Studying Mandarin Chinese Language

As I am going back to the orient to Taiwan I have started studying Chinese again. When I was in China for 5 months I was studying language at ZheJiang Da Xue (The University of ZheJiang Province). About a month ago I dusted off my old school books and cracked them open. Fortunately my memory served me well in remembering most of what I had already learned. I made it through the first book in about a month. Now I am on to the second book which is totally new material.

I am finally realizing why my teacher had us doing such silly exercises to learn the language. Our homework was to simply say tons of syllables in 4 different tones. I had no idea what any of it meant, but I now realize that it really helped with pronunciation. As I am now on my own it is more challenging.
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(Photo of my Chinese Teacher in class)

It is really hard to learn a language when you are not in a classroom or submerged in the language. You just don’t use it everyday, which in learning a language you have to use it everyday if you are going to learn and remember anything. I am now struggling in pronunciation, toiling to learn characters in their obscure intricacy and trying to understand their simple, yet complex to the Western mind, grammar. I picked up Chinese a lot faster when I was in a classroom and in China.

(Chinese Bathroom Sign)

I think this is the reason why I did not get very far in Hindi. First, my teacher wasn’t very good at teaching or explaining the language and grammar. Also, no one in Bangalore, or South India for that matter, really speaks Hindi. You do not hear it in the street, and you do not have to use it in everyday interaction. In learning Spanish I feel that when I really realized I could speak, and when I felt most confident in understanding the language was when I was fully submerged in it, had no one around me to speak to in English, and was forced to speak it all day, everyday in order to interact with people. I could not run away. The best way to learn a language is to stop speaking, hearing or thinking your own.

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