I cannot say that I can speak Chinese yet. Sometimes I can actually recognize a word or two, and occasionally even a simple question posed by some well-meaning person. ("How old are you" seems to be a standard conversation starter.) However, whenever I try to answer them in Chinese they just start laughing. We are obviously a source of constant amusement, which is fine. If you can't laugh at yourself, life is pretty sad.
I am learning some Chinese though, as I sit in 4 days a week on the first grade Pinyin Chinese class. (Pinyin is the Chinese way of spelling words using our western alphabet.) The class always begins with the teacher telling the class to stand up and then she says, "Good morning, class." We all answer "laoshi hao," which is literally "teacher good." Thank goodness they sit the biggest people in the back. All the other students are Tariqa's size and come up to my waist. I sit with my knees squished under the desk, on a chair that is barely the size of my bottom. Twice a week I teach the same students English, and it never ceases to make me chuckle when one of the little fellows looks at my work and parrots 'good' and gives me a thumbs up, like I do with them. One day a week I actually have to teach them in the very next period. They seem to be able to adjust to my dual roles, probably better than I.
I now mostly know 70 Chinese characters. To know a character you need to know how to read and pronounce the Pinyin word and spell it correctly with the proper tone mark, as well as learn how to correctly write and memorize the Chinese character. The student are usually also required to memorize the passage using the word, often consisting of 6 to 8 lines, similar to our nursery rhymes. An example of a lesson is:
Zao chén shàng xué qù, (a sample with tone marks)
zao chen shang xue qu, Morning up school go
mian xiang tai yang zou, face towards sun work
qian mian shi dong, front side/direction is east
hou mian shi xi, behind side/direction is west
zuo mian shi bei left side/direction is north
you mian shi nan. right side/direction is south
q is pronounced ch, x is pronounced sh, zh is unpronounceable for me, djz.
It occurred to me that the tone marks might not come through on your computer, so I only did one line. Each mark is a different inflection, down, up, down then up, and short and higher than normal (-). You need to have memorized about 2000 characters to be able to read the newspaper. Children's books are still beyond me. People have told me that Chinese is the most difficult language to learn in the world. It certainly was not developed for education of the masses. You know you are in trouble when native speakers ponder and erase several times when you ask them how to write a word in Pinyin. It is also equally mystifying to have helpful college student disagree about how to translate a simple nursery rhyme from the first-grade book.
Each Chinese character is one syllable, and has its own distinct symbol. That's the good news. When I first started listening to Chinese tapes before we moved here I made the comment that everything sounded the same. I have since found out that the reason it sounded the same is because it IS the same. An example is the word shi. It is the end syllable for teacher, lao shi, it also means 10, stone, and the verb to be. The tonal accent over the "i" is different in three of the words, but both 10 and stone are spelled and pronounced exactly the same, so you really can't tell which is which. What makes Chinese really fun, though, is that there are basically no punctuation marks used, no capitalization, and each syllable is written separately, in its own little box. The syllables are not grouped by words so you never know which ones make up a word unless someone tells you and you memorize it. Also, just because a particular character means stone, that does not mean that when it is combined with other syllables it will still mean stone; maybe it will, maybe it won't. I do have to say though that I get great satisfaction out of writing Chinese characters. To me, they are an art form. Each must be written exactly, until you are in a hurry, then it doesn't matter, it all just looks like squiggles. There is a quick way of writing characters and the Chinese people can usually read each other's writing.
Yesterday I took the Chinese test with the other first graders and think I only got 5 wrong out of 100 points! I actually got all the tone marks correct on the 10 words we had to do and all the Chinese characters except two; unfortunately they were both used twice. The night before I had just written them again 15 times, the third or fourth group of 15, and said to Tim, "I know I'm in trouble because I just closed the book and realize I still don't have a clue what the characters look like." On the test I was again a total blank. The little guy who sits in front of me looked back at my test periodically and either gave me a thumbs up or would try to tell me the answer I should write down, a waste of time since I couldn't understand him anyway. I just grinned back and shrugged my shoulders, and kept on trying to remember. Maybe years from now I will be able to actually say that I have learned Chinese. Since I have always enjoyed a challenge, I guess I will be busy and happy for a long time to come.
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