Chinese Characters No Double Dutch

By BIRGIT FISCHER

"SO cute! Your handwriting is the equivalent of babytalk," was the reception I got when I proudly showed my Chinese friends the Chinese characters I had painstakingly brushed. At that time, I had just started life as a college student majoring in Asian Science, early in the game to come to the realization that I was merely imitating – the "double Dutch" phase of children's language learning, and successful Chinese "immersion" would be a long haul.

For someone from Europe, Chinese differs greatly from any foreign languages he or she has heard or spoken previously. After several classes in Basic Practical Chinese, my Asian Science cohort already lacked confidence we would ever master this special language. Four tones and characters with such minor differences make it hard to distinguish words, let alone remember them. But a week of culture shock gave way to fascination with this "song-like" language, embodying as it does such a long history and cultural tradition. So I grit my teeth and set out to master it.

Our teachers are Chinese highly capable with German. They understood our problems as beginners. With great patience they drilled us in the tones, a very important basic skill. We accepted that we could communicate in this language only if we mastered the tones. For example, the different tones of "ma" each have different meanings. Meanings that provide dangerous conversational territory are "mother," "flax," "horse" or the verb "to swear." You can imagine how mistakes with tones can lead to little misunderstandings, big problems, or huge jokes. Fortunately, the Chinese teachers showed infinite forbearance towards us Europeans doing our best with their ancient language. Glaring errors in tones didn't discourage them, they just persisted until we got it right.

Like German school kids reciting the alphabet aloud in the classroom, we students chanted the four tones for each different syllable, day in and day out. In the beginning, the solo efforts felt silly – like a kid singing alone in front of the entire class, and we behaved as if we didn't take it seriously. The result was that our mistakes on basic tones persisted.

Unfortunately, the pronunciation rules for consonants in Chinese Pinyin don't exactly correspond to those in European languages. When you pronounce S, J, Q and X in Chinese, the positions of the tongue are different from German letters. Pronouncing them felt like trying to master a tongue twister. It all amounted to an unusual and steep learning curve for us. Three steps made up the methodology we used to learn "Words and Phrases" – first, the German definition; second, Chinese Pinyin and pronunciation; and then the written character or characters.

The Chinese teachers told us that everyone should work out his or her own way to remember characters. The best way probably is to write the same character a million times, but only after you have made sure you are right about the number, sequence and directions of strokes. Chinese kids also practice like this. It works very well, but takes a lot of time. My classmates swore they'd render all the difficult ones and paste them up on the walls of their rooms. We ended up with paper labels on the bathroom mirror, so we could do some memorizing while brushing our teeth; better yet, we pasted them at the head of the beds, so they would appear in our dreams.

Another method required a rich imagination: observe a character or character set for a long time until you have reconceived of it as a face or image, which is helpful for memorizing the meaning of a character as well as its structure. I'm very good at this now, but my propositions sometimes made my classmates laugh. Here, of course, I should give an example. The characters for wedding are "结婚." For the first one "结," the left part means silk (many characters are made up of two parts, one of which decides pronunciation, and the other meaning). The right part of "结" in the eye of a German like me looks like, from top to bottom, a cross, and then a horizontal stroke, and at last a square which means "mouth" in Chinese. So my memory device for this character is that the bride is standing in her dressing room with out-stretched arms, which look like a cross. Before her wedding, she dressed in "silk" dresses and put on her lipstick. As for "婚," the left part means "woman," the upper right part is a man playing saxophone, and the lower is the sun which means, in my "story," when the bride stepped into the church, the man played a song for the sunrise on his saxophone.

Memorizing characters by image seems trivial, difficult and naïve, but it is the best way for me to assemble a Chinese vocabulary of a respectable size.

Pronunciation and characters might be daunting, but Chinese grammar gives us a bit of a break – German doesn't have such a good reputation that way. From my point of view, Chinese grammatical structure is easier to pick up than some European languages. In Chinese, nouns and adjectives don't have declensions, nor verbs conjugations; they don't change according to different tenses, which is something that drove students of Latin crazy. So it's easy to compose or parse a sentence... but just try to translate it! As nouns and verbs remain unchanged regardless of tense, a single Chinese sentence invites several translations. The context is what decides the proper version. Whether interpreting the single or plural form, the male or female gender, the present or past tense, it is all determined by context. You will come up empty-handed if you want to clarify the fixed or correct structures of Chinese sentences like you would German. Therefore, the right way to learn a language as foreign as Chinese is to build up a good sense of the language.

Here you might ask, what degree of competence in Chinese can a German speaker hope to reach? I have no answer, as I am still trying my best to learn. Back in my college in Germany, Chinese class focused on reading, writing and translation. Listening and speaking are only a very small part of class due to the limited class hours in the schedule. We were required to practice what we learned in our spare time. Take, for example, looking for a Chinese student to be your "language partner," a mutual commitment to achieve better fluency in your respective new languages. After two years of classroom-based studying in Germany, I decided the most important thing was to use my knowledge in daily life and live in Beijing for a while. I learned from some tourist guides that without a few words of Chinese, a foreigner would be as disadvantaged as the deaf and dumb on Beijing's streets. My experience verified it. Although the Olympic Games boosted the popularization of English, some knowledge of Chinese is a must, especially outside of cosmopolitan areas and tourism magnets.

As I've mentioned, Beijingers show great patience and tolerance to Europeans who trot out their wobbly Chinese. Alas, they could usually guess what I wanted to say. It doesn't stop them from praising you with great enthusiasm after you've wrenched out one sentence of Putonhua! But as a German, I'm not much of a keen listener. For example, if a cab driver speaks at his normal speed or with a bit of a provincial accent, I'm still lost.

Chinese is one of the most beautiful languages. It is the country's art, culture and soul. I am looking forward to lingering in Beijing longer – there is still so much new to experience. As for practicing my listening and speaking, if I'm lucky my Chinese will progress beyond "babytalk."