Chinese Language and Culture

How I got started

A few years ago, I got a Chinese roommate at work, 李韵蕾. We became friends, and I helped her (a little) with learning Dutch, which she was doing at the time. I thought it would be interesting to learn a little Chinese at the same time, with which she could then help me - see the other side, so to speak. Mandarin Chinese turned out to be a very fascinating language. It is quite unlike any Western language, which were the only languages I had learned so far (except for a little bit of Arabic).

Funnily enough, it was actually quite a bit like Dutch sign language (SLN), in which I have taken a few courses. Both do not alter words to indicate number, tense, grammatical function (object, subject, etc), grammatical gender, etc. Instead, time is indicated by using a time phrase (like 'yesterday') or special function words, grammatical function is indicated by word order or again by function words, etc. Very interesting, but quite hard to use those function words correctly. Also interesting is the fact that both Mandarin and SLN have concepts for 'long, thin things', 'flat things', 'persons', etc. In Mandarin, these are used as measure words. For example, to say "two tables" in Mandarin, you need an extra word indicating the 'things'， in this case flat things, 张 (zhang(1)): 两张桌子. In SLN, these words (signs) are used to place things in grammatical space, or to enumerate them. For example, speaking of two pens, you could first sign TWO PEN, then use the classifier for long, thin things (index finger extended), and 'put' two pens in the space in front of you. I will not go into more detail about SLN here, more information can be found in the Sign Language section of these pages.

Getting serious

For a long time, Yunlei and I simply exchanged some phrases, I practised the sounds of Mandarin and tried to learn some words, but all very slowly and casually. Around the middle of 2008, I got more serious, got an audio course, tried to get more input in the form of Chinese movies, and in January 2009, I started to learn characters. This is quite a difficult task, since there are over 50.000 of them in the Chinese written language. Fortunatly, only about 6.000 (I think) are commonly used, and with about two or three thousand (I think), you can cope in everyday life. Still, quite a lot compared to our 26 letters in the Western alphabet (or 28 in Arabic or 24 in Greek). Nevertheless, the study is very interesting and rewarding. I can recommend the method proposed in the book "Learning Chinese Characters", published by Tuttle. They use a simple but effective mnemonic technique, and let you acquire characters in an orderly fashion (from simple to complex), and in the order of frequency of occurrence in Chinese texts. This means that you see progress very quickly, you soon recognise some characters in regular texts, because you have learned the most frequent ones first. Sort of learning the English words 'and' and 'the' first; you can't really understand what's written yet, but you do encounter them a lot and realise that you can read at least these words :-).

At the moment, I think I can read about 1500 characters, which unfortunately does not mean that I can read all compounds these characters occur in. Characters are more like syllables than like words, so they are often used in combination to form a word. Sometimes this word's meaning follows naturally from the combination of characters, e.g. 足 (foot) and 球 (ball) form 足球 (football, soccer). However, not all are that logical, so you basically have to learn the combinations as well as the separate characters.

Reading Chinese

After nearly completing the Tuttle method (after learning about 700 characters), I started looking around for something to read. Because after all, reading is one of the best way to acquire (written) language. Unfortunately, knowing about 700 characters, and having only elementary knowledge of Chinese, it is not yet possible for me to read ordinary newspapers or books. So I started looking for graded readers, books in which only a limited amount of characters is used, and the sentence constructions are relatively simple. There are not many such readers available, and some of them have Pinyin pronunciation annotations above the characters, which is - in my opinion - disadvantageous, since you then automatically read the Pinyin, rather than try to retrieve the character's pronunciation from memory. However, I did find two very useful series of readers:

Chinese Breeze (汉语风) - a series of readers using only a limited number of characters in each book
Bookworm (书虫) - a series of readers with English on one page and Chinese on the other.

The Chinese Breeze series is more modern, and books come with a CD on which the book's text is recorded, so that you can practise listening as well as reading. Currently, books at the 300, 500 and 800-character level are available, and further levels are planned. Unfortunately, the books are often hard to get, most of them are unavailable on amazon, although amazon.cn sometimes avails better options. Hopefully, more will be printed in the future.
The Bookworm series is actually meant for Chinese learners of English, so no special care is taken to use a limited number of characters. However, they are still very useful for Chinese learners, since the language is fairly simple, and you can check your understanding by looking at the English text. Currently, there are 6 levels of difficulty, and about 20 books per level. A great advantage is the low price: a set of 10 books sells on amazon.cn for about 40 RMB.

Visiting China

In the fall of 2010, Herman and I went to China for three months, to travel around, and for me to practise Chinese. It was a great trip, and I think it defenitely improved my Chinese conversational skills. Most people could understand me with no problems. It was understanding them that was most difficult for me. This was because there are still many words that I do not know, and understanding these is hard. But part of the problem is the fact that many different dialects (and languages) are spoken throughout China. Everyone also speaks Mandarin, but accents can be heavy and make it more difficult to understand someone's words. And of course, some people speak more clearly (and slowly!) than others.

During our trip, I also kept up my Chinese reading, reading about six (small) books in all. Seeing characters around me all day everywhere certainly helped as well, you can practise all day if you want (in fact, it is hard to stop trying to recognise the characters around you - can be a bit tiring). I therefore think the trip helped improve my reading skills as well. I am now comfortable with the second level of the Bookworm series. In fact, I do not sense much difference with the first level. Maybe the reading levels are not reflected very well in the Chinese text - after all, it is really an English reader for Chinese speakers. In any case, I am happily reading on, with my dictionary always close at hand.

Further Progress

Currently, I am steadily advancing my Chinese character set by learning from the book "Chinese Characters" by Alan Hoenig, which gives an ordered list of the 2178 most frequent characters and offers mnemonic help. Actually, I am not very impressed by the method in the book, so I would not recommend it; the Tuttle method is much better and more structured. I simply use the book as a list of characters and use Tuttle's method to memorize them. Currently, I have learned about 700 characters in addition to Tuttle's 800. What is very useful is the Anki deck associated with Hoenig's method. Anki is a very good flashcard method, and the flashcard set of Hoenig's book, freely available via EZchinesey.com, contains all characters in the book, so that you can easily review them.

Currently, I am reading the Bookworm series levels 2 and 3. For me, the difficulty varies more per book than per level, where books that contain a lot of vocabulary that I am familiar with are much easier to read than others with more obscure subjects. I am also reading the "Graded Chinese Reader" series. This is one of the series that prints pinyin above the characters, which is annoying, but volume three now comes with a cutout that you can put over the page covering the pinyin (apparently, more people complained!). This makes the books usable, and it is nice to read contemporary Chinese short stories for a change (the Bookworm series consists of older British and American literature, which is copyright free). In general, I am seeing a slow but steady progress in my reading abilities, and though I sometimes despair of ever being able to read a newspaper, at least I use my dictionary less often and can read more and more of the Clavis Sinica texts without resorting to Google Translate :-)

Chinese Name

When learning Chinese, it is of course fun to create a Chinese name for yourself. This can also be advantageous if you want to go to China or have other dealings in which you need to write your name in Chinese. The image shows my provisional Chinese name, 霍仪妮 (huò yínī), which I created together with Chinese friends, using the sounds of my name as a starting point, and then finding some characters that could conceivable form a normal Chinese name. Unfortunatly, the Dutch 'Gi' syllable does not occur in Mandarin, so we decided to drop it and start with the 'i' :-).
In finding a name, I came across an interesting cultural difference. When I first asked a Chinese friend to help me pick a Chinese name, she looked up what my name meant and created a Chinese name that carried similar meaning. It was a beatiful name, but I did not identify with it at all. For me, the sound of my name was most important, but for a Chinese person, the meaning of the name is the most important part. This makes sense, since most western people are not aware of the (ancient) meaning of their names at all - whereas in Chinese, every (given) name has meaning and the meaning can be very important for someone's sense of identity, or even their self-esteem.
To return to my own Chinese name, in the end, we searched for Chinese characters that carried some of the sounds of my own name, and could also be considered an acceptable Chinese name. Thus we ended up with 霍 (for 'Holt'), and 仪妮 (for Gini, but without the impossible 'g'), with which I am quite happy.

Gineke ten Holt

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