Mandarin and Wo

My friend sent me a link to a very good article reasoning that Mandarin is the most hardest language to learn at an advanced level, it doesn’t matter your background, race, previous language experience. The article stacks it’s reason in a very logical way and is an interesting read for anyone who is studying language in general.

Prior to my Taiwan days the only exposure I would get to Mandarin would be on the Chinese channel on television, and from what I heard it wasn’t pretty. I thought to myself that I would never want to learn such a harsh sounding language. The world is full of beautiful languages to learn and to me, Mandarin wasn’t one of them.

Sure I have some friends from China, but none of them used their language around me, and when they did I was too negligent to care.

And even after making my plans to come to Taiwan, I still wasn’t planning on learning the language. How uncouth would I have been to go the whole year without investing some time to learn the language. Well, with that said, I did learn the language but it was more out of necessity than interest.

What I found, I fell in love with.

The strongest facet of Chinese is that it isn’t phonetic based, which is its greatest attraction and also its greatest weakness in a world full of phonetics. And with the written language are hieroglyphics. Now I know this isn’t shocking news, but it was all news to my negligent brain.

On the first day in Taiwan I learnt that Mandarin comprised of four tones. Which means you can pronounce the same sound in four different ways, a flat tone, a rising tone, a dropping tone and a dipping tone. And depending on the tone it can completely change the association of the word. All news to me. And when my friend demonstrated the tones in speech, I couldn’t tell the difference at all.

This is one of the reasons that Mandarin is difficult to learn. With time I found it to be one of the languages best characteristics. From what I was used to from watching TV was a harsh, short, sharp, cutting language. But what I found was a language based on town, you could say it was melodious.

I like writing characters the most, and most days I will practice. It involves a lot of time to memorize the strokes and associate the character to a sound (and a tone). Its weird not to have phonetics for once. Even if I didn’t know the word in english, I could attempt to spell it if I knew the sound, and potentially someone could recognise the word even if the spelling was wrong. But in Chinese that is impossible. A great amount of time needs to be invested to associate the character with the word, but I guess it isn’t much different from associating the word ‘tree’ with an image of a tree in your head, another semiotic to make.

One of the problems with Chinese is that it can be extraordinarily simple. Some sentences cannot be translated properly into English, and worse can be translated in many different ways. There is no solid translation. Which can make things confusing for a western brain. At the same time simplicity is a great asset. In Chinese there is only one word for “me/myself/I” which I think is fantastic, 我. That’s just an easy example, the language is full of them.

I’ve come to understand the beauties and pitfalls of the language, and my view on the language is totally different to how it was a year ago. Although it is complicated at first, perseverance makes it easier, and sharing jokes and having a laugh using it make it worth while. I find myself addicted to learning languages. The rewards are really worthwhile, more worthwhile than most things I attempt.