I've been studying Mandarin Chinese for 6 weeks now, and I plan to continue for the foreseeable future. I thought I'd write down a few notes on that for (hopefully) my own amusement at a later date.
Why? This is (quite naturally) the question everyone asks and, weirdly, I don't really have an answer. I just felt like it! I've always had an interest in China since being born there, although I've no particularly legitimate claim to that interest since we moved back to Scotland when I was a baby. I've studied languages before (my degree is in French, with 2 years of Russian thrown in for good measure) so it's clearly something I'm capable of. I think more than anything it's probably just a deep seated ambition to do something new, open new doors, meet new people and so on. With the huge upside of giving me better access to a fascinating country with an ever-bigger presence on the world stage.
My method of learning is through an evening course at The University of Glasgow, 2 hours per week plus a bit of personal study. And I will say it's been an amazingly refreshing experience returning to university and actually wanting to be there. It's the same old trite story, but when I first went to uni at 18 years old I was straight out of school, had no real idea of what I wanted to do and was simply there because I had good enough grades and it was the done thing. I went to classes, I did all my homework, I studied a bit, I got ok grades, but I did everything out of obligation and fear of repercussions, rather than a sense of actually wanting to learn things.
Now, picking up Mandarin 15 or so years later, paying my own money for the privilege and using my limited pool of free time to do so, the stakes are higher but in a lovely way. When I'm studying I'm actually trying to use my time efficiently, coming up with techniques which will help me understand and retain information as quickly as possible, as opposed to just completing the checkbox exercise of homework. And so, going to class a week later, there's such a rewarding feeling in tangibly seeing your abilities improve week over week.
So, 6 weeks in, what have I learned so far?
- Pinyin and pronunciation in general has by far been the biggest focus, and understandably so. The way words and sentences are pronounced is just completely alien to an English speaker, but is completely key to being understood in Chinese. I think this is something I'll struggle to click into for the foreseeable future. When spoken slowly I understand all of the tones, but at pace or in complex sentences it all goes out the window as it's just so hard not to slip back into an English pattern of enunciation.
- Numbers (I can fairly fluidly count to 100)
- The rules of writing Chinese characters. In particular stroke order, which is far more helpful in understanding characters than I initially expected.
- 50 or so common characters, including numbers, the basic natural elements, and some basic vocab. Using flashcards for practice I've learned to comfortably recognise, read and write all of these.
- A few sentences (What's your name? etc).
My main takeaway from all of this is that Chinese is a slow language to get going with - if you picked up French tomorrow, in 6 weeks you'd be devouring vocabulary, grammar, pronouns, verb conjugations etc and would comfortably be having basic to intermediate conversations with your classmates (albeit probably with awful pronunciation!). With Chinese being a "foreign" language in the truest sense of the word there's just so much preparatory work which has to be done before you can be let loose on the language proper, but I'm really glad we're taking it slow and building these strong foundations.
The course is broken up into skill-level based 8 week blocks, and you pay for each block individually, so taking "Beginner 1" I had no idea if it would just be a bit of fun for a couple of months or something which would grow into more. Right now I'm definitely thinking the latter so I'll be signing up for Beginner 2 in the new year and will continue to see where it goes from there.
谢谢阅读!