Something I wrote for my school

Sorry about the use of Chinese characters. --there's some translation at the end if you're curious

When I first decided to come to China, my goal was to become fluent in Mandarin in the three years of my planned stay. Upon arriving to China the only words I knew were ‘ting bu dong,’ and a faltering ‘ni hao.’ In theory I knew that Chinese was a tonal language, but had no idea what that actually meant. I wondered if my years of musical study would be of any use in learning Chinese (as it turns out the answer is ‘no’).

I was to study language in Chengdu at 四川师范大学 for two months with classes in the morning and individual tutoring in the afternoon. My morning classes were held in a hidden classroom overlooking the campus’ grungy swimming pool which had been drained for the winter. I had never been in a classroom that was so cold—one of my most useful purchases in China has been my blue santa-polar bear electric hot water bottle. I would stumble out of my bed five minutes before class, grab the hot water bottle, stuff breakfast into my bag, and run to the classroom which was accessible through a sprint around the back of my apartment next to the austere badminton courts, beside the pond, over the disintegrating bridge, and up the treacherous and narrow stairs that climbed past a distrustful mother cat.  

The first week I felt more stupid than I had ever felt in my entire life. I had studied Spanish in high school and had done well with little effort, but Chinese turned out to be a completely different story. For an American used to English words as long as the Great Wall, the melodic brevity of the Chinese language was completely disorienting. The absence of a phonetic writing system has been one of my greatest obstacles. When I studied Spanish, I learned words by remembering what they looked like, but I found this nearly impossible with Chinese. Every pair of initials and finals sounded the same to me, and I was at a complete loss when it came to hearing the tones. The entire mentality of speaking Chinese was foreign to me in a way that to this day I cannot describe. It took me at least a year to realize that one ‘word’ could actually be created from more than one 汉字.

I started two weeks behind my classmates, and had completely missed the lessons on pinyin. Our teacher asked me to read what I could from the text book, and I had no idea what to do. Learning how to say ‘你’ felt like I had summited 峨眉山, and I became familiar with ‘不对’ more quickly than any other vocabulary I have ever learned. Eventually my teachers gave up on me and no longer required me to go to listening class where I just sat in a stupor wondering if what was going on around me was actually language. When the teacher would ask me a question, I would stare back at her with my mouth open and my eyes fighting tears.

Teddy, my first tutor, is now one of my best friends. I can’t thank her enough for the patience she had with me. She brought her pinyin reader from primary school, and we looked at nursery pictures of turtles, dogs, trees, and ducks for weeks as I slowly and painfully tried to comprehend how my tongue could possibly do the acrobatics required by the ‘sh,’ ‘ch,’ and ‘zh’ initials. I had resorted to tying yarn around my lips to make the ‘v’ sound required by my favorite color, 绿。I think that Teddy’s selection of this children’s textbook was appropriate in more ways than just my language level. Being new in a country and not understanding any of the language made me feel more helpless than one of the children learning to walk with their 婆婆s outside of my 单元. I have never prouder than the day I figured out how to ask the 阿姨 at the front desk of my guest house for toilet paper.

I am thankful for how far I have come. I usually don’t have problems buying things that I need. I can do most errands alone downtown. On a good day, I can have short conversations with people in stores, sympathetic Chinese friends, or taxi drivers, but I am often discouraged at how far I have to go. My goal for the end of the school year is to know at least 2,000 words. So here I am with six more months left in my time here China, and I still have so much to learn. Just this evening after a taxi ride back to the school, I could hardly get the driver to stop. I was saying something like, ‘你可以停在这门口,’ but he kept driving, until I frantically starting blurting out any phrase I could muster with the word 停！Sometimes I wonder if I can speak Chinese at all, but I will just have to keep trying. Thank you all for your patience, and I hope that when I teach in class, I can be as encouraging and patient with you.

四川师范大学 --Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu
汉字--(han zi) chinese character
峨眉山--(Emei Shan) A famous mountain in Sichuan...there's a famous temple and some monkeys and stuff...and climbing it is a big deal
不对--(bu dui) Incorrect
绿-(lü) green
婆婆--(popo) Maternal grandmother
阿姨--(a yi) Aunty
你可以停在这门口 (Ni Keyi ting zai zhe menkou) something like 'you can stop at this gate'
停--(ting) stop