It has been a little bit of a struggle to learn this language called Mandarin or as many people seem to call it around the world, Chinese. And the books and websites don’t really help that much. Most of the stuff they contain is not really that useful for daily living. As I have told several people, we were just too dumb to learn much from the book “Chinese for Dummies”. It started off with complete sentences before we had barely learned to say “hello”.

Case in point: End of Chapter 1, p.22, a little introductory sentence….”Wo meige xingqi chi Zhongguo fan de shihou, yibian chifan, yibian gen fuwuyuan xuexi Zhongwen. Yijiong hui shuo hen duo chengyu le. Yi ju liang de.” I don’t think so. Maybe a little, “Hello, how are you?” would be a better starter. “Your friendly guide to understanding Chinese”, the back cover says. Well, after four years and a few lessons here and there, it is my friendly reference guide. As an introduction to learning the language, it didn’t exactly win any medals. Plus you have to buy other books to learn important phrases such as “F#$k your mother!” or depend on friends or students for such gems as “Go away you stinky, little kid” or “Are you stupid?” (None of these are every said to kids but they are great for those people who keep trying to get you to buy stuff on the street after all polite responses have been ignored.)

Now I am subscribing to a little freebie website that sends me a new sentence to learn every day. The last one was, “The birds are singing.” Yep, that is a really useful sentence, something I need to know to help me around a foreign land. That’s right up there with, “I only trust my mother.”, a previous lesson. Now once in a while, a few more useful ones do arrive in my mailbox like, “Are you lonely?” and “Give me a hug.” These might get me into trouble but I can see them being used by some. I would say they are batting a useful to useless ratio of about 1:5 right now, which I guess could be worse. Add the four or five tones to these little tidbits of conversation and you have an exercise in futility unless it is something that is really going to be used on a regular basis.

I also read recently there are about 30,000 Chinese characters of which 3,000 are necessary for day-to-day understanding. I gave up on them a long time ago. All I can say is thank God for Pinyin, the use of our trusty little alphabet to come up with the same sounds. I am so impressed with those foreigners that slog away and actually learn a few hundred of them. Most other languages have some sort of clue to the meaning compared to English when you see a sign or bulletin board. Usually Italian, German, French, and Spanish can be pseudo translated on a menu or storefront. But confronted by a bunch of Chinese characters is another story. I defy anyone who doesn’t read, write or speak another Asian language to begin to interpret these things. I am still in awe when I watch my students scribble away in their notebooks like we scratch English notes. Their characters come nowhere close to the sterile little square ones we see on signs or in books. So even if I did learn some of them, I would still be hooped for reading anything other than printed text.

Anyway, the saga continues. I was impressed with myself the other day when I told my motorcycle mechanic that my Chinese friend would give him a phone call tomorrow to find out if he had finished working on my bike. The guy doesn’t speak a word of English. Not a big deal for a language student but for me it was a major communication step forward.