A Chinese Learners’ Journey
People have many reasons to learn a new language. Perhaps it’s for travel, a job, or maybe even romance. For me, I decided to learn a new language as a way of getting in touch with a culture I had never gotten a chance to connect to. To give that statement some background; my mother is mostly Chinese and Indian, but never got to learn any of what that meant ethnically due to her parents not teaching her it. Fast forward a number of decades and my mom meets my white & Jewish dad, then I’m born in New York, New York as a multiracial child. Growing up I also was unable to understand what it meant to be anything racially as I was too Asian for the Asian kids and too White for the White kids. Eventually when I got to my third year high school, I saw a new class in the collection of offered language classes: Mandarin Chinese. To be very honest, at first I did not take this class seriously. As a teen I wasn’t as interested in my racial identity given how uncool it was to be anything but cool in high school.
The class was brand new in the high school so I figured at the time that it’d probably be an easy A while also being something a bit more interesting. As soon as the the first day starts, I just knew it was going to be quite the show. The teacher was very new to America and even admitted getting a $500 fine for shooting a pigeon in our municipality which was a pretty clear flag that we were going to be able to get away with whatever we wanted. Between passing notes and hiding a book in our classroom bathroom, most of us admittedly did very well.
A few years later I had been accepted to Rutgers - New Brunswick and had to pick some classes and a potential major. Originally, like many other freshman, I thought business and maybe international business with a background in Chinese. So I started to take Chinese classes, but this time they were real. Surprisingly enough though, it seemed that the challenge seriously studying Chinese had been brought to me at the perfect time because college is the first time I truly shined academically. I aced my first few elementary classes freshman year and then decided that I’d be a double major: Chinese and Political Science. Like most things, the thing I needed the most to learn Chinese was actually just time.
It takes a very long time to learn each individual character as that’s the basis of meaning between words. Chinese isn’t alphabetical like English is, so every character has it’s own meaning and is routinely combined with other characters to either make related or completely unrelated words. Chinese is hard, I won’t lie. Remarkably harder than learning French was when I was younger. Other than having to learn each character and how it looks, you also have to know how to write it which contains a stroke order. Not only this, but there’s Pin Yin (a system where English letters are given to Chinese characters) where you have a lot of the normal English pronunciations of letters get completely changed. Lastly, you have to learn an entire tonal system comprised of 4 basic tones (neutral, up, down-up, and down). Speaking in English, we use tones primarily to convey emotions so this tends to be particularly hard for Chinese learners coming form a non-tonal mother language.
In college I found most teachers were very understanding and the standard that we were held to wasn’t unreasonable. The only two times I had problems with learning Chinese was learning classical Chinese and my business Chinese class. Classical Chinese was hard because most of the ancient meanings have been lost with words and that also made me learn traditional characters. For those don’t know, the major written forms of Chinese are split into simplified and traditional. Traditional is the original way of writing which tends to have an obscene amount of strokes per each characters. This honestly gave me a whole new appreciation for those ancient Chinese scribes and philosophers who would have to physically spend so much time transforming oral language into written form.
The other time I had a hard time learning Chinese was in my business Chinese class which is honestly not a solid representation of what learning mandarin is like for most people. This class was actually the only Chinese class I wasn't able to ace in college thusly preventing me from the 4.0 GPA I wanted so badly. Regardless, the reason this class was so hard was because the teacher would speak to the class as if she was speaking to native speakers. Part of the reason for this was because half the class were actual native speakers just taking the class as a GPA booster in college. Whereas I do understand this given the plight of international students, it didn’t give the teacher the right to just completely linguistically ignore half the class that clearly wasn’t ready to deal with this high-level Chinese instruction. Actually the funny part here is that even after all of these years and almost 5 years in China, I decided to go over this book again and there are still some words I didn’t even know in English.
As soon as I graduated college, I had a job for me in DC and I proceeded to not use my Chinese language skills for almost an entire year and a half until I realized how I personally needed to go to China. This is the exact point in my journey as a Chinese learner where Chinese truly became a portal for me to learn my culture and discover what in the world it meant to call myself part Chinese. For the first time I was using Chinese in a way that would actually get me somewhere, and it did. I landed myself a job teaching English after getting a 150 hour TEFL certificate and getting lucky enough to be emailed through the friend of a friend.
Before I knew it, I was actually living in Beijing. Something I had dreamed of for years, happening right before my eyes. Those sort of accomplishments in life just stick with you in ways that other things don’t. Upon my arrival in Beijing, my Chinese was ready to get seriously tested. At first I was almost unable to really get into any conversations and I found myself consistently asking my manager what they were saying. Not after long though I assimilated very quickly. One of the main points I want to make in this blog post is that the the best way to learn a language is to go to that country and just immerse yourself completely. Get yourself into situations where you don’t know how to say something then learn it and use it. The Chinese call this 学以致用. Within a month of my being there I found myself able to just copy accents and certain quirks that accompanied particular words or phrases. I had adapted.
Eventually I decided that I wanted to make my Chinese level official with some sort of test. That test happens to be called the HSK (HanYu ShuiPing KaoShi) and is commonly used in China especially for foreigners applying for jobs within the country. The levels go from 1-6 on the basic test (before you go for a specialization) within 6 being the highest. Most would say that you would be fine to get around China by yourself and no apps with anywhere between a 3 and a 4. Given my background in Mandarin, I decided to start with level 5. After a few months of rigorous studying, I passed! For the most part my studying consisted of a lot of reading and writing since the test doesn't have any speaking and the listening isn’t that hard… or so I thought. In general the listening isn’t that hard for someone who lived in the country, but the reading was undoubtedly one of the hardest test experiences I’ve ever had. HSK 5 gives you too much to read to the point of where you have to know how to synthesize large amounts of information in a short period of time, which is hard in a foreign language.
My Chinese studies would continue for years there, as it still does here while I’m living in America. There were times where I was more focused and times where I wasn’t as focused. In general though the most important thing is that you use the language you learn. Regardless of what level of commitment you’re willing to give it, just use whatever you learn and once you use it, learn something new.
