My Experience Studying Chinese
Possessing an extensive knowledge of a foreign language is a skill that is very often underestimated. Well, of course communication between people from two different worlds has never been easier - there are speech-to-speech apps allowing an almost seamless conversation in a foreign language to be had, and Google translate isn’t as laughable as it used to be a few years back. However, no matter what we use, there is nothing quite like being able to express ourselves in a different language.
Tomas Masaryk once said: “As many languages you know, as many times you are a human being”. As a person who spent over 12 years on learning a foreign language, I could not agree more. For example, I am a different person in English (my second language) than in Polish (my first language) based on the different words and expressions that I use. Even if I were to try to literally translate everything I say between the two languages, some of the jokes or phrases would fall flat for the lack of lexical sense or contextual knowledge.
So being aware of how hard it is to master a foreign language and how you essentially need to almost recreate your personality when you speak it, I decided to learn yet another foreign language. I had the exciting opportunity to go on an exchange year to do it, and my choices were narrowed down to Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries, and a Chinese speaking country. I’ve heard from a lot of people that Chinese was hard, especially in comparison to the so-called ‘easy’ languages such as Spanish and Portuguese, so I felt like I was faced with a difficult decision. On one hand, I wanted to use this year to become conversational in yet another language, on the other I wanted to challenge myself and test my abilities, so I chose the Chinese speaking country. In that way I spent my year 11 in a Chinese speaking environment with the sole goal of learning Chinese.
It was very depressing at first… The first four months that I spent abroad were absolutely fruitless in terms of my language learning. I could not write the characters well (or even correctly); I kept making mistakes in strokes and the stroke order (which at the time, I thought was not this big of a deal). As an avid coffee drinker, I remember the first time I tried ordering coffee with milk by saying, “一咖啡和牛奶” which not only was poor grammar but also most definitely poor pronunciation and, frankly, vocabulary. Nonetheless, when it came to the end of my first year of learning Chinese, I was able to confidently order what I wanted and to be understood, “請來一杯拿鐵”. That was a small thing that materialized the progress I had made.
The big thing was, as it always is, the language exam - Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language (TOCFL). At the end of my first year of studying Chinese all the exchange students would take a test of proficiency in Mandarin as a foreign language, and I remember seeing this table that mentioned recommended studying periods for different levels of the exam.
As you can see, the number of hours you need to put into reaching just an elementary level of Mandarin proficiency is quite high, and even higher if you learn Chinese in a non-Chinese-speaking area. After a year of studying in a Chinese-speaking area, I was able to obtain a Band A level 2 certificate, however, as you can see from the table, it would be probably only feasible for me to achieve level 1 if I wasn’t given the opportunity to study abroad. That brings me to the conclusion that - yes, Chinese is a demanding language (and a very different language from its Indo-European counterparts), and it takes a lot of time to learn; however, it is by far the most intriguing and beautiful language that I know.
Another amazing thing about studying Chinese is how friendly and eager to help the native speakers are. I know it might come across as an awful generalization, but I just want to credit here all the native Mandarin speakers that have voluntarily expanded my knowledge about the Chinese culture and language. I remember being on a cultural fair, for which I prepared a poster with Chinese writing on it. Of course, I had tried to write the characters as accurately as possible, however, I had only partially succeeded. A lady came up to me who was a 國文老師 (which translates to ‘Chinese teacher’, but actually means ‘the national language teacher’ - which I find way cooler!) and told me that 波 needed this sickle in the fourth stroke, which saved me a lot of embarrassment. Another time, I made some friends from the north of China, it was the first time I have ever met anyone from up north, and they were kind enough to speak slower and enunciate every word to accommodate me in the conversation; or when my friend from the south of China introduced me to different traditional dishes from his region. I literally cannot recall a single negative experience with trying to speak Chinese to native Chinese speakers. The only negative about exercising your Mandarin with Chinese speakers is that sometimes they will be just too polite to correct you, so you’d need to ask them to correct you yourself!
All of this and I have not mentioned my university experience yet! I feel extremely lucky to be studying Chinese at the University of Edinburgh. All my teachers in my first year were native Chinese speakers and tried to speak to us mainly in Chinese, which I found extremely helpful with starting to speak Chinese after a year-long break. The teachers at the university are so encouraging and always make small talk with us in Chinese in the beginning of each class, which is really nice and organic, as we get to, for example, complain in Chinese about the amount of homework in all our courses or other trivial matters. The lessons in university have been extremely engaging, and the teachers use a lot of pedagogical helps, such as: Quizlet, Padlet, Kahoot, YouTube, and many more! There are more learning materials to help you study Mandarin than you might think! For example, I got really invested in this channel which was created by a Canadian guy who moved to Shanghai and has been living there for quite a while now. The channel, ‘Jared’, explores differences in people’s expectations when they first come to China and the reality they face after living in China for a while (I think my favorite aspect of the process is just getting used to the comradery – calling people who are unrelated to you: auntie, uncle, grandma, etc.). So, when in one of the classes, I saw that a part of our homework was to watch one of Jared’s videos, I was overjoyed. I think it shows how in touch the teachers are with the current Mandarin learning network and how well they use all the available online resources to help us study. Besides that, the teachers in university often pass onto us a lot of exciting opportunities that relate to studying Chinese, and opportunities to practice our Chinese outside of the classroom - i.e. Tandem, or events organized by the China Futures Society.
So yes, it takes time to learn Chinese. It can be a difficult language, especially for a native Indo-European language speaker. Therefore, studying Chinese often impresses a lot of people (even some native Chinese speakers). However, I wanted to emphasize that there really aren’t any ‘easy’ languages. If you decide to learn a language and expect to see results after putting no effort into learning it, you’re not going to speak it or get better at it. No matter which language you choose, it will be hard. Nonetheless, if you do choose to learn Chinese, I can guarantee that the language will open you up to a lot of new perspectives and challenge things that you would otherwise take for granted. You will be able to understand the Chinese culture better and the paradigm of ‘your culture’ will be forever changed. One last finishing note - as with learning any language - be prepared to make mistakes, and even more importantly, be prepared to learn from them. J All the best of luck!
By Anastazja Domek
Member of the China Futures Society, University of Edinburgh
