So I need to tell everyone that I'm sorry I have posted in about a month. We finished classes in early Feb. and had the month off and I did a bunch of traveling around south China. I've got some good stuff coming in the next week or two to write about from the Chinese New Year celebrations to my trip. Anyway, here is a few thoughts on the language so far:
So I figure this will be an interesting post for me to look back on in a year and see how my education changes my views on what I have politely dubbed the most confusing language in the world. I came into my language study in China knowing very little about the language other than the complexity of it and that it is a tonal language. The first day of class we were handed 4 text books designed to teach us over our short term study (we are here for one short term study and two full semesters) the basics of the language.
There are 5 tones in the Chinese language they are numbered first, second, third, fourth and neutral tones. First tone is a higher pitched drawn out sound that is probably the most unnatural sound that has ever come out of my mouth. Second tone starts at a normal level and you raise the tone of your voice almost in the way people will raise their tone when asking a question. Third tone is a drop and rise tone where you lower your tone then raise it back up as confusing as it may sounds its probably the easiest one to say on a regular basis. Fourth tone is a falling tone where you almost cut the end of the sound off. The neutral tone would be the one that would be most similar to every day speaking for us where you aren’t having any inflection in your voice.
The written Pinyin form of Chinese is a westernized form of writing using traditional letters with tone marks. Pinyin is only used to help with pronunciation and cannot be used in writing because the words have a multitude of meanings. For example the word in pinyin “shi” can be pronounced in each of the four tones but can also be represented by a number of different characters (是，时，etc) it also has numerous meanings which in spoken Chinese must be inferred from the context of the conversation (shi can mean among other things: be, are, right, yes, thing, accident, trouble, responsible, job, problem, hour, time fashion, opportunity, truth, solid, ten, etc. etc. etc.). The characters are suppose to represent things in the form of “pictures” for example 人is ren which means people so that wishbone is a picture of a person don’t ask me how that looks like a person because I don’t seen it but somehow they do and my opinion doesn’t matter.
Our classes have been taught by three different professors. Unfortunately, on the first day of class they came in and told us there names in Chinese while speaking nothing but Chinese so we don’t know their names, therefore we’ve given them all nicknames. We had Kermit, Old Lady, and Hot for Teacher. The process of these names was as simple as you could think, Kermit I thought looked like Kermit the frog and she wore a lot of green, Old Lady was the oldest of the group and Hot for Teacher was the best looking of the group (and Ted had a little crush on her). Learning Chinese though with no base is hard enough and these woman did everything they could to make it as easy as possible on us however their inability to speak English made learning very challenging and frustrating. Old lady was the worst, she came from the old school Chinese way of thinking where they don’t want to correct you because it may embarrass you so even when we’d be doing something wrong she’d give us a “Hen Hao” (very good) and when we’d ask if we were using a word correctly we’d get a “Dui” (Correct) even if we weren’t. And so for six weeks we went to class everyday and have been working to learn some of this crazy language, between the Hanzi (characters) , the Pinyin, and the spoken I’ve got a long way to go but hopefully in a year from now I’ll have an idea as to what I’m doing.
Picture with the guys and our teachers. Kermit and Old Lady are in the picture together and Hot For Teacher is by herself with us.
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