where we were able to practice our bartering skills. The markets were filled with jade jewelry and bronze Buddha sculptures. There is a large Tibetan population in Chengdu and so we browsed shop after shop of Buddhist merchandise from shops selling clothing for monks to workshops where huge religious sculptures were being carved from wood. We also ate at a Tibetan restaurant which was delicious! Nathan and Becca had yak dumplings (which are apparently very good) and I had some potato dumplings. All the dumplings came with this delicious sauce which was almost like a salsa. Very spicy and tomato-y. For our entree we all split what I can best describe as a Tibetan calzone. The shell was made from a pizza like dough and the inside was filled with grilled vegetables. We also ordered a pot of traditional yak milk butter tea. It tasted pretty much how you would imagine—like butter in tea form. I rather liked it before the meal, but it wasn’t the best drink to have to accompany food.  

Thankfully our hostel was only about a 15 minute walk from Clay’s university, so we were able to move freely between the two places without paying for cabs. Our first hostel was very comfortable. The beds were what we have grown to expect from China—rock hard—but the decor was inviting and the employees were very helpful. We saw a sign near our rooms for the Sichuan face-changing opera and so one afternoon we asked one of the receptionists about it. He helped us book tickets for that night and so we ventured into a more downtown area of Chengdu to see the show. The theatre itself was fairly small and there were small electronic screens on either side of the stage with English translations. The show was not necessarily what I would have thought to call an opera as there was really only one song sung in the entire hour and a half. However, there was plenty of music and dancing. The music was interesting because it was very clearly pulling on traditional Chinese instrumentation and motifs, however there were many modern elements added to it, most notably some club-like dance beats. The lights used during the show were another really great use of modern technology. There were several points where the lights created an almost holographic illusion. This was used once for a sort of time-warp or blackhole image. There was a knife thrower, funny jokes by the Chinese jester of the show, and some Cirque du Soleil-esque acrobatics. And finally, for the last 15 or so minutes, we figured out what the whole face-changing concept was all about. With traditional Chinese military march music blaring in the background, four actors wearing HUGE elaborate headresses, silk costumes, and carrying brightly colored silk flags came running out into the audience. They would come over to different audience members, shake your hand, stare at you for a moment, wave the flag across their face and voila! When the flag passed over their face, their mask was changed to a different design. They did this several times, and then more actors came out with, if it is even possible to imagine, even bigger, more elaborate costumes, to continue the face-changing magic. It was definitely money well spent. And, as we were walking out afterwards, we were stopped by a man from Singapore with a British accent who interviewed us for a China tourist documentary he and his crew are filming.

This year the Mid-Autumn Festival (also called the Moon Festival) fell during the National Holiday. The Moon Festival celebrates the end of the fall harvest and falls on the 15^th day of the 8^th month in the Chinese calendar. By our Western calendar this is the end of September or beginning of October. It is a very important holiday across China, Taiwan, and Vietnam and is traditionally celebrated by carrying or hanging lanterns (symbolizing the moon) from buildings with wishes or riddles inside of them, large family gatherings, and eating moon cakes. Moon cakes are an interesting Chinese baked good. Typically they have a chewy and sugary pastry dough crust and are filled with some kind of bean or fruit paste with a salted duck egg yolk in the very center to symbolize the moon. Mooncakes can also be made with a meat filling which, for me, sounds like a surefire way to ruin a perfectly good pastry. Despite looking a bit rubbery the cakes are quite pretty—they are usually no bigger than your average American biscuit and are imprinted with the Chinese characters for “longevity” or “harmony.” We spent our Moon Festival seeing pandas, but when we went to Clay’s university later that day one of his Chinese friends, Serena, had bought all of us mooncakes to try. Mine had some sort of fruit paste in the middle. It was like an extremely dense, less sugary sweet, jelly donut.

Like I said, we spent our Moon Festival at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. It is hard to put into words how adorable the pandas were—they were simply unreal and incredibly silly-looking. Nathan and I decided that they basically look like humans in animal suits. All of them—in the entire park—were laying on their backs, eating. Many had piles of bamboo just strewn across their bellies, either as a stockpile for more eating or because they were too lazy to throw the shoots they finished eating away from their body. There were also red pandas which look kind of like a larger, fluffier raccoon. These guys were much more active and roamed fairly freely around the park. We even came across one on the tourist walkway, coming toward us from the opposite direction. The Research Base also had baby pandas which we were lucky enough to see at a cute stage in their life. I would advise any reader to not look up pictures of newborn or even infant pandas for it will ruin any standard of cuteness you may have in your head for baby animals. They are like naked mole-rats at that stage. However, after a few months, they are little fluff balls pawing around for food.

After our several days of fun in Chengdu we embarked on the second part of our vacation. One of Nathan’s department heads had told us of a beautiful National Park about ten hours north of Chengdu in Jiuzhaigou, Sichuan. Wanting to see some nature, we planned a trip. We learned two important things about traveling in China on the bus ride to Jiuzhaigou.

1.)    Chinese drivers are crazy. We had witnessed their erratic driving in the context of Wuhan-driving, but driving through the mountainous countryside was an entirely different experience. Passing on a two lane road was an all too real game of chicken in which two vehicles (often times two coach buses) would compete for a spot on the road, trying to pass in the wrong lane even around corners and even when another car or bus was in that other lane coming at us. I eventually had to stop watching the road because I was certain we were going to get into an accident and end up in the rivers below the mountains we were driving up and around.

2.)    Traveling when all of the rest of China is traveling is not the best idea if you are hoping for a peaceful trip where everything goes according to plan. About an hour outside Jiuzhaigou we were stopped by the police for two hours because there was too much traffic on the road (we’re assuming this is linked to the problem laid out in point #1). After these two hours had passed (thankfully this occurred during dinner time so we were able to get out of the bus and get some food) we got back on the road and not thirty minutes later were stopped again. This time we were not told why we were stopped or for how long we would be. After about an hour and a half we started up again. Just in time too because we were starting to think it might be quicker to just get out and walk the rest of the way. Then, on the bus ride back to Chengdu, we got caught in this massive traffic jam where we were creeping along and intermittently stopped for random periods of time, sometimes in tunnels under mountains or on bridges (a particularly frightening experience considering how many bridges have collapsed in China in recent years). It took us between 2 and 3 hours to make it out of this traffic jam, which was stressful because unlike the jams on the way to Jiuzhaigou, we had no concept of how close we were to Chengdu and when we looked out the windows of the bus at the extent of the jam in front of us, it snaked on as far as we could see. Turns out the jam was because there were a bunch of multi-lane roads merging into a one-lane road, back into a multi-lane road, and then merging again into a one-lane road into order to then merge onto the highway. You can imagine this situation was not helped by nobody obeying any sort of traffic rules.

Jiuzhaigou itself was beautiful though. We got to the National Park around 7:30am after our day of travel the day before. They offered a bus to the top of the park where all the “scenic” sights were, but we opted to walk it. But literally everyone else (and there were hundreds if not thousands of Chinese people there) took buses up. Which turned out to be nice for us because we were the only people on the hiking path. We were stopped several times though before we made it out onto the path and were asked if we were really sure we didn’t want to take the bus. The hike was wonderful. The first area we walked through was wooded, but the path followed a river most of the way up. The river had some of the bluest water I’ve ever seen—an unreal cerulean that made the water look as though it were dyed or had bright blue tarps laid out underneath it. We encountered waterfalls every ten or twenty minutes and finally broke out into a grassland full of wildflowers and surrounded by mountains. The sides of the mountains were covered in pine trees, filling the air with a clean, woody scent. After all the pollution of Wuhan, just breathing the air in Jiuzhaigou was possibly the best part of the trip.

Unfortunately, my computer charger broke this week so I cannot load my pictures until I get that fixed (I deleted the pictures from my camera after I loaded them onto my laptop and I am writing this blog entry on the tv/desktop computer provided in the apartment). I’ll give a few more details of the sights when I am able to post the pictures because I fear I may make the waterfalls and Tibetan villages and mountain valleys seem plain compared to their actual wonder.

After a 15 hour bus ride back to Chengdu and a 19 hour train ride back to Wuhan the next day, we were all sufficiently exhausted and ready for a break from traveling. I feel proud, though, that we were able to travel to these two places—buying bus and train tickets, navigating taxis and hostel and hotels—in a foreign country and knowing very little Chinese. It certainly boosted all of our confidence, I think, and gave us an even broader perspective on Chinese culture.