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.