The Newmans

It's my observation that when people are learning a language they start to get traction with it after learning a couple hundred words or so. This seems to equip people with the necessary basics with which they can start to use it and consequently start engaging people in elementary conversation. This then enables them to learn through use of the language - the more they use it the more they learn.

With Mandarin I'm not so sure this is the case. For starters, the language is not phonetic. That means that you can't learn how to say a word by reading the Chinese characters. There is the pinyin system, the writing of Chinese in Roman characters which is a huge help, but it makes learning Mandarin a 2-step process. One has to first learn the pinyin and then the Chinese characters.

In essence there's two things you need to be able to do; the first is to memorise all the words and the second is learning how to build the sentences. Apparently the point at which Mandarin starts to become really useful is when you can use about 2000 words fluently. Hmm. The sentence structure and grammar rules are actually fairly straightforward, they're just very different to those in English. What that means is that a word-for-word translation between English and Mandarin usually results in a meaningless sentence. This is why those Chinglish instruction manuals on some products are the way they are.

The language lessons that I've been having have been focussing on spoken Mandarin. That means that we're doing lots of learning of pinyin and only a brief look at the characters. I can remember the characters for 0-10 and a couple of others but that's about it. I can't even blame the teacher, because our teacher is very good. 

So far we've looked at about 450 words of so, of which I can remember a little over half, and I'm still completely useless at any attempt to engage in conversation in Mandarin! I don't mean that it's a bit difficult or I need to have a few goes at understanding what someone is saying, I mean completely and utterly useless! I can tell someone to take a seat, I can give a cordial greeting, I can ask someone where they live, I can tell a Taxi driver to go left, right and stop, and when a shop owner gives me the "foreigners mark-up" price on something I can say "You must be joking!", but that's about it.

Unless I'm talking with someone using elementary challenge-response style questions, I am still lost, even after a year in China.