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[little horsey]

Well, do you? Have you attempted to learn one or both of these languages?

I'd love to learn Mandarin. It sounds beautiful, but near impossible to even think about learning.

Share with me your attempts to learn these languages, why don't you? How did you learn? On your own? Classes? On your own and in classes? Did you try to learn it before going to China? Etc? Was your strategy successful? Just curious is all...

[Roger]

Touring China prior to taking up my first job here, I taught myself some Mandarin. I used phrasebooks and dictionaries. Up to a certain level, this is not a big and difficult job. Actually, the structure of a CHinese sentence is simple as is grammar. The problems come with the script and the tones.
Most CHinese can't write more than 3000 characters, yet there are a grand total of 56'000 of them. So to some extent, almost anybody is semiliterate. For a non-native Chinese speaker to start learning how to write it you have a serious handicap - you begin something at an age when you are more analytical-minded, less inclined to doing repetitive exercises. I can't bring myself to copying characters line after line.

I don't like Cantonese at all. Initially, I learnt some Cantonese while living in Hong Kong, but on my trips to Guangdong and Hainan it was virtually useless. They say there are some 50 million native Cantonese speakers; perhaps, but they live scattered all over the world, and why can't they communicate in Mandarin? It is not a different language at all, it is only a different dialect, and by gosh, that does matter - same structure, same characters, most words are identical. Just different pronunciation and intonation.

[HappyTown]

After a year and a half of living (and studying, on my own time on an ad-hoc basis) here I can understand enough of what is going on around me to get the jist and speak enough to get me through most situations. However I only read a handful of characters, and i cannot write at all. That just takes willpower that i dont have in the short term. Forget the tones at first...they get easier with time.

[arioch36]

I think learning Chinese will make your life here much richer. But sometimes it is better to pretend not to know because sometimes people say stupid things, and ignorance can be bliss.

On one hand, I would say learning Chinese (Mandarin) is not too difficult..if you can get in a good schedule for yourself. A phrase book is a good starting point. Buy books and tapes before you leave. My favourite is Cheng & Tsui Co. "Integrated Chinese". I enjoy learning the language, I think it helps my teaching, my understanding students, and vice versa (though not neccessary). Negotiate with your school to give you lessons twice a week. Learning with a student can be problematical.

Tones kiil me, but I agree, they are not as important, as people say. Learn more words, and they will understand you bad tones and all.

I PERSONALLY enjoy SITTING AT THE LOCAL EATERY AND TALKING A LITTLE cHINESE. My Chinese is still pretty bad. But then a lot of them have bad Chinese too .

Oh, there are web sites that have Chinese lessons. But I forget where. Maybe one is China.org ????

CAntonese...Pleeease..Not in my lifetime

[Roger]

Chris is absolutely right in saying that sometimes pretending to be the dumb laowai who can't communicate in the local lingo is preferable and may actually save you troubles!

I experienced this at a police station. When I mentioned having noticed a car with a "WJ" in its number plate, the guy investigating my "case" turned hostile. "SPy" he yelled (WJ is the prefix that signals the user of that car is with the PLA).

[MartinK]

...

[Minhang Oz]

I used to think my Mandarin was kindergarten level until I visited my son's class and realised how far behind I was. However, once you're beyond a stock of useful phrases for which you can't understand the answers, to a point where you can structure simple sentences using a basic vocab, you're on the way. Learning Pinyin to master pronunciation was a major initial step for me; as has been mentioned, even with the wrong tone, listeners will use the context of the situation to guess your meaning. But with wrong pronunciation, they've got no hope. You'll notice this when some of your students think they're speaking English, and you think they're speaking Chinese. The widespread use of dialect means a lot of the time you don't understand what you hear around you, but certainly all younger people have learned Mandarin at school, and will "switch" once you speak to them. A lot of old Shanghaiers can speak better English than Mandarin though.

[pratyeka]

I arrived in Kunming, Yunnan province with the intent to travel through China and onward, but wound up living there for six months. During that time I lived with Chinese, spent much of my time with Chinese, and consequently had no problems learning some basic Chinese (Mandarin ).

It took about three months to get over the hurdle that was remembering and pronouncing tones. It's true what people say though - they're not absolutely critical, though they are very important in many situations and are definitely worth persuing. I would recommend you believe they're absolutely critical, and study accordingly, as it's likely to open doors.

Anyway shortly after those 6 months, at the end of which I was literally having basic thoughts in Chinese (yeah, thinking in a language isn't that hard if it's all you ever use, despite the fact that your vocab might only approach the 'strictly practical' level). I then spent 2 months in Taiwan, before returning to Australia. Here I studied Chinese at home for 3-4 months, and have now been at university for about the same period of time, doing the same thing.

I've pushed myself relatively hard, such as taking Chinese speaking competitions (hanyu qiao bisai) and reading courses, as well as skipping first year Chinese at my university and practising every day online (anyone after some practice, check out chat.tom.com). I would have to say that my Mandarin isn't as fluent as when I left China, but my vocabulary is massively improved, and I can now read and write easily a few hundred characters.

I've just received a one year Chinese government scholarship to get back to China & study Chinese history. Includes a decent allowance, board, etc. Dunno what that's worth to them, but to me it's an amazing opportunity! By the end of that time I would hazard a guess that my Chinese will be at least conversationally fluent for most situations.

Not bad for effectively a year and a half's effort, is it?

Don't let anyone tell you Chinese is hard .. it's not hard, it just takes time and perseverance. Rock on!

[hubei_canuk]

The school administrator said to me on the playground
"Ni Ai zi Bing?
...
Huh? Do i have AIDS? I acted dumbfounded.
Ni Aizi bing?
Huh!!!?
...
Ni Ai Che Bing!
Ni Aiche Bing qi ling?
Ohhhh... do i like to eat ice-cream!!!!
Relief. yeah sure...
---------
Forget the cantonese, mandarin is enough for one brain.

[kimo]

I am like most of my students who read at a fairly decent level. I know about two thousand characters and although the exact meaning usually eludes me, when I watch TV I like shows with the Chinese subtitles. I'm tone deaf, I think, so listening and speaking are far from my strengths. Maybe I'm just old with slightly bad ears. Getting the tones for me has been hard, but now it is starting to come. I have found practice, practice, and practice are helping me. Isn't that what I tell my students.

Anyway, I take solace in the fact that my Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese sound near native.

[Chairman Roberto]

Like Arioch, I too use the good ol' (actually, quite new) Integrated Chinese. I originally used the excruciating DeFrancis "Beginning Chinese", written in 1976. A pretty archaic book, but now I'm beginning to appreciate that old tome. Let me elaborate.

Integrated Chinese is an excellent vehicle in learning Chinese through the Communicative Approach (that is, situational Chinese). It has good drilling sections that expedite literacy, and the accompanying workbook that will ram those characters down your throat. The tapes are also good. (I wish I brought them with me to China...I'm VERY handicapped without them!）

My criticism for Integrated Chinese is that it tends to introduce way too many characters per chapter. I noticed that each chapter will unload about forty or more new characters, on average. It can be rather overwhelming, and when you get deeper into the book, it can be a slow haul as you try to master each chapter. In this respect, the DeFrancis book had a better pace. It introduced maybe a dozen new characters per chapter, building upon the ones you already know. But...you do need to know about 3,000 of those little *beep* to read a newspaper, so maybe I'm just too damn lazy....

IC's grammatical explanations are pretty hit and miss. Sometimes it's crystal clear, other times it gets mired in grammatical gobbly gook that would take a Ph.D. in linguistics to figure out. But all in all, you get the basic gist of it...it shows examples of correct and incorrect structures that I find very helpful.

Also, you use variety and practical situations to acquire vocab and grammar. There are alot of children's books here, with the pinyin printed over the characters, that are more fun to read when the textbook gets too dry. The primary school books are also good starts, if a wee bit too disorganized for the Western mind. The other day, I had my teacher translate my TV remote control! I also enjoy attempting to translate menus. Music is a fun break from the textbook. I'm a fan of Taiwan "rocker" (such as it is) Zhang(1) Zheng(4) Yue(4), who is generally a very clear singer. On that subject, can anyone else recommend any good CDs??? I'm always on the hunt for relatively decent Chinese music...

CSL (Chinese as a Second Langauge) is a pretty unknown science here, at least out here in the boondocks. The most annoying aspect of my tutorial sessions with my teacher and students is their tendency to burst out laughing with each mispronunciation. (Which would be every other word). Unless you have a professionally trained CSL instructor who knows how to deal with laowais, you'll find your sessions another culture shocker. Learning through mistakes is still rocket science out here....

The Chairman

[Steiner]

[hubei_canuk]

I have learned more chinese than is really useful to myself and i hate to be a party pooper but learning spoken mandarin chinese is mostly a pointless undertaking.
...
The first reason is that Nobody speaks standard mandarin except foreigners. And they're just not really my kind of people i want to talk to. You can add the teachers in the classroom to that, but they also are not my cup of tea and i can explicate that.
Everyone in every city speaks their own sub-area dialect within their city area dialect under the umbrella of their linguistically labelled area dialect.... something like that... and that includes those beijingers who remind me of dogs barking...AR AR AR AR ARF ARF AARF. And when they speak the artificial language of Mandarn of course they do with their own local accent.
In Beijing they don't know where the "gong yuan" is until you say "gong yuer". In Hubei In Hubei they can't find the kuai zi until you say KUARRRRRZERAH!
Taiwanese and Southern Mandarin is a horror story. They can't say the sounds and change them. Shan jie (Mountain sisters) becomes San Jie (three sisters) Hua (flower) becomes Fa (method), er becomes ur.... and on and on.
Hunaese mandarin sounds like they have marbles in their mouths.
..
It's all so unhappy, so miserable.
Why? because spoken Manarin is so beautiful. If you don't consider the tones you can realize that most of the sounds are the sounds of the English language with only a few exceptions.
Mandarin is the language of Authority and Patriotism!
With the same feeling like German ... Qi Lai!
...
Cantonese is the language of songs.. i have been told, but i can't see it being so delicate as because they need so much volume. To make up for the lack of sounds they use 9 tones and VOLUME!!! There is no such thing as a quiet cup of coffee or tea in Guangdong.
In their normal conversation pitch one guy sits at one end of the hall and the other guy sits 20 feet away and they have a conversation.
..
Anyway it's useless.. Mandarin is a language used by Ghosts on CCTV-9.
--------------------------------
But that's only the frist reason that learning spoken language is useless. The second is that Chinese people do not use language to COMMUNICATE.
No, that would be too simple.
(I refer of course in all remarks here to Chinese people socialized in china by chinese education and put the reasons therin to socialization and not to genetics in case any should accuse me of such a thing.)
...
And here i will leave off for a while only to return again.
...
But first let me recount a typical conversation from chinese a that occured while i was washing my clothes in a hostel.
Chinese: Hi! Are you washing your clothes?
Myself: No, i'm destroying water.
..
Now let me interject here to say that using sarcasm with Chinese people is like teaching squirrels physics. The result is the same... blank stare.
..
Her are some other typical chinese conversational gambits:
When you are standing... "Hi! are you standing here?"
When you are sitting "Hi! Are you sitting here"?
Sometimes it gets a little more complicated but always the same and doesn't matter if it is in English or Chinese language.
..
Fianlly i figured it out.. They only ask questions in which they are sure of the answer. That way they cannot possibly make a mistake and lose face.... unless you use sarcasm ...but then it just doesn' t compute and the machine breaks down.
Another reason is that the conversation doesn't lead into any dangerous area or subjects or asking of opinions like how do you feel about the weather? or what did you think of the news last night? No, asking about thinking and feeling is very dangerous.
...
Now the point here is that we can begin to see the purpose of a chinese conversation. That is, it is used to fill the dead spaces between people and allow them to go about their business. In a conversation you know what you are going to say and Party B also knows their lines. If anybody deviates from the script then communication breaks down.
..
Oh what the heck, i'll finish with the third point of uselessness.
FACE.
For 20 minutes outside a temple in Taiwan i asked the guards what time the temple would open the next day.
I thought my mandarin was no good. Maybe it was the dialect. I scrambled with my dictionary. I tried changing my tones and emphasizing them.
Finally, I UNDERSTOOD!
...
They didn't know.
And they didn't want to tell me they didn't know.
They didn't want to lose face.
ARRRRGGrravation!
Is it any wonder i am driven to drink Mijiu?

[Kurochan]

I speak quite a bit of Mandarin, and a little Cantonese (badly, and only to little kids!).

The more you can say, the less you will freak out when you first get here. You'll feel less powerless and confused. Also, the more you can say, the safer you are. If you can chat with locals, even on a minimal level (like, "Your baby is cute" kind of stuff), people will be more likely to feel they know you, watch out for you, and help you if you get into any trouble.

However, I'd say the way Chinese is usually taught here is ABYSMAL. Teachers usually have this attitude like, "If you don't say it perfectly, don't say it at all." It's really daunting. Bring a phrase book, find a friend, chat with the locals who don't speak English. That way you'll be forced to learn new, useful things. For me, since I learned characters before I came and know how to use a Chinese dictionary, I have learned a lot of Chinese from karaoke videos and tv shows.

As for books to try, my fantastic teacher at Indiana U., Margaret Yan, has written a book called "Interactions." It's really useful in that it includes a lot of daily life vocabulary, unlike the "In the 5th century B.C., Chinese jade pottery ..." useless, arcane crap that used to be the mainstay of Chinese language books when I went to college. The downside of it is that I think there is too much new material presented in one chapter, so it can seem daunting, and it emphasizes traditional characters rather than the simplified ones used in the Mainland. Still, it's fun, with lots of illustrations and stuff to keep things light. You could check that out if you want to study before you go.

[hubei_canuk]