On Sunday, I was supposed to get together with my friend Jacky for my first Chinese lesson, but he got stuck in bad traffic coming back from visiting a relative somewhere in southern Taiwan and so had to take a rain check. We ended up getting together this evening. I can't say that I learned any great new words in Chinese, but at least I've made a beginning with the Chinese alphabet.
Yes, you read that right: the Chinese alphabet. Popular myth to the contrary, Chinese does have a phonetic alphabet. The reason we Westerners aren't aware of it is that it's only used in schools to teach pronunciation of very basic words. I guess you could say it's more like the Chinese version of the phonemic chart (more on that in a later post).
He started me off with a few letters in "neutral" tone. Which to me, sounds exactly like rising tone, falling done, and falling-rising tone. Chinese tones are infamous. But somehow, despite feeling as though I had absolutely no idea how to tell the difference, Jacky kept telling me I was getting them right.
I got to learn first-hand how different the meanings between tones can be. To, pronounced with a rising tone, means "to steal". Pronounced with a falling-rising tone, it means something else entirely--I don't recall what (a mere half-hour after this lesson), but nothing anywhere near as dramatic as "to steal".
Jacky also promised that at our next meeting, he will bring a Chinese-English electronic dictionary, so that I can look up some basic words and hear them pronounced.
Toto, we are most definitely not in English anymore.
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3 comments:
All I can say is best of luck. Languages fascinate me and I've tried on two or three occasions to learn just a little bit about Chinese but the combination of phonemic tones and ideographs has daunted me every time. Immersion is always the best way to learn a language, but at least with most languages you can get a good handle on basic vocabulary and grammar from books. Not so Chinese.
Which is a shame, since I believe that Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish are the languages to know these days. Arabic, despite its similarity to Hebrew, has also daunted me because of the alphabet. Arabic script is harder to decipher than my own handwriting and that's saying something!
At least the Chineese characters are discrete -- you just have memorize a thousand of them and their various combinations.
At least you have the advantage of immersion.
What kind of Chinese do they speak in Taiwan? I assume the characters are the same, but how does the spoken language compare to standard Mandarin?
Daniel,
Taiwan has its own dialect of Chinese called either Taiwanese or Fujanese. But Mandarin is the language of education, business, and the media, and there's no real point in learning something other than Mandarin.
That said, Taiwanese people tend to think their pronunciation is inferior to that of Standard Mandarin which is, you guessed it, the version of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Beijing. You can think of Taiwan as China's version of "Y'all" country.
"Alphabet"? If you're talking about Bopomofo ㄅㄆㄇㄈ, it's an imperfect phonetic system at best. Of course, there's Pinyin, which could be more of a "Chinese Alphabet" than anything.
"there's no real point in learning something other than Mandarin."
I COMPLETELY disagree. I regret more and more that my mother did not teach me Taiwanese when I was young. In the marketplace, on the street, on the variety shows, and as of lately, political rallies, you MUST know Taiwanese to get by. Not everything has Chinese subtitles.
"Taiwanese people tend to think their pronunciation is inferior to that of Standard Mandarin"
Now just where did you hear that? Maybe Pekingese (and REALLY arrogant Waishengren) think that, but for most Taiwanese, the particular way they speak Mandarin is just "the way it's done."
On the "y'all" thing, incidentally, "咱們" (zanmen, we including you, contrasted with 我們, we excluding you) is a Taiwanism/Hokkienism, from "lan". Elsewhere, "我們" means just "we", including you or not.
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