Food

Today's Mandarin lesson was at my place.  At my kitchen table, Min quizzed me on this week's flashcards.  It's helpful to learn how lexemes fit together.  For example, the word "fan," "meal," is contained in the words for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  I realized as I studied the past few days that I had been getting the tones wrong, so I recorded most of today's lesson.  That way, I'll be able to imitate Min's pronunciation in the future.

Min introduced lots of food words, and we did a skit in which she pretended to own a restaurant and I ordered food.  She explained some rules about eating in China: the number of dishes at a formal meal is usually a multiple of four, and the first one is soup.  There are some conventions about the order in which people eat hot or cold dishes, too.  She gave me words for the five tastes, including bitter.  In the summer, Chinese people eat a bitter cucumber-like squash to prevent marks from forming near their mouths due to dehydration.  We agreed that there probably isn't a word for those marks in English, because the Chinese word reflects traditional Eastern medicine.

I'm learning a lot about daily life in China.  For example, there are snack carts in cities.  There are Western restaurants with food such as hamburgers, and people can use knives and forks at  such places.  In fact, it is possible to ask for a fork (instead of chopsticks) at a Chinese restaurant, too.  I'm glad that Min is helping me, because she pointed out something about the word for "waitress" in my guidebook.  Ten years ago, the term listed was acceptable; now it is slang for prostitute!  It's good that I won't use that term out of ignorance!!

On to Grammar

In the week between the last lesson and this one, I tried to practice a lot.  I made flashcards for all the words and expressions Min and I had gone over; I think I quizzed myself every day except one or two.  It felt like taking private music lessons: my teacher would be able to tell however much or little I had repeated these words to myself!

I learned a lot of simple words such as numbers, please, thank you, etc.  There were also full expressions on the list, and those were by far the hardest for me.  If I'm hoping to live in China, I might as well learn some common phrases besides "Do you speak English?" and "Where is the ATM?"  So today, I asked Min to teach me some Chinese grammar.

She gave me a list of personal subject pronouns; there is a "you" plural in Mandarin, and there is a plural suffix that only works for people (on "we," "they," etc.).  There are no case-marking particles, so the word for "ball," for example, would be the same whether it is the subject or the object of a sentence.   Min also wrote down some expressions that are related to words I already know--"Good morning" and "good afternoon," for example, are close to "hello."  Min taught me how to ask how much something costs, and to bargain.  We're planning to try a skit next lesson, after I get a chance to study all my new expressions.

Even though I'm starting to see how Chinese fits together, some aspects of it are still hard.  My phrasebook listed two words for "no," to be used in different contexts.  I asked Min for some practice on how to figure out which word to use when.  She explained that there is an entire verb for negation!  In some ways, Chinese grammar is simpler than English, though: there is no passive voice in Chinese.  Learning these things makes me appreciate the challenges that Chinese students of English have to deal with.

On Writing

The whole time I've been studying Chinese, I have been wondering what it's like for Chinese students of English to learn our writing system.  Learning Chinese characters seems hard to me, but at least they look like pictures of what they mean.  Whenever linguists in my graduate program have talked about English orthography, we have commiserated about how much harder it is than languages like Spanish or French.  People don't have weekly spelling tests in their native tongues all around the world.

 So I asked Min about that, and she said that Chinese students tend to find the English writing system easier than Chinese--at least English has an alphabet!  She began learning English at twelve years old, but most Chinese people today begin at four or five.  They start learning grammar around age twelve.  Min added that she is writing two articles about teaching for publication, and she is getting help from a professor that we both had, so she can write in the American English style.  I hope I can see her original version, in a more Chinese writing style, as well as the revised, American one.  That would be a window into Chinese culture for me.

Similarities and Differences

Today Min and I went over numbers.  I had practiced pronunciation twice with a website since our previous meeting.  It was still hard, though!  To me, counting from 1-10 in Chinese sounded like a song.  When Min asked me what individual numbers were, I really had to go through my song and pick each one out.  Also, she showed me hand gestures for these numbers, saying they are widely used in China.  These gestures are different from American ones--a fist means 10, for example.  Doing the gestures helps me remember the numbers, so I hope I can find a website that helps me review that way.

What I did improve on when I practiced without Min, I think, was reading Pinyin.  She expects more from me than that, though!

There are some interesting patterns in Chinese.  For example, Monday is literally "1 day," Tuesday "2 day," etc.   Also, any number with a hundred and a teen has a one in between.  Two hundred eleven in Mandarin, then, is literally "two hundred one eleven."  Min pointed out that Chinese syntax is very different from English, and we noticed that Mandarin has no copular verb.  I expected to find myriad differences between the two languages.  Yet so far, I haven't come across any phonemes that are absent from English--in fact, Mandarin even has English retroflex /r/, which is rare cross-linguistically.  I wonder if that will help me teach Chinese EFL learners to distinguish between /r/ and /l/ in the future.

Min had some questions for me about English and American culture.  She wanted to take a pragmatics class, but unfortunately the pragmatics professor at our school is away this semester.  She said she understands graduate students and professors when she has conversations with them, but she can't understand undergraduates.  So she asked me to teach her some slang, and I told her she could come with examples of words she doesn't understand in the future.  I gave her a copy of our college newspaper, which has slang in columns sometimes.  

She also inquired about what parts of the human hand are called in English.  When we went over the names of the fingers, she asked why the pinky finger is called that.  I laughed--I didn't know!  That's just what kids are told in this country!  I'm sure there are moments like that when she teaches me, too.  She said Chinese children are taught that if they don't say "excuse me" when they ask for directions, the person they ask will give them wrong directions on purpose.  Politeness seems very important in Chinese culture.

English Teaching in China

After the language lesson, Min and I talked about teaching English in China.  She said Chinese teachers teach writing and grammar there, while foreign teachers do listening and speaking.  At a university in Shanghai, I would probably do ESP (English for Special Purposes).  I was glad to hear that, since I figured that students would be more motivated to study exactly the kind of English they planned to use.  During my teaching classes this year, I had been thinking about how to have students do skits of business meetings.  I could get lectures about business from the Internet and have students look for key points about pragmatics and pronunciation.  I'm starting to get excited!

The First Lesson

Originally, Min and I agreed to spend half of each lesson on Chinese, half on English.  I bought a guidebook to Shanghai with a phrasebook in the back, and thought we could start there.  Halfway through the time, though, Min said she was having so much fun teaching me Chinese (explaining a lot in English) that it was fine with her to just keep doing that.

First, she explained the tones.  She knew tones would be hard for a native English speaker like me.  My book listed four, but in fact there's also a neutral tone, so it's as if there there five!  Chinese has characters, of course, but also Pinyin, which is supposed to be a sort of phonetic transcription (in the Roman alphabet) of Mandarin Chinese.  I found Pinyin hard, though.  It doesn't match up exactly to what an English speaker would expect (not that English spelling matches up to pronunciation!).  The vowels, especially, gave me trouble.  Sometimes an "i" would be pronounced as a schwa or wedge.  Min would first say each word on a list, having me repeat.  We would then do that once more.  She said I did that correctly, even with tones.  (She's so patient and nice, though...)  Then, when I had to repeat the whole list, invariably I would make mistakes.  I'm learning.

Min said that each Chinese word has two characters: the one on the left corresponds to the meaning of the word, and the one on the right, the tone.  I should learn that well as a pronunciation helper in the future.  The falling-rising tone goes down really low, too.  If Min can say it, so will I!

 One of the first words I learned from Min was "ni hao," which means "hello."  I've been to China once before, on vacation with my family in 2005.  There, we understood this word to be two syllables.  With Min today, I found that my family and I had all been pronouncing the tones completely wrong.  "Ni" and "hao" each have the falling-rising tone, which makes each one sound like it has about four syllables!  It seems like a lot of travel and learning about other cultures is like that.  Whatever you thought you knew, or learned in your own country, or even from a little bit of travel, is kind of the same but really totally different.  For me, part of the fun of working in this field is that I'll never know all about every language or foreign land, no matter how long I've been teaching.  There will always be more to learn.

About Min

I am pursuing a master's degree in linguistics for teaching English to speakers of other languages.  My university is in the United States, but this year, one of my classmates is Min (not her real name), an English teacher on a fellowship from China.  Min already has a master's degree in linguistics, and teaches English writing, grammar, and linguistics at a prestigious Chinese university.  I'm going to graduate in May, and have been planning to apply for teaching jobs in China.  So when Min offered to teach me basic Mandarin Chinese, I jumped at the chance.  Who wouldn't, when there's a chance to go to China without leaving home?