How to Learn Any Language 49

How to Learn Any Language 49

Chinese
Chinese is actually more of a life involvement than a language you choose to study. When you’re in your easy chair studying, Chinese has more power to make you forget it’s dinner time than any other language. It has more power to draw you out of bed earlier than necessary to sneak in a few more moments of study. There’s simply more there.
More people speak Chinese than any other language on earth. There’s hardly a community in the world that doesn’t have someone who speaks Chinese as a native. Even in the 1940’s, when I first began studying Chinese, there was a Chinese restaurant and a Chinese laundry even in our small town of Greensboro, North Carolina. You can count on conversation practice in Chinese from the Chinese laundries of Costa Rica to the Chinese restaurants of Israel.
The Chinese Communists on the mainland and the Chinese Nationalists in Taiwan agree that the national language of Chinese is the northern Chinese dialect of Mandarin. Accept no substitute. Be sure you know what you’re doing if you set out to learn any Chinese dialect other than Mandarin! It was almost impossible to find a Chinese person in a Chinese restaurant in America who spoke Mandarin forty years ago. They all spoke a subdialect of Cantonese, being descendants of the Chinese labourers who came to build America’s transcontinental railroad in the 1800’s. Today it’s almost impossible to find a Chinese restaurant in America where the waiters don’t speak Mandarin.
Don’t let yourself be drawn into Cantonese merely because your Chinese friends happen to be of Cantonese descent or because your new employees are from Cantonese speaking Hong Kong. Even the Cantonese themselves are now trying to learn Mandarin!
Spoken Chinese is enthrallingly easy. There’s nothing we could call “grammar” in Chinese. Verbs, nouns, and adjectives never change endings for any reason. I once caught a showoff student of Chinese trying to intimidate new students by warning them that Chinese had a different word for “yes” and “no” for each question! That’s largely true, but not the slightest bit difficult.
The closest thing Chinese has to what we think of as grammar is what we’ll call “interesting ways.” When you pose a question in Chinese you present both alternatives. Thus, “Are you going?” becomes “You go not go?” or “Are you going or not?” If you are going, the word for “yes” to that question is “go.” If you’re not going, you say “Not
go.” Likewise, “Are you going to play?” becomes, literally translated, “You play not play?” To answer “yes,” you say “Play.” “No” is “Not play.”
You’ve already learned some of the “middle language” essential to the mastery of Chinese. Don’t fear that, because there’s a middle language, you’re being called upon to learn two languages to acquire just one! It’s a shortcut. The middle language is English – the way a Chinese person would say it if all he could do were to come up with the English words literally and nothing more. Thus, “Do you have my pencil?” in middle language is ‘You have I-belong pencil, no have?” “The man who lives in the white house” becomes “Live in white house-belong man.”
I find it helpful to look for the middle language no matter what language I’m studying. In Russian, “The vase is on the table” becomes “Vase on table.” “Do you have a pen?” becomes “Is by you pen?” “I like the cake” in Spanish is “To me is pleasing the cake.” “Where have you studied German?” in German is “Where have you German studied?” “Do you want me to help?” in Yiddish is “Do you want I should help?” – a construction that should come as no surprise to anyone with immigrant Jewish grandparents.
The middle language helps you get the hang of things. Once you see the structure as revealed by the middle language, it’s easier for you to climb inside the targt language. Learning the “interesting ways” through middle language is especially important in Chinese.
Chinese has no alphabet. Each ideogram or character is complete unto itself and each must be learned. There are said to be as many as eighty thousand Chinese characters. Fear not. You can carry on fairly sophisticated conversations with knowledge of a few hundred characters and you can carry on like a Ming orator once you compile a couple of thousand. You can read a Chinese newspaper with fewer than six thousand. Though lacking an alphabet, Chinese nonetheless has 214 radicals, the elements that make up the building blocks for almost every Chinese character. The fact that there are clusters of Chinese characters that surrender to you by the family group makes the going quicker and easier.
One problem: the pronunciation of each Chinese character is always one syllable and one syllable only. Therefore, the same sound has to represent a lot of different things. We have a slight touch of that in English – a pier has nothing to do with a peer – but imagine how much utterance duplication you’d have if each word in the language were limited to one syllable only. (Beginners who learn that the Chinese word for “chopsticks” is kwai dze and “bus” is gung gung chee chuh may object. I simply mean that the term for “chopsticks” is two separate words [characters] in Chinese and the term for “bus” is four!) A Chinese textbook for Americans that makes no pretense of being complete lists seventy-five different meanings for the sound shih alone!
Chinese differentiates among the various possibilities of meaning by the use of tones. Each Chinese word is assigned a specific tone, like a musical note. Mandarin Chinese has four tones, Cantonese has nine.
The word wu in Mandarin’s first tone means “room,” in tone two it means “vulgar,” in tone three it means “five,” and in tone four wu means “disobedient.”
Take the sentence “Mother is scolding the horse.” The spoken Chinese transliterates as ma ma ma ma. If we want to make it a question and ask “Is mother scolding the horse?” just add a fifth ma. Without the tones a Chinese person would hear an
unintelligible babble. With the correct tones, however, it would be as clear to him as “Peering at a pair of pairs on the pier” is to us.
Ideally you should know the tone of each word and the circumstances under which words shifts tones, but until you attain that lofty peak, you’ll be okay if you do your best to imitate the tonality of the native Chinese speaker on your cassettes.
Much is made of our ability to read the Chinese soul through the Chinese language. “Tomorrow” in Chinese is ming tien, which literally means “bright day.” The character for “good’ literally depicts woman with child, suggesting that a mother and child are emblematic of everything good. The character meaning “peace” depicts a woman under a roof. The character for “discord,” however, is three women under one roof!
All that is indeed fun but hardly a cryptanalysis of the Chinese soul. After all, how much can you tell about the English soul by noting that the word breakfast really means “breaking” the “fast” you’ve engaged in since your last bite the night before?

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