I wouldn’t have thought it possible when we started learning Chinese. But, weirdly, I think she’s right.

A month ago we couldn’t tell where one sound ended and the next one began. A Chinese sentence was a meaningless, shapeless blur, the ultimate barbarian “bar-bar-bar”. The only syllables either of us could even identify as individual sounds were xièxie (thank you) and nǐ haǒ (hello).

Now?

Well, we can cope with basic conversation and if there’s something functional that I need to get across, I can manage it…

… Eventually.

We haven’t quite finished our course in three weeks (click on the links to read about week 1, week 2 and week 3), but six hours hard study on the Sunday before we leave Kunming brings us to the end of it.

And Z, at least, is super-stoked to hear that some of Sophie’s adult students take a year to finish the book, and longer than that to get to the point where they can comprehend and be understood in conversation.

But are we at the end of it?

It feels more like we’re at the beginning of something.

Chinese is a fascinating language and phenomenal brain training, whether you’re ten or thirty-seven – and that’s before you get to the magic of the characters. It’s also an extraordinarily useful one for Z to know as the new world order begins to shake down.

So, once we’ve got our little travel money hassle resolved — replacement credit cards for the ones the pickpocket took are currently somewhere in South-Western China en route to Lijiang — we’re going to schedule a couple of hours of study via Skype once a week.

We even have our new coursebooks! We’re onto New Practical Chinese Reader Textbook 1, complete with CDs, and armed with these we’ll be learning to read and write our first few of the 2500 most common Chinese characters.

So this is the last in the weekly series. But I’ll give you an update in a month.

We Covered
Posting parcels, mending a bicycle (oh, happy memories of mending our motorbike), booking into a hotel, at the train station, booking plane tickets and the internet. Also different ways of making sentences with bǎ, the use of the word jiù, colloquial passives, different ways of forming requests and various common ways of linking sentences.

My View
“Grammar’s not so important,” says Sophie, as she and I plough through yet more grammar and Z plays with her daughter’s hamsters. “You need to learn the words.”

And, actually, it’s true that once you get the tones even approximately right — Z can sound fairly Chinese when he’s trying, I sound resolutely English, I think because I push the sounds through the wrong cavities — you can, in fact, just string words together fairly intuitively and… Well, it’s ugly, but it works.

That said, I’m a full-on grammar Nazi (a former sub-editor and one-time English teacher with a degree in two dead languages, and you don’t get much more fascistic than that), so I WANT to understand this stuff.

I’d also like at some point in my life to speak not pidgin Chinese but good Chinese.

On the plus side, I can now make sentences with the dreaded de particle. I’m getting a feel for when to use guo and when to use le. I can even drop in words like yíxìa (‘one time’ – a Chinese equivalent of “please”).

And I’m sort of getting a feel for the slabby, heaped constructions, the piling-up of nominal phrases, the obsession with number, the prioritization of big things and big ideas over what we’d consider a normal word order. So much so, in fact, that Z sometimes has to haul me up for talking Chinglish (a far worse fate than talking Singlish).

On the downside? Reading and writing’s going to be a whole new level of crazy. Take this, from our book:

The Kid’s View
“Whew! Thank god that’s over! No homework tonight, I hope… Though I am pleased we finished the book.”

“You do realise we’re starting a new book after this one?”

“Yeah.”

“But you do feel a sense of achievement? ”

“Yes.”

“Are you alright with learning more Chinese?”

“Well, yes. I do want to learn Chinese. I understand it will be good when I’m an adult. And, yes, I do kind of like learning Chinese. But not at this kind of rate. I’m TEN, for god’s sake.”

He has a point…

On the other hand, in Chinese terms (AKA, Sophie’s terms), he is “very smart, with a very good tongue, but lazy”.

She has a point…

You see, by Western standards, Z has been working his little butt off, covering in three and a bit weeks what would take a good couple of years in school.

By Chinese standards? He’s, umm, a lazy little sod who needs to put the hours in.

In Practice
I am mildly irritated to find that, as with Indonesian, Z prefers to eschew speech in favour of correcting my myriad errors.

“Shouldn’t you put a question word after that? Like ma?”

“You mean yaò, not yǒu. That’s why she’s confused.”

“Bù. Not méi.”

I am also not entirely sure what to do about this. I’d like to get him together with Chinese kids of his sort of age – we left Kunming too soon after he befriended the girl on the bus to arrange a hook-up.

This would be a good thing on all levels, linguistic the least of them.

BUT…

Chinese kids of Z’s sort of age work phenomenally hard. They’re in school from 7.30am to 4pm with 2-3 hours of homework every evening – a lot of it rote learning — and, generally, classes at weekends too.

Add in the time spent commuting to and from school and you’re looking at a 13 or 14 hour day.

Sleepovers?

Fuhgeddaboudit.

And consider this. The vast majority of Chinese couples today will, like their parents, only ever have one child. That means that there are two, often three generations’ hopes and dreams invested in that single child’s success.

Urban, school-age Chinese children do not have much time for family time with their adoring parents and grandparents. Let alone time for play.

In other parts of Asia, we’ve found it relatively easy to meet kids of around Z’s age scampering around the streets, in restaurants, in parks or just, say, hanging out on the beach. Here the kids who are out and about at any time on a weekday are usually of pre-school age.

Time to hit the parks more, I figure. And time our travel around weekends.

Because, yes, armed with our little pinyin dictionary and three and a bit weeks of gutbusting toil, we WILL get around China just fine. But I’d like Z to make a few more Chinese friends.

This is the last in the weekly series. But I’ll give you an update in a month.

And, if you’d like to learn Chinese, you might want to pick up our coursebooks:

Buy the Intensive Spoken Chinese Book via bookdepository.com for $16.82 with free delivery worldwide
Buy the Intensive Spoken Chinese CDs  via bookdepository.com for $18.44

Buy the New Practical Chinese Reader Textbook 1 via bookdepository.com for $24.98

Buy the New Practical Chinese Reader Textbook 1 CDs via bookdepository.com for $30.73

The post Learning Mandarin: Week 4 appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

If you’re a language geek, or planning to study Chinese, you might want to read about our first week learning Chinese in China.

If you’re not? Well, you might just want to skip that post. And this one too…

Frankly, week 2 has been a challenging week. Language has been the least of it.

Day 1

We Covered:
Shopping, prices, and drinks of all kinds. We learn a bewildering number of words for tea, words for weights and money, a range of particles and more pesky Chinese measure words (these appear, most obviously, between number and noun – Chinese is BIG on numbers).

Also? Some useful conjunctions and sentence constructions.

After great gains last week, when we pick up lessons my tones have gone right back to yodelling level and Z’s forgotten half his vocab. Not a great start…

Z spends a lot of time going through new vocab. Me? I have to make a new sentence with each new word. It’s good practice.

My View
The full horror of Chinese measure words is beginning to unfold. We met eight of them last week. Today it becomes clear that there are… well, I’d guess hundreds, quite possibly thousands.

There’s also a whole bunch of particles, single syllables used to form tenses, for emphasis, to change meaning, to indicate possession, to signal questions, and, well, any combination of the above, really. And, I’m sure, more too.

Chinese is, arguably, even more difficult than English for non-native speakers. It has a similar concatenation of little nothing-y words that carry a lot of meaning and can be placed apparently at random.

However… It’s also a hackable language. You can string nouns, verbs and conjunctions together and the results will be ugly, but generally comprehensible.

Plus, your tones can be a LONG way off — I’ve yet to hear a native English speaker sound like a Chinese person when they speak Chinese — and they’ll still make sense.

With some Chinese sentences now I can hear a sentence and spit out a comprehensible response without translating back into English.

The Kid’s View?
“Hmmm… I don’t think Chinese is that bad at all.”

“Yeah, but you do need to learn the words and really listen hard to understand. You don’t seem to have remembered a lot of your vocab…”

Z finds it easy to translate the pinyin lesson texts.

When it comes to speaking Chinese? He’s finding it hard to distinguish the tones when listening and he’s not confident enough just to have a go at speaking.

On the plus side, he can still remember his Indonesian (and not just the twenty essential Indonesian words). My Chinese has pushed out my Indonesian, as Indonesian pushed out my little Spanish in its turn. (My French is still there, thank god.)

In Practice:
On the bus, we say “hi” to a little Chinese girl. We ask her name and her age. Our tones are good enough for a three year old to understand. Yay!

At our local shop, I realise I can recognise the local accent — Sophie, our teacher, is from Xian, so speaks with a standard accent.

Kunming Chinese has, I think, the Chinese equivalent of the English West Country burr. So “forty-seven” (sì shí qī), which sounds roughly like “sir-shir-schee” in standard Chinese, sounds more like “zur-zhur-zhir” in Kunming Chinese.

And, no, we’re not in China’s answer to Glasgow. China is a vast country and pronunciation of standard Chinese varies widely from city to city.

The different Chinese dialects? Hell, they can be as different from each other as German and English. The only reason they’re not called Chinese “languages” is that they’re written the same way.

Anywise, my shop Chinese has progressed from pointing and holding up fingers and waving flat palm when I’ve finished, to pointing and saying “two” to pointing and saying “I want two bottles of water”.

I hear, understand and answer “Do you want anything else?”, hear the numbers correctly despite the local accent, and successfully ask “how much is that?” And, yes, I could have done all this in sign language. But THAT’S NOT THE POINT.

Day 2

We missed two days’ study this week because Z was sick. Copiously, repeatedly but, mercifully, painlessly and accurately, for three hours both mornings without fail. So Day 2 was actually Thursday.

We Covered:
Coffee bars, teahouses and menu items. The dish “fish-smelling hot shredded meat” appears more often than is strictly necessary, IMHO, though we’re delighted to find that “tomato” translates (roughly) as “Western red thing”.

We learn the distinctions between various types of knowing and wanting. Also that Chinese likes to stack its verbs up, without the link words you have in English. You don’t say “I want an apple” but “I want eat apple”.

There’s also a whole vocabulary that’s used only in buying, selling, restaurants etc.

The measure words rear their ugly heads again. To say “I want three cups of coffee” you use the measure word “bēi” (cup or glass) and the noun “kāfēi” (coffee). “Can you bring me three cups?” takes the measure word “gè” and the noun “bēizi” (cup or glass).

I had, optimistically, assumed that, because there are five tones and each syllable can have five different meanings, all Chinese sounds had unique meanings.

Nope.

You can have a syllable that is written with the same character, pronounced precisely the same way and means, well, several different things. So: laí means “come” and “take”. shàng means “on” and “go to, go up”.

“So this is a different word in Chinese?” I ask. “Not just we translate it different ways in English?”

“Yes,” she says. “Different word in Chinese too.”

My View
Chinese script menus are a nightmare. Dishes seem to all have their own names rather than a list of nice characters for the ingredients. I have no memory for characters.

On the plus side, we’re finding that a lot of food words have crossed over into other Asian languages. Dumplings are jiǎozi (like Japanese “gyoza”), and the steamed stuffed buns called “bao” in much of Asia are, well, bāozi.

There’s also a huge overlap with even the little Vietnamese we know, unsurprisingly so since much of North Vietnam was occupied by China for centuries and Vietnamese was first written in Chinese script.

Oh yes. We’re also learning a lot about Chinese culture.

The Kid’s View
“All this learning is killing me. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Oooh! I can recognise the sign for fish. It looks like a boat on the sea. And the character for chicken looks quite a lot like a chicken. And beef looks like something being cooked on a griddle.”

Z’s very visual, which gives him a real head start on the characters. But he’s still struggling to talk much in Chinese, while I’m quite happy to have a pop at it. He’s reverted to turning a question into English, his answer into English, and then translating back into Chinese at quite painstaking length.

In Practice:
The problem for Z in China, as in Indonesia, is that in most day-to-day interactions I am expected to do (and therefore do) the talking.

We’re also not going to be in our flat in Kunming long enough for me to make a sustained effort to find kids or families to hang out with, particularly since we’re studying five days a week.

I suggest he socialises with some of the Chinese kids at the arcade. He’s more interested in coming first on his racing car game. Plus, he gravitates to the teen games, while the kids his age are on the little kid games.

Me? I ask “Where is the coffee?” in the supermarket and am understood first time.

I ask at the cinema “Do you have English language films?” and am understood first time. Unfortunately, the name of the film the girl points to is written in Chinese characters.

Hey-ho.

At our local shop, I manage to communicate that I’d like my change in one-yuan notes because I want to get the bus tomorrow. “Bus”, by the way, is gōnggòng qìchē — seriously, the Chinese make the Academie Française look like lightweights.

Day 3

We Cover:
Restaurants, foods, eating habits, likes and dislikes, family and profession.

We learn the four different particles that can be used to turn a sentence into a question (in Chinese, the rising tone we use for questions is just one of the five tones used for syllables). I don’t have much of a clue when to use each of them, mind.

Ludicrous quantities of measure words appear. There are at least two measure words used specifically for counting people. Gah!

On the plus side, we learn that you can basically turn an adjective into a noun by adding the particle “de” to it. We also learn some prepositions. As to where we fit them in a sentence? That’s more difficult.

We do six hours today and my head is spinning.

My View:
“I think you think like a Chinese person,” says Sophie. “Most students take a year to finish the book. You can get through it in three weeks. When we finish here, you’ll be able to understand Chinese people.”

I’m officially star pupil! Yay! Clearly all those years of learning Greek conjugations, declensions, particles and the like weren’t wasted.

Z? He’s learning at the pace of a typical Western adult student.

And, yes, Chinese is beginning to make some sense. I can have a stab at abstract sentences, and form time clauses.

Tones? My fourth tone is just plain horrible. My second tone is too short. My third tone is too long. If I try more than three high tones in a row my voice drops as it would in English.

I’m often too focused on getting the sounds out to make even remotely appropriate sense breaks.

I can now hear how the tone changes both the vowel sounds and the consonantal sounds in a syllable. I can’t replicate it.

The Kid’s View
Z spends a chunk of our lesson hanging out with Sophie’s daughter, who’s a year older than him and speaks very, very good English for someone who’s only been studying it for two years.

He’s getting to grips with the differing meanings of Chinese words. “Chinese people think about food very differently from English people. There’s no way you’d find an English person saying that a dish isn’t greasy enough.”

After translating the pinyin texts for our lessons flawlessly, he remarks, “I’m quite pleased with how I’m doing in Chinese.”

“That’s good,” I say. “But you do need to work on your vocab. And you don’t like talking. You need to focus on the talking, just let the words come out…”

“Look!” he says. “You’re twenty-seven years older than me and you studied languages at university.”

Fair comment.

It’s weird. He grasps the grammar and syntax easily. But he’s pathologically averse to talking the language and, though his spoken tones are better than mine when he tries, he seems to have trouble distinguishing the tones when he’s listening.

That said, he can do the basic social niceties. Names, ages, birthdays, likes and dislikes. He’s starting to use conjunctions to string together more complicated sentences.

In listening, though, he tends to miss crucial particles. That’s not surprising. They’re chopped-off, non-tonal sounds that are supposed to be almost swallowed.

Unfortunately, they make important differences to the sense, turning a statement into a question, a present tense into a past.

When we talk? His second, third and fourth tones are better than mine when he puts his mind to it. But he pitches his first tone, which is supposed to be high and flat, in his standard English speaking voice.

Yet, by the end of the day, he’s having stabs at quite complicated sentences.

In Practice?
We go for lunch in the Chinese section of the mall, and traipse around asking for roast duck until we find somewhere that serves it. My order for roast duck and cucumber salad is understood, first time, though my tones are terrible. Cucumber salad does not mean what we thought it meant.

That evening? A whole new adventure…

At the local shop, I reach for my wallet. Which is when I realise, first, that my bag is open and, second, that my wallet is not in it.

There follows a slow, sickening realisation, like the time before Z was born when I came home to find… “Oh! The television has moved… Oh, there’s a pile of rubbish on the floor… Oh! that bag’s gone!… Oh! the window’s open…. Oh! we’ve been burgled…”

Yep. As we’ve been warned, there are pickpockets on the bus. I am down credit cards, driver’s license (unusable in China anyway), plus around two hundred pounds in various currencies and the entrance card to our flat.

How could I be so stupid?

I exclaim in rubbish Chinese, “Money gone! No money! You see? You have? My money gone!”

They didn’t see. And they do not have.

This is especially vexing since the 1500 yuan in my wallet was intended to top up our Chinese cash reserves to a comfortable safety level for, well, exactly this sort of emergency.

Plus, we’d meant to go shopping for warm clothes. Gah!

Z’s take on it all? “Well, we’ve got travel insurance, right? That will cover it.”

“No,” I say.

“We haven’t got travel insurance?!”

“Yes,” I say. “Of course we’ve got insurance. But to claim on it I’d need to file a police report in Chinese — and we’re not registered with the police. Then I’d need to prove to the insurer a) that I took the cash out and b) that I haven’t spent it. They never pay cash claims.”

Day 4

Our plan on Friday evening was for Z to do a catch-up lesson on Saturday, to try and get him using more of his Chinese.

However, the pickpocket thing is a bit of a shock. I spend the evening ringing banks in the UK, endeavouring to send money to myself via Western Union and failing, while Z grapples with his VPN. We have only 500 yuan cash to last us until I get the money sorted out, so when I wake up I feel…

… Well, a bit anxious, extremely cross with myself and a bit down…

It’s no big deal, being pickpocketed. It could happen anywhere. It happens in London all the time. Two hundred quid isn’t much in the scheme of things.

But it’s a lot of hassle when it happens in China. And, irrationally, it makes this big, alien, wonderful country feel like, well, a VERY big, VERY alien, wonderful but slightly scary country.

Plus, I’ve got sod-all work done this week and I’m late on a deadline.

End result? We take the day off everything and mainline Doctor Who. Not good for my bank balance. But a nice day.

Week 2 In Summary…

We’ve had less time studying than we’d have liked. Z’s been ill and I’ve been robbed, which makes for a bit of a “meh” week, all in all.

I reckon, though, by the time we start exploring China by train — a week from now — we’ll both be able to have simple chats with the locals we meet.

I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to manage the basics of ticketing, directions, shops, guesthouses and so on.

And, yes, I could manage the ticket stuff from the phrases at the back of a guidebook.

The small talk? That, I think, will be the gain.

Most importantly — we’re both finding Chinese a genuinely interesting and worthwhile language to learn.

We’re beginning to get glimpses into the richness of it, the alien-ness of it, the different patterns of Chinese thought and even a vague sense of how the characters might work.

Next week? I think the plan is for Z to have two hours study on his own each morning, focused on his talking and listening. While he does that, I’ll do some work.

Then we’ll do four hours together after that. And then work on his vocab in the evening.

All in all? I think 80 hours over five weeks, or even 100 hours over five weeks, would have given us a more solid grounding and allowed us to do more in Kunming.

But we’re commmitted to Christmas in the UK and want to see quite a bit of China before then, so 50-60 hours will just have to do.

I wish we had longer here. I really do.

If you’d like to learn Chinese and get a bit of a head start, you can buy our course books and CDs here:

Buy the intensive spoken Chinese book on bookdepisitory.com for $16.82 including free delivery worldwide

Buy the Intensive Spoken Chinese CDs on bookdepository for $18.44

The post Learning Mandarin: Week 2 appeared first on EscapeArtistes.

Z was up for this too.

At least until he realised Mandarin is a tonal language. Which means that every syllable has five separate meanings, dependent on whether you say it rising, falling, wobbling, high and flat, or neutral.

So, for the last week, we’ve been taking the bus from our flat in Kunming to Teacher Chang’s house for Mandarin lessons.

Sophie’s a couple of years older than me, with a daughter a year older than Z. She took early retirement from her job teaching Chinese Language at Yunnan University and now teaches foreigners from her 24th floor living room, complete with feng shui fishpond in one corner, a rack of indoor shoes for guests, and her daughter’s four pet mice, whom Z adores.

We’re working from a course called
Intensive Spoken Chinese. It starts with speaking, moves on to writing and only then introduces reading.

Why? Well, there are 2500 Chinese characters and they’re not phonetic. So for the average Westerner to attempt to learn not only alien vowels, consonants and tones BUT the associated non-phonetic syllables is a recipe for brain overload.

That means we’re learning in the transcription system known as pinyin, and picking up the odd character along the way.

It’s tough. So I’ve introduced an incentive.

Z has his eye on a 1000-page jokebook from the English-language bookstore in town.

Me? I’d rather not spend the next three months of my life listening to excerpts from this opus: twenty-five minutes in the shop was QUITE long enough.

Result? The first person to sustain a mutually comprehensible conversation in Mandarin with a Chinese person who is not our teacher wins the jokebook battle.

If Z’s first, he gets the book. If I’m first, he doesn’t get the book.

How’s it going? Wayull…

DAY 1

In Summary
A bracing romp through the four main tones, the neutral tone and a tone created by adding the Chinese ‘r’ to sounds including the Chinese ‘n’.

Next? The 21 Chinese initial sounds, some of them quite similar to English consonantal sounds, some of them more reminiscent of those weird Slavic sibilants and a couple that are purely Chinese. Plus 38 Chinese finals, an exciting selection of vowels, diphthongs and nasals.

Conversation? Hello, goodbye, thank you, you’re welcome. Plus introductions, possessives, question words, pronouns, name words.

Homework? Learn around 100 words, prepare the next two chapters. Practise with the Chinese language CDs.

The Kid’s View
“Chinese is hard! How am I possibly supposed to learn all of those words? WHY am I doing an adult intensive course? WHY can’t I do a kids course? WHY can’t we just do one hour a day?”

Weirdly, though, while my mouth is forming all sorts of weird shapes and my tones sound like I’m trying to yodel through a mouthful of spit, he can parrot back Teacher Chang’s pronunciation and sound, well, vaguely like a Chinese person.

He has, apparently, a “soft tongue”.

It takes us over four hours to drum in the vocab we’re supposed to learn that evening, a session that becomes, frankly, pretty heated.

We introduce a new incentive. After Chinese lessons, every day, if he does well, he will have a number of tokens to spend in the super-duper-outsized arcade in the mall twixt Teacher Chang’s house and our bus stop.

My View?
Before we begin, I am buoyed up by having navigated a series of three buses in Chinese and successfully asked my way to the toilet WITHOUT pointing at the Chinese characters in the guidebook.

Mandarin seems less hard than I’d feared. Sure, the tones are a nightmare. As are the weird “tschyeew”, “jhurh”, “shyiair” type sounds I am expected to make.

On the plus side? There seems to be less grammar than in Romance languages. Tenses are formed by time words, not conjugation, as in Indonesian. There are no genders to worry about.

And, while there’s no common roots to grab clues to meaning from, as with European language, words are assembled from nice shared syllables.

Like this:

Wǎnshang: evening
Wǎnfàn: dinner
Mǐfàn: cooked rice

This is, I think, a very cool and interesting language to learn.

Day 2

Summary
More tone drills and pronunciation drills. Pinyin dictation. Conversation practice. “Who is she?” “She’s my mother.” “What’s her name?”

Next up? Country, nationality, cities and native places. “Where are you going?” “I’m going to Shanghai.” “Where are you from?” “I’m English.” “Have you been to China yet?” “No, I haven’t been to China yet.”

Teacher Chang spends a lot of the day correcting my pronunciation.

“Listen to your son!”
“Fourth tone! Falling tone!”
“Relax your mouth! Look my mouth!”
“Listen to me!”
“NOT chew! tchyeeeuw!”
“Fast tone! Falling tone!”
“STOP moving your tongue! Your tongue flapping about. Tongue FLAT! Say from HERE! Look at me! Chin down! Why your mouth move so much?”

I can only attempt the fourth tone by making a karate chop gesture with my hand and channelling Monty Python’s Knights Who Say NI. I’m quite glad I can’t see the facial contortions this produces, but I can see the effect it has on poor Sophie, who did, after all, teach Chinese language to the province’s brightest and best.

Z gets a lot of rest breaks. During which he helpfully interjects things like: “I think that’s more like a ‘dzh’ sound than a ‘ch’ sound, Mum.”

Homework? Learn all our numbers, 30-odd new words and practise conversation on each other.

And “You no teach your son! Your son’s pronunciation VERY good. Listen to CD. And listen to HIM!”

The Kid’s View
“Actually, Mandarin’s not that bad.”

On the plus side, Z sounds quite like a Chinese person when pronouncing places like Shanghai.

On the down side? When asked a question in Chinese his brain contorts and there is an agonising pause as he puts the Chinese into English, answers the question in English, then turns the English answer back into Chinese.

Twenty yuan go a LOOOONG way at the arcade.

My View?
It appears that Chinese may have rather more grammar than I had thought. On the plus side, we’ve learned a simple tense.

On the down side, this “measure word” (ge) keeps coming up, and it is not immediately obvious what it is or what rules govern it.

Further? My tones are screwed. As are ALL my non-English initial sounds.

We overlap with an advanced student, also a Brit, who gives me some advice on the tones.

“You speak Russian?”

“Well, no. But I learned some at school. And some Polish before that.”

“My friend speaks Russian. Really good Russian. And it makes Chinese really tough.”

“I’ve been sort of using the sides of my tongue for some of the sounds.”

“Yeah. That’s not how you do it.”

Z gives me some helpful advice. “Try and put your tongue down below your teeth.”

My agonising pause before saying anything in Chinese is shorter than his. My challenge is not what to say, but how to pronounce it.

In Practice?
The importance of tones is underlined at the restaurant where we have lunch. I attempt to ask for tea (chá) and a panicky waitress runs over with a pen as I have told them we are missing something (chà). Later, at the local store, I ask for a cold (liáng) beer, and get two (liǎng) beers.

Day 3

We Cover
Conversation practice. More pinyin dictation. Numbers, years, months, dates, days of the week. This is easier than it sounds. Chinese months and days are named by number: May is “wǔ yuè” – “(number) 5 month”, Monday is “xīnqīyī” – “week (number) 1”.

By keeping my tongue entirely still and breathing over it and using my lips I produce more convincing approximations to the Chinese sounds.

Teacher Chang and I spend a lot of time on the Chinese R, a sound that sits somewhere between “zh”, “y” and “r”, which Z can manage and I can’t.

Drilling is hardcore.

“Is this the year 2000 or isn’t it?”
“What is tomorrow’s date?”
“What will the date be next Wednesday?”
“What was the date last Thursday?”
“What day of the week is the day after tomorrow?”
“What date is the year after next?”
“On what day of the week and date did you arrive in China?”

The Kid’s View
“This is a bit embarrassing, Mum, but I’ve realised I don’t actually know the order of the months in English.” We rectify this omission.

Z’s struggling a bit with vocab, still, but his pronunciation’s good. Teacher Chang dishes out a lot of praise and seems genuinely really pleased with his progress.

Yet the agonising pause between being asked a question like “What’s your name?” and answering it has not gone away.

“Try and just hear the question in Chinese and answer it in Chinese,” I say. “Just let the Chinese come straight out. Don’t try and turn it into an English answer. You’ll get the word order all muddled up.”

On his request, we have no homework. Four hours class per day plus four-five hours homework every evening is a lot for a ten-year-old.

My View?
The tones are feeling a bit more surmountable, although my pronunciation is still awful. My “l” has softened sufficiently from the English “l” to meet Sophie’s high standards.

My attempts at “rènshi” (I know) meet with howls of pain, I still have NO idea how to make the Chinese ‘r’ and the word “yuè” (month) is beyond me. On the plus side, my “n” and “ng” sounds are now coming out of my nose.

The grammar? It is beginning to look suspiciously as though Chinese has a grammar every bit as random yet rigorous as English. If not worse.

There are two words for “not”. No obvious rule as to when to use which.

This measure word “ge” keeps coming up. Why oh why is yesterday “zuòtiān” and last year “qùnían” when this year is “jīnnían” and today is “jīntiān”?

On the other hand? I can understand long-ish Chinese sentences and answer them.

In Practice?
At lunch we are asked “liǎng rén”. I hear this, correctly, as “two people”. They are out of Z’s favourite gyoza. I hear the phrase, correctly, as “méi yǒu”, and understand it as “don’t have”.

A small step for mankind. But a giant leap for me. And, yes, OF COURSE I could have understood both those phrases from the context without any lessons whatsoever, but the point is I distinguished and understood the Chinese words.

Day 4

We Cover
More drilling on dates, times, days of the week, years. Birthdays, age, telling the time. We can say when our birthdays are, how old we are, the year we were born.

We are getting to grips with the different ways of telling the time in Chinese. We can hear rapid strings of numbers and understand them.

We cover the daily schedule, which introduces simple time clauses.

My pronunciation’s improving, although my face is still contorting a lot and my sounds are hideously strangulated.

Because Z is still translating the Chinese questions into English and his answers from English into Chinese, when he speaks, as opposed to reading or repeating, his tones slip back to English.

Thanks to my degree and all, I have a better hold on the vocab than Z does. Teacher Chang picks up on this, and does a lot of vocab drilling with him in class. We do conversation practice with each other. It goes OK.

The Kid’s View
“Oh my god! SOOOO much homework.”

“That’s because we had the day off. We still need to learn the stuff we learned on Wednesday.”

His Skype status, I notice, begins: “HOLY SH**! HARDCORE MANDARIN LESSONS AND HOMEWORK 5 DAYS A WEEK! NOOOOOO!”

He can, however, use his Chinese vocab to string together simple sentences. When he’s concentrating, he even sounds vaguely Chinese.

My View
Oh god. Chinese grammar is a lot more hardcore than it looks. Different sorts of time words have different places in the sentence, and I can’t see the rules why.

We have learnt another tense which uses a particle I’d understood as possessive. The same particle also seems to be used to turn a verb into a noun phrase. Or, as the grammar section puts it helpfully:

“When used attributively, a verb or verbal construction must take after it the structural particle 的”.

The pattern is that Z takes a break while Teacher Chang and I do grammar, then I explain the grammar to him as I’ve understood it.

I move from keeping my tongue rooted in my mouth to using it a little on some sounds. Teacher Chang is pleased with the results.

In Practice?
In the pagoda garden I manage the following riveting conversation.

“How old is she?” “She’s seven.” “Is she your son [sic]?” “No, she’s my grand-daughter…. [rapid flood of Chinese met with mystified look…. slows down…]… How old is he?” “He’s ten.”

We watch China launching the first module of their space station on State TV. We catch the time words (“five minutes before…”), the count down, the place names, the name of the module, and fragments of the social small talk between anchors and interviewees.

Not a lot, sure. But given the newsreaders are spitting out characters at the rate of 250-300 per minute, and in Chinese each character has the potential to have meaning all on its own, I don’t think it’s bad going.

Z is SUPER-CHUFFED to count along with the countdown.

Day 5

We Covered
Drills on dates, times, places, conversation practice, pinyin dictation. Public places. Simple time clauses.

“After you go to the cinema to see the film, what are you going to do?”
“What time do you have breakfast before you start class?”
“I don’t have free time until 3 o’clock.”
“Who are you going to the cinema with?”

And, mercifully, some nice “simple” nouns, names of different fruits, pens, pencils, dictionaries.

“What’s this?”
“This is a watermelon.”
“How many dictionaries do you have?”
“I have three dictionaries.”

The Kid’s View
Z had a MAJOR breakthrough yesterday, greeted with rounds of applause from parent and teacher and a yuan spend at the arcade that bought him about an hour on his favourite street racer game.

The breakthrough? He stopped (on some questions, anyway) translating.

“What are you doing later?” I ask him. “I’m going to see my friend,” he comes back, quick as a flash. “What’s your friend’s name?” I say. “His name is Big Wang,” he says, and giggles.

While I’m out of the room, he corrects Teacher Chang on where he’s from in fast, flowing Chinese. When he answers her questions, his pace sounds fast, and his tones sound good.

“Baby make good progress!” says Teacher Chang. “VERY good progress. VERY good baby!”

Z is, I note, sufficiently in awe of Sophie not once to have asked her to stop calling him “baby”.

Our tones are now sufficiently improved for her to let us have a go at reading out the dialogue from the book WITHOUT her reading them to us first.

AND… We can both come out with simple sentences, while I’ll have a pop at more complex sentences.

My View?
A day and a half of trying to speak Chinese without moving my tongue except on certain sounds seems to have taken the worst of the Slavic edge off my sibilants and softened down my English sounds.

On the downside? My “x”, “q” and “zh” sounds are still really bad, my “r” is unrecognisable, my “j” needs a lot of help and I cannot say the important syllable “qù” (go/gone/past etc.) for the life of me.

I’m beginning to understand the sense breaks in a Chinese sentence, where to pause.

Chinese grammar? It’s going to be hell.

There seems to be a loose rule to the use of the two negatives. With a more abstract/idea-led word (like, think, know), you use “bu”. With a more concrete word (have), you use “mei”.

Yet… To say something as simple as “I’m going to the cinema with my friend” in Chinese you need to use two words “together… with”. One goes with the noun/pronoun at the beginning and one with the verb at the end. Yowsers.

And, the true horror of measure words is beginning to unfold. In Chinese, as in Indonesian, when you are enumerating something, you put one of three measure words in between the number and the noun. So you don’t ask for “three plums” but “three fruits of plums”.

In Chinese? There are EIGHT measure words. And no solid rules. In Chinese, most fruit take “ge”. The rest use other measure words.

I have a feeling this is going to be infinitely worse than just remembering whether a noun is masculine or feminine.

“So, there’s no rule? You just need to know it?” I ask Teacher Chang.

“Yes, you practice and you learn,” she says.

The tone picture is worse than it looks, too. The number “yi” (1) can be pronounced with three separate tones. What fresh hell is this?

And, Chinese “y” and “w” sounds are so soft that syllables beginning with them seem to run together (to my English ears).

Worst of all? We are only on page 40 of the book.

In Practice?
After 20 hours of Chinese lessons and at least that many hours’ homework, plus an hour or so in the arcade, we don’t get out much. We watch The Last Emperor and catch a few of the words in the Chinese songs.

WEEK 1, IN SUMMARY

My goal for learning Chinese was to be able to get around the country independently — tickets, hotel rooms, meals, directions, toilets — and manage social small talk with people we meet on trains.

In some ways, we’ve got a lot further than I’d thought we would in our first week. My pronunciation’s good enough for me to be able to say the name of a street or sight slowly and carefully and be understood first time. And we can already manage the basic social niceties.

Z’s tones are better than mine but he’s very, very shy about using anything more than hello, goodbye and thank you.

We can both form simple sentences and understand simple sentences spoken at normal speed, as well as more complex ones spoken at teacher speed. And we know 300 or so words.

Which, after twenty hours’ intensive one-to-two study in a European language, would be an atrocious result. But, for the first week of intensive Chinese is not, I think, that bad.

Tomorrow we’ll be out exploring the town a bit more. So we’ll see how the work translates into practice. And whether Z gets his jokebook.

To read about our second week learning Mandarin, click here.

In the unlikely event you’re inspired to have a stab at Chinese, you can buy the course books here:

Buy The Intensive Spoken Chinese Book on book depository for $16.82

Buy the Intensive Spoken Chinese CDs on book depository for $18.44

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