Putonghua

I was excited to find, when reading a recent US News (recent being 2 months ago…) entitled “50 Ways to Improve Your Life in 2006,” that learning Chinese was one of the fifty suggestions. The article says,

To be sure, you shouldn’t expect to pick it up overnight. Chinese is one of the
hardest languages for English speakers to learn. Words are depicted with
pictograms rather than spelled out with an alphabet. And saying a word
using the wrong tone can change its meaning from “mother” to “scold” or “horse.”

Difficult – oh yes. But I’m already on my way to improving my life. On Monday evening I had my first Chinese class of the semester. Our foreign affairs office has arranged a beginning (very-very-beginning) Mandarin class for the foreign teachers on the campus. Two evenings a week after teaching classes I get to sit in a very cold classroom and be a student.

We have met twice and have learned things like “Wo jiao Ruth.” My favorite, if someone asks how you are doing, “Ni hao ma?” you can say, “ma ma tu tu” (so-so). It sounds really funny. Our teacher writes the words in characters so we can become familiar with them and then writes it in pinyin so we can actually read them.

Here is an interesting comment on pinyin (the phonetic spelling of characters). Foreigners who have come to the country since the 17th century have used a variety of spelling systems. The current pinyin system was developed by the communist government in 1933 and was only officially used since 1958. One of my students mentioned she is teaching her mother pinyin. It is my only connection to understanding Chinese, but it is not even known by older generations. Now, people use pinyin on the computer and for text messages. You type in the pinyin and the computer or cell phone converts to the characters. There is concern that the younger generations will lose some of their proficiency in reading and writing characters because of this.

To learn Chinese you have to first learn the pinyin pronunciations. Some are the same as English and some are quite different (q = chee, x = sh, zh = j). And then there are sounds that we just don’t have in English. Each sound can be said with four different tones (high, rising, swooping down and back up, and falling) to have four different meanings. You can say the same word with the wrong tones and no one will understand you. Believe me – I’ve tried it. You can be a relatively fluent speaker of Chinese and still be completely illiterate. The characters are fascinating but are completely unfamiliar. Educated Chinese use between 6000 and 8000 characters, and they basically have to be memorized. Suddenly a 26 letter alphabet seems ridiculously easy. And then you can read Chinese and still not be able to write it. The strokes of each character have to be made in a certain order for it to be correct. In case it needed to be a little more difficult, there are traditional and simplified Characters which, to the untrained eye, look nothing alike. Simplified characters are mostly used in everyday life, and traditional characters are somtimes used on advertisements, signs, or for special announcements, since it looks prettier. They are also used in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Another note. "Putonghua" refers to standard Mandarin, as opposed to a number of other dialects. Recently in taxis we keep seeing signs that say (in Chinese characters) "Please speak Putonghua." We are always like, "Aw man, that's rough." :)

The encouraging thing about starting from scratch: anything is improvement! I can almost feel my brain straining and expanding. Yep, I’d better be getting smarter.