What I wish I’d known before learning Mandarin
Three years ago, I got the opportunity to go to university. After getting a scientific bachelor’s degree, I chose to study foreign languages. The complete opposite, I know ; why? Well I’ve always been passionate about foreign languages and the abilities it gives yo. Travelling? Useful. Moving to another country? Useful. Meeting and talking to people from all around the world? Useful. Care to pursue international studies? Useful.
So, then came the choice of which languages to learn. As a French student, I naturally chose English as my first language. Then… Mandarin Chinese (not so naturally). I know what you’re thinking. Every time I say that to people, they look at me with big eyes like “Sorry, what? Did you say Mandarin? But why?”. See, I was thinking about the importance of emergent languages nowadays : English, Spanish, Russian, Arabic… As I had learned Spanish for a few years, I wanted to spice things up a bit and learn a new language : Chinese! I saw it as a challenge. And it really is a challenge. This is how Mandarin Chinese became my second language I was going to learn at uni. I was really excited and thought after my three-year degree I’d be able to speak Chinese fluently… Now welcome back to reality, three years later in my third (and last) year of my degree.
As I said, I am a French student. I am currently an Erasmus student and doing my last year here at The University of Kent, Canterbury. Let’s say the way of teaching is different compared to France. There, we used to practise more; we had ten hours of seminars during the week compared to three here. However, I find the level more difficult here… Besides, imagine learning Mandarin for me, but in English?! Which means I am a bit lost sometimes. You see, there is actually no alphabet in Mandarin. It’s only characters, and it seems like there’s an infinite number of them (there are approximately 20,000 characters in total). Each character can be pronounced in four different ways, and so tones. Which means there are four meanings to each character. Also, when you combine each character with an other, it gives you a whole lot of new words. Now you know what I mean when I say it is quite difficult learning the Chinese language, as you must not stop practising writing the characters. Even Chinese people confess they have to practise writing, otherwise they can forget. Can you imagine, forgetting how to write your own language? However there are no tenses, plurals or genders (like we do have in French). The grammatical structure is not at all the same: mix up all the words in a sentence and BAM! There you go, Chinese. Magic.
As for what I’m going to do after my three-year degree, it does not involve Mandarin. And that is alright. It was a good decision at the time but unfortunately, I don’t see myself living there or continue learning it, as I prefer to do something else now. See new horizons. Still, I will keep the notions I learned in my next two years in journalism school. I know I didn’t lose my time learning it. You never lose time learning anything anyway, do you? Do I regret having taken Chinese as my second language? I don’t. Because despite the difficulty and the challenge it represents, I found learning it nevertheless interesting. It opened me up to a new culture and way of communicating… And not everyone can say they know a few things about the Mandarin language!
Would you take the challenge?
With thanks to @Tracy Enright
