Part 1 - Summer Romance
My feelings towards the Chinese language have been a bit rocky since I arrived about 10 weeks ago, and I guess a little before that as well. Our relationship started about a month before arrived...while I was working in Albuquerque. I started listening to the Pimsleur audio series. I remember walking around the dirt path by our apartment complex repeating the same few phrases over and over again until they stuck. I knew nothing about the rules of pinyin (the Latin transliteration of Chinese), so I was busy forming my own (and quite wrong) version of how all the words could be spelled out.
Chase's Brain Spelling: Nee hway shwawhh yeeng-when mah?
Actual Pinyin Spelling: Ni hui shuo ying wen ma? (Can you speak English?)
This worked for me. I certainly wasn't learning a lot, but it felt better than just sitting and waiting for my departure date. And listening to the tapes while walking outside was perfect. The only times it felt a bit awkward were those chance occasions in which I'd walk by some of Lovelace's Chinese employees. I felt a bit weird about them hearing me walking alone, muttering to myself, "Are you able to speak English?" over and over.
This was the curious, honeymoon stage of my relationship with Chinese. I hadn't been hit with the characters, tones, accents, or blank stares. And yeah, things did kind of take a turn for the worse when I actually arrived in China. It turns out that the knowledge of how to ask if someone speaks English, or how to ask someone if they want to eat something is certifiably worthless. The only phrase that the audio series taught me that was worth anything was how to say, "My Chinese is bad."
However, in the several hundred times that I've employed this valuable phrase, it has yielded the same result. "Oh no...your Chinese is very good, very good!" If only I had learned how to say, "No, you are wrong. This is the only sentence that I know." And one must not forget that their compliments were most likely due to the fact that I got a lot of practice with that phrase.
Things have recently gotten much better, but there certainly was a dark period. Which will be discussed in Part 2 of this mini-series!
I am on the edge of my seat! Part 2 part 2!!!
ReplyDeleteSo is the better part or the dark period discussed in part 2? I hope both! or was that the dark period?
ReplyDeleteI want to try and start learning some of my own. If you could include some helpful starting tips in part 2 I would be much appreciative bro.
More pictures! You dont even have to write anything. I guess that is what bookface is for.