The Road to Mandarin
Anyone learning Mandarin as a non-native will probably, at some stage of their learning journey, curse at how much of a pain it is. Whether you’re struggling with the tones, the pinyins, or the characters, you’re almost assured that it requires some hair-pulling moments.
I thought I’d share some insight into our day-to-day life embracing the language. But before I do, allow me to contextualize the way Chinese played as the undertone in my life.
I am a Singaporean of Chinese descent. However, like many others growing up outside of China, I could barely speak a word of mandarin until age 6.
In a melting pot of ethnic immigrants who all had a hand in shaping Singapore’s multiracial society that it is today, the language one grows up with is a bit of a luck of the draw. My parents, both second-generation Chinese, grew up during an era of Singapore where they communicated by learning the tongues of neighbours of their kampung, or village. Since they started dating, it was mix of Cantonese and English that got them by. My mother, who went to a village convent, learnt very little Chinese at school. She earned her street cred through her versatile knowledge of dialects though, thanks to the mix of immigrants in her village. My father, on the other hand, ended up in a Chinese school. However, he acquired English skills in his early 20s when he trained under the British as the first batch of chefs in Singapore. So whilst he still gets the basics like ‘he’ and ‘she’ mixed up today, as a chef his vocabulary of the various cuts of meats and sauces in English is pretty phenomenal!
And so it became that English was the lingua franca in our household right from the onset. It seemed like the right choice for my parents — English was the language of the colonists who ran our country, and arguably the ticket to a ‘promising’ future for the children. And given the monolingual environment and my chatty nature, I flourished in the language relatively easily.
However, all that changed when I hit my primary years. My school, whilst a convent, was located in the heartlands of Singapore where most of my schoolmates grew up in Chinese-speaking households. I still remember being thrust into the realities of having to cough out bits of an unfamiliar second language on the first day of school. I could barely utter a sentence in Chinese, yet my first task at school was to order my own plate of noodles from the canteen. At 10c a plate, I made sure I remembered my “script” as I waited in line for my turn. I will never forget the mortifying experience when the foodstall seller yelled at me for not knowing if I wanted ‘guǒtiáo’ (flat white noodles) or ‘mífěn’ (thin white noodles). The only sentence I had memorised was ‘duō shǎǒ qián?’ (“how much?”)
Embracing Chinese
Over the years, my relationship with Chinese grew into something of a love-hate. Whilst I enjoyed the music and poetry, I found the process of learning the language excruciatingly dry. Thanks to a strict Chinese tutor though, I earned my stripes the hard way — memorization, followed by regurgitation. Chinese was all about practice, and I made it through another 12 years of Chinese, by the sheer number of hours put in retain the information in my head, until the exam was over. Come to think of it, it definitely helped that the feather duster always laid next to my tender limbs.
As with life’s twists and turns, Chinese — in all its quirks and character — has become my little obsession as I transitioned into my adult years. Not surprisingly, this fascination for Chinese stemmed from my immersion into the motherland in 2004, when I landed an unexpected job opportunity which brought me to China for the first time. I knew nothing of the country back then, except that it was deemed the ‘Asian Tiger’ that was poised to change the landscape of global business. I worked for a French multinational then, and my role being based in their joint-venture — a Chinese state-owned enterprise — required me to use Chinese on a daily basis — on emails, phone calls, meetings and arguments. With the new country, new working language and new role — I was knee-deep in the steep learning curve.
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Fast forward 15 years later, I am now a mother of two young boys, both of whom are under 5. And because their Swiss father speaks French, our household now has an ‘eclectic’ mix of language use. However, ‘language nazis’ would frown at our interchanging use of language at home today — we’ve unfortunately never been able to apply the strict rules of One-Parent One-Language (OPOL) to our children. My husband Vincent, having had to use English so much since his time in Asia now, often forgets to switch back to French to the children. And as for myself, I felt obliged to take on both Chinese and English with the children.
Learning Chinese in the Motherland has given us a priceless opportunity to let our children come into the language much more easily than I ever did during my time as a young student. However, though our fate in Beijing this time was never planned (and may not last forever), this chance to immerse into Mandarin in the best environment possible was one of the benefits weighed up in our consideration for the move.
Six months on, Mandarin has permeated slowly but surely into our household. Kai, our curious four year-old, goes to a school where most of the children are from Beijing. Of course, playground speak is possibly the most enjoyable way to pick up a language. Kai learns terms like 翻筋斗 (somersault) before he successfully does one, and calls me 淘气的妈妈(cheeky mama) whenever I do something silly.
Why Mandarin is difficult
I thought I’d document my observation about Mandarin learning here, because being the in-between person for my husband and children, I find the journey of learning this language particularly unique. Notoriously known to be a difficult language, you immediately wonder how 1.4 billion people on this planet seem to have no problem acquiring it. Well, unlike most other languages, Chinese is especially challenging for non-native speakers because there are multiple aspects to learning it.
Firstly, the terms used are completely different and therefore speakers have no context with which they can relate them to. For example, the word ‘fire’ is relatively predictable in many European languages — ‘feu’, ‘fuego’ or ‘feuer’ in French, Spanish and German respectively. To remember ‘huo’ requires some form of memorization.
A second challenge are the tones. In Chinese, there are four tones in the language, and if one does not pronounce the word in the right tone, the meaning gets lost very quickly. Fire is ‘huǒ’ in the third tone, and if one says ‘huò’ in the fourth tone, it means something completely different. So, if I said ‘huo’ in the fourth tone instead of the third, it instead of saying 那里出了火 (there is a fire there), the person on the receiving end could interpret it as 那里出了祸 (there is an accident there).
As if that was not tricky enough, the challenge is further compounded by the third level of complication — the characters. Chinese characters stemmed from 2,000 years of graphical representations, and therefore have no correlation to phonetics. So ‘huò’ in a fourth tone has many possible characters — 货goods, 祸 accident, 惑 to be puzzled (and more!). And so whenever my poor husband hears somebody say something he is remotely familiar with, such as ‘jiā’ 家 (home), he often assumes he knows which word it is, and unfortunately there are over 20 different possibilities for ‘jia’, across 4 different tones.
A fourth challenge which I never quite realized until having to teach my own son Chinese today, is the use of pinyins. My older son is at the age where he is learning to join alphabets to form little words. And so English words such as ‘rat’, ‘mat’, ‘cat’ — are easy to pick up. Phonetics is a logical concept, and over time they get used to blending. However, today’s Chinese also requires users to learn the pinyins, or phonetic letters of Chinese words. This is so that Chinese can be more accurately pronounced. When we say ‘chong’, it is significantly different from ‘cong’, ‘song’ or ‘zong’. And so native Chinese speaking children learn to read and pronounce the alphabets ABC very differently from the way it is pronounced in the western setting. The phonetics for ‘rat’ for example is not pronounceable in Chinese, but one wouldn’t know that unless you know the rules of pinyin.
One thing I have learnt to appreciate over time however, is the beauty of the Chinese character. Every Chinese character has a root meaning, and when combined, gives life to a word or a phrase. My name for example is 娟蕾 (juan lei). The character is juan, which means graceful, has the root characters of a female, with a mouth and the moon. Whilst 蕾 lei, is a flower bud. The root characters have connotations to grass, the rain and a padi field. I didn’t think much of my name when I was little (except for how difficult it was to write it!), but I have great fondness for it today, especially since it was my father who chose it for me.
Recently, older son Kai En came home from school excited that he learnt the story behind the word ‘fire’, or 火。 He stood with his legs wide open, and put his arms up, much like the shape of the Chinese character. He instantly recognized the word 人 (man) in it.
The next day while I was washing up in our kitchen, he suddenly spotted a red bag (picture below) hanging on the wall, that had the words 灭火毯 (mièhuǒtǎn) written in bold characters. He recognized the middle word, and immediately asked what that was. It was a fire extinguishing bag. Before he knew it, he was learning another word: 灭 miè -to extinguish (fire). The character spoke for itself.
And so the challenge, like the Great Wall, is long and arduous. We are only at the beginning, but I am fascinated with how this language is taking shape in our lives, and I hope to live to tell the tale!
