“Laowai, so do You Really Want to Learn Chinese??”
If you are in business (or politics) today, you probably need a China strategy (OK, Google is an exception; they wrote China off in a huff). Increasingly, we have business people and even celebrities starting to learn Chinese or having their kids learn Chinese. Mark Zukerberg of Facebook pulled off some intelligible Chinese in a recent Q&A in China (his Chinese was “mamahuhu”, neither a horse nor a tiger, i.e., so-so), and charmed the socks off of the Tsinghua audience. Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister of Australia, actually does speak fluent Chinese (I ran into him once on a business trip in Australia). And the list goes on.…
In China, foreigners are “Laowai”, literally “Old Foreigner(s)” — actually a neutral or endearing term Chinese use for foreigners in general; like Mr. Wang’s friends may call him “Old Wang” even though he may not be old. And the general consensus among “Laowai”, as my Scottish wife would say, Chinese is a “hellish” language. BTW, my wife also knows French and Spanish.
Chinese uses pictogram-based characters, and is monosyllabic. The challenge is the total syllables available in Chinese number only about 10% of those in English. So the Chinese, being a clever bunch, invented tonal variations. In Mandarin, there are four tones: level, upward, undulating, and downward. But that still brings the total to 40% of those in English. So it means many Chinese characters share the same exact pronunciation. Even Chinese people often have to ask each other to clarify which character they mean after all! And with a character-based language, there are also no plural forms of noun characters, verb tenses, or the third person singular verb forms…
Once, my wife had a business meeting at a particular university in Shanghai. She got to the neighborhood, but needed help to find the exact location. So she asked the locals, “where is the so-and-so Daxue?” “Daxue??” the Chinese were puzzled. “Da” usually means big. But “Xue” could be “Learning, Snow, Blood, and …” So the Chinese probably thought my wife was a little crazy, “looking for big snow in the sweltering summer, OK?” or “needing lots of blood, but why?” My wife also tried out various tonal combinations or permutations on “Da-Xue”. And one Chinese was very apologetic and said he did not understand her “English!!” My wife then tried to toss in more words like “books”, “library”, plus some ingenious miming of reading and studying. Finally, some clever Chinese got it, “Haha, Daxue — a place for Big Learning!” And everyone, including my wife who was “crying” with relief, burst into laughter…
My wife would often ask me the proper pronunciation/tone for a Chinese character/phrase, thinking that I ought to know. But the tonal variation and tongue contortion in Mandarin are also challenging for some Chinese, like me who grew up with the Shanghai dialect. So I just gave up, and told her not to worry about the tones (since I am not good with them anyway), and since Chinese is a contextual language, just learn as much vocabulary (phrases) as possible and throw them together to build up the context so a clever Chinese can figure it out…
So dear reader, if as a “laowai”, you decide to jump into that “renshanrenhai” (i.e., “people mountain, people sea”) of China, and want to learn some Chinese, may this be your lesson #1. (To be continued…)
Originally published on Byron’s LinkedIn Pulse
Edited by: Joanne Zeng
