Learning some Mandarin

As I plan to spend at least 4 months in China this year and, because I found difficulties getting around Beijing during my month-long 2009 stay without knowing any of the local language, I am doing a couple of units in elementary Mandarin here in Melbourne over the next few months.  As part of these courses you learn the Pinyin system which is, to me, a quite complex way of representing the Chinese language in terms of the English alphabet and you learn the Chinese language characters as well.  The objective is to ‘expose’ you to about 600 words of Mandarin although this (I imagine) is definitely an outer bound on what people can hope to assimilate.

There are quite a few Caucasian Australians doing the course with me and I have not met one who doesn’t find the material challenging – I find memorizing the Chinese characters very difficult. The spoken language demands effort but is easier once you educate your tongue to some new sounds.   The characters are made up of 214 elementary pictographs or Chinese radicals and words are made up of two or more of these radicals.   There is some sense to the way words are formed from mthe elementary radicals but the connections are often not obvious.

Some of my classmates have business interests in China or have a Chinese spouse and wish to be able to talk to in-laws. There are also quite a few Chinese/Australians who are learning Mandarin – some are young kids, some adults.

I can speak a bit of Thai but that helps only in being sensitized to the tones of Chinese.   When I learnt Thai I had the considerable advantage of needing to use it almost immediately because I lived in Thailand.  It is amazing how quickly you pick up some basics of a language when you have to!  A difficulty with my Chinese is that I only speak it in the class. I’ll try to hire someone to help me with basic conversation over the coming weeks.  An essential prerequisite will be the need for a lot of patience!