Literate Laowai

First, some housekeeping notes:

1. "Laowai" is Chinese for foreigner, literally "old foreigner." I don't know why.

2. The photo is not of myself, my teacher, or the Chinese language. I took it on a daytrip this weekend to Black Dragon Pond, about 20-30 minutes from here.

3. I wanted to write really eloquent posts about learning Chinese, as it's been so interesting, but I've decided to prioritize frequency over polish. I apologize in advance for their mediocrity (am I already acquiring a Chinese sense of modesty?? I didn't think it was possible).

Okay, with all of that said, here's my first post about learning Chinese. And the big news is: I'm learning to read and write. Before coming here, I thought I would just learn to speak and understand. I'd talked to Americans who had learned Mandarin for business, and they all told me they were illiterate in Chinese. It was just too hard to learn the characters, they said.

It's possible to learn to speak Chinese without really learning to read and write the language. That's because it's been phoneticized; there are a couple of systems, but by far the dominant system used for this today is the pinyin alphabet. So it is possible, and not uncommon, for anyone accustomed to the Roman alphabet to learn Chinese without understanding Chinese characters. I don't know too much about this yet, so if you want to know more, I suggest you visit www.pinyin.info and read up.

My first day of class, we opened the book, and there was the first lesson, in pinyin, Chinese characters and English. I was too jetlagged to broach the subject of adjusting my course to eliminate the characters, so we proceeded with the textbook’s prescribed lesson structure.

Much time in my first few lessons was dedicated to learning to correctly pronounce the syllables that are the phonic building blocks of the language. Just knowing proper pronunciation of the Roman alphabet is insufficient, as the pinyin rarely sounds how you would expect. Learning the subtle differences between sh, ch, zh and j, as well as the proper tones for everything, takes practice and time. I felt like a complete moron repeating hundreds of syllables after my teacher, and getting most of them wrong. I also got sore from using new mouth muscles.

Every day, my teacher shows me how to write about 25 new characters, and we read a dialogue and do exercises that use them. My second day in class, she opened by saying to me: "We learned 20 characters yesterday. Can you write them on the board." I most certainly could not. Every time you learn a new character, you are learning the character's appearance, the order of the strokes to write it in (important-- more on that later), the pinyin spelling, the correct tone to pronounce it in, and when and how you can use it. For one- and two-stroke characters that look exactly like what they denote such as yi (one) and ren (person), this is relatively easy. But it gets harder for words like rongyi (ironically, the word for easy, which is a 10-stroke, 2-character word) or duanlian, a 12-stroke, 2-character word for physical exercise. Add to this the genetic blip that is my failure to inherit the visual art gene that the rest of my family has in abundance, and you have one struggling laowai.

Despite my struggles, I'm fully on board now with learning to write and read as well as speak. There are several reasons. For one, I find the meanings of the characters fascinating (more on this in another post). For another, I am a writer in my own language. How can I learn a new language and be illiterate? Seems like that might be hypocritical. Also, I think if I'm going to learn characters, the time is now. It would be much harder to change my mind later and try to go back and learn to write. And as I travel around China, I may not be able to understand the many dialects, but if I can read, I should be able to get by. Finally, it should improve my overall understanding of the language and contribute to my ability to speak and understand.

So I'm still basically an illiterate laowai, but I don't plan to stay this way.