Lost in Translation
It’s gone on long enough: I’ve been in China for six months and existed on a vocabulary of roughly five hundred Chinese words plus a handful of characters to get by. Since many foreigners living full time in Beijing speak an impressive amount of Mandarin, my relative ineptitude is beginning to make me feel like a social pariah in expat circles as well as severely limiting my ability to befriend local people. It makes me highly envious when I see a Westerner and a local happily chatting to each other in Mandarin and, quite frankly, I feel rather rude that I’m unable to do the same. Many of the younger Chinese generation speak brilliant English of course, but this is no excuse: I need to improve my Mandarin skills, fast.
The concept of living full-time in a country and being unable to speak a reasonable amount of the language is a relatively new one for me, and being a native English speaker I often take for granted how lucky I am to have learned from birth such a universally recognised language. On top of this I’m a talkative soul and, clichéd as it sounds, I do think that learning the local lingo is the single best way to break down cultural barriers and make yourself feel at home. So I’ve finally bitten the bullet and shelled out hen duo qien on a course of Chinese lessons (see, they’re paying for themselves already).
Before I continue I should point out that, up to now, I have made at least some effort to learn Chinese: before I arrived I’d been backpacking in Asia for several months and every ‘China veteran’ I met recommended that learning a few words and characters would make my life immeasurably easier, not to mention ingratiating me with the locals (they weren’t wrong either – I arrived from northern Vietnam via a fairly remote border crossing and my first few days are a blur of rickety buses, gesticulating with hotel owners, playing ‘guess the meat’ in roadside restaurants and being grateful I could ask for train tickets in broken Mandarin). So I took their advice, downloaded a series of self-study podcasts, and spent many an hour lying on rickety Vietnamese beds learning the basics.
Unfortunately, though, the language course I selected had some strange priorities when it came to deciding the most useful words and phrases for its students to master. For example, by the time I crossed into China I had reached lesson twenty-two, and I knew how to say, ‘No, I would not like to come back to your place for a coffee’ but I still hadn’t been taught the phrases ‘I want a hotel room’ or ‘can I have the bill’. Consequently I formed some odd preconceptions and was almost disappointed when nobody tried to chat me up immediately after I crossed the border.
Nevertheless, I persevered with my self-study techniques and have managed to pick up most of the basics when it comes to things like getting on transport, ordering food and bargaining in the markets .The problem with all this is, if somebody answers my perfectly crafted questions in any way other than I’ve been taught by the robotic voice of my podcast, I haven’t got a clue what they’re saying. On top of this, (due to the afore mentioned fact that most Beijing expats speak decent Chinese), once I’ve rattled of the two or three sentences I’m comfortable with, the person I’m addressing assumes that I’m all but fluent and often launches into a happy flow of Mandarin to which I can neither understand nor respond. This is a particular problem in taxis and I have perfected the art of lasting for ten or fifteen minutes pretending that I fully understand their one-way conversation through a series of smiles, nods and vague grunts.
In a nutshell, the self-study isn’t really doing it for me and I wouldn’t want to put a language partner through the pain of an hour’s worth of my tortured muttering just yet, so last week I attended my first one-on-one ‘Intensive Spoken Mandarin’ lesson (intensive being the operative word).
Despite dark warnings from expat friends that Chinese language schools are not all they should be, my inexhaustibly cheerful and enthusiastic teacher immediately proved her worth. She performed minor miracles by forcing me not to speak English, at all, for two full hours, and drilling Mandarin words, phrases and pronunciations into me by asking me to repeat them again and again. It remains to be seen whether she’ll have fluent within weeks (which I would like but I accept is not a realistic goal however good she is) but already, after four lessons, I am more confident and comfortable speaking Mandarin with people, and somehow feel I have more of a right to be here. This sounds schmaltzy I know, but considering how often I’ve have a laugh over a bad Chinglish translation or strangely pronounced English word, it is only fair that I put the boot on the other foot and learn to make myself understood.

It’s gone on long enough: I’ve been in China for six months and existed on a vocabulary of roughly five hundred Chinese words plus a handful of characters to get by. My ineptitude is beginning to make me feel like a social pariah in expat circles (all my rugby pals are fluent or close to it, the gits) as well as severely limiting my ability to befriend local people. It makes me highly envious when I see a Westerner and a local happily chatting to each other in Mandarin and I feel rather rude that I’m unable to do the same after being here for so long. So I’ve finally bitten the bullet and shelled out hen duo qien (a shed load of money) on a course of Chinese lessons – see, they’re paying for themselves already.

Before I continue I should point out that, up to now, I have made at least some effort to learn:  every ‘China veteran’ we met while we were in South East Asia recommended that learning a few words and characters would make life immeasurably easier, not to mention ingratiating us with the locals (they weren’t wrong either – we arrived from northern Vietnam via a fairly remote border crossing and my first few days are a blur of gesticulating with hotel owners and playing ‘guess the meat’ in roadside restaurants. So I took their advice, downloaded a series of self-study podcasts, and spent many an hour lying on rickety Vietnamese beds learning the basics.

Unfortunately, though, the language course I selected had some strange priorities when it came to deciding the most useful words and phrases for its students to master. For example, by the time I crossed into China I had reached lesson twenty-two, and I knew how to say, ‘No, I would not like to come back to your place for a coffee’ but I still hadn’t been taught the phrases ‘I want a hotel room’ or ‘can I have the bill’. Or even ‘yes please’. Consequently I formed some odd preconceptions and was almost disappointed when nobody tried to chat me up immediately after I crossed the border.

The other problem with self-study pod casts is that, if somebody answers my perfectly crafted questions in any way other than I’ve been taught by the robotic voice of my podcast, I haven’t got a clue what they’re saying. On top of this, (due to the afore mentioned fact that most Beijing expats speak decent Chinese), once I’ve rattled of the two or three sentences I’m comfortable with, the person I’m addressing assumes that I’m all but fluent and often launches into a happy flow of Mandarin to which I can neither understand nor respond. This is a particular problem in taxis and I have perfected the art of lasting for ten or fifteen minutes pretending that I fully understand their one-way conversation through a series of smiles, nods and vague grunts.

In a nutshell, the self-study isn’t really doing it for me and I wouldn’t want to put a language partner through the pain of an hour’s worth of my tortured muttering just yet, so last week I attended my first one-on-one ‘Intensive Spoken Mandarin’ lesson (intensive being the operative word).

Despite dark warnings from expat friends that Chinese language schools are not all they should be, my inexhaustibly cheerful and enthusiastic teacher immediately proved her worth. She performed minor miracles by forcing me not to speak English, at all, for two full hours, and drilling Mandarin words, phrases and pronunciations into me by asking me to repeat them again and again. If I screw up the same word three times she makes me sing a song, which is a remarkably strong incentive for both of us to work hard.

At the moment the characters are the bit that’s killing me – who decided it was a good idea to have a different symbol for every single word? – and it is tempting to just learn just the basics and leave it at that. But considering how often I’ve have a laugh over a bad Chinglish translation or strangely pronounced English word since we crossed the border (my personal favourite: ‘cripples and retards toilet’), it is only fair that I put the boot on the other foot and learn to make myself understood.