Chinese makes French seem like a leisurely hobby. The day after I started French class I also began a Chinese class. It meets Tuesday and Thursday nights for two hours at a time but demands daily study twice that. Whereas I study two hours of French outside of class per week, I easily spend ten times that on Chinese.
The class is helmed by a mainland Chinese lady who, while young in years, is old school in approach. We are learning to listen, read, speak AND write Chinese. No, not on a computer - by hand. Each character requires the correct number and order of strokes. So, in other words each pen stroke must be done in a certain direction and order. It is not acceptable to write the character haphazardly even if you end up with a correct result..
Our school is located on Orchard Rd, the famous shopping district, four subway stops away. It's a wonderfully small class, just me and an Australian guy. We each get a lot of attention from the teacher. He is an engineer whose company is considering relocating him to Shanghai so he is trying to get up so speed. I explained my interest to the teacher humbly - I just "wanted to learn how to order food and eavesdrop on Jean's family and friends when they swapped out of English."
Once you remove the mysteries of Chinese and see the reality of it you realize how daunting it is. You must learn to make sounds that are foreign to your mouth, memorize thousands of characters and their precise construction, and worst of all - the four tones. Each character can be pronounced one of four ways - high tone, rising tone, dipping tone or falling tone. When in class, pronouncing a single character slowly, it's easy. When you string them together in a sentence your mouth doesn't always cooperate. It's crucial to get this right because if you don't it's easy to turn a sentence like "Nice to meet you" into "Your mom rides pigs." I have a lot of trouble with the tones, I may just be tone deaf.
The pace of the class leaves me winded. On Tuesday night our teacher walked us through the characters for the numbers one to ten, one hundred, one thousand and ten thousand. Ten minutes later we stood at the whiteboard with marker in hand as she began rattling off the Chinese for 10,467 or 111,876 and we had to process it and write it down as numbers. Without a pause, she reversed course and said numbers in English and we had to say their equivalent in Chinese. I came home with a profound headache and was in a bad mood as I swam laps in the pool. I didn't feel normal again until the next morning. My teacher explained that with Chinese you exercise both halves of the brain at the same time - left side for the pictures of the characters and right side for the meaning and pronunciation. I don't doubt her.
A month in, it feels like a marathon roller coaster ride. It's very challenging and can leave you feeling like a dolt most of the time. Once in a while I get excited by glimpses of understanding. For example, when watching a Chinese movie I recognized a sentence or two without looking at the subtitles. Or, when riding the subway, I looked at the characters for the Chinatown stop and noticed they actually say "cow" "car" "water", which translate to ox cart water. Chinatown is situated on the Singapore river, where there were once a lot of ox carts which ferried water.
I am getting a greater insight into Singlish as a side benefit. Clearly, the sentence structure for Singlish mimics Chinese. The Singlish for "I don't know either" is "I also don't know." which is a direct translation of Chinese, which has no word for "either." Unlike Paris, there is not as much opportunity to practice speaking. A lot of people here don't speak good Mandarin and are more comfortable in English. The older generation speaks a dialect, usually Hokkien, the same language you use to order food in the coffee shops. You can get a lot from TV, however, like watching an American show such as NCIS, which is in English with Chinese subtitles.
For an extra headache you can watch a Korean or Japanese station which are sometimes subtitled in both English and Chinese. Or, you can watch a Chinese show subtitled in English. Sometimes I throw out a "Good Morning" in Chinese to one of the condo staff. The response is usually the same "Ahhhh, you very smart one, ah? Learning Chinese." This is an interesting glimpse behind the fake humility of the culture - they think you have to be smart to learn their language, unlike English.
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