Learning Mandarin Chinese

So, Vicki and I have been learning Mandarin Chinese for three months now.  During this time we have learned our numbers, time and dates, and most simple conversation items related to purchasing and talking about LiLi.

We started a month before we left and could functionally say very little when we hit the ground.  With self-study, 1 to 2 lessons a week, and everyday interactions we have been piecing more and more useful stuff together.  For instance, even though we knew our numbers when we arrived, we couldn’t really understand people when they said them, and we couldn’t string them together fast enough for people to understand us.  The first day in Shanghai we were able to tell someone LiLi’s age, but that was about it – and we definitely didn’t understand the words they were saying – only charades.

At this point we’re able to have some conversations about LiLi:

• Ta shi nuhai (he/she is a girl)  the spoken sound “ta” can be either he or she.  However, there are actually two different characters – so when it’s written, it’s not ambiguous.  The sound “shi” is pronounced “sure” and means “is, was, am, were, to be, AND yes”. 
• Women shi Meiguo (We are American)  Here the “guo” means country and Mei was selected because it means “beautiful” and because the sound “May” is phonetically related to America”
• Ta shi shi-qi ge yue (She is 17 “measure word” months)  Measure words are those that offer size.  For instance the difference between a LOAF of bread and a SLICE of bread.  In Chinese they use measure words in many places we don’t.  So here it is required to say “16 ‘units’ of months”.  It becomes an issue at 12 months and less because December is “shi-er yue” literally “12 month”.

We can also throw out some ‘fun’ phrases, usually directed at LiLi:

Knowing some Mandarin is useful
when buying vegetables!

• LiLi, shuo ni hao (Say Hello – literally “you good”)
• LiLi, lai zhe-li (come here)
• Zuo-de hao (Well done – literally “done good”)

We’re also fairly competent shoppers.

• Duo shao kuai yi jin? (How much money for a ½ kg?)

• We can also easily hear prices now after we ask and also rattle off long strings of number (i.e. a telephone number) without much hesitation.

And of course, when they think we know Chinese and start talking to us, we always reply “Wo zhi hui yi-dian-dian Zhong-wen” (I only know very little Chinese).  I think we’re getting close to dropping the second “dian” which in this case acts as the “very”.

My total word count is about 400 words now and most people can understand me when I say them (with some context and maybe charades).  I can also recognize 40 or 50 characters – which is still in the ‘not very useful’ category – but fun.  Our weak spot is definitely our ability to listen to others speak the language.  We can’t hear the words we’ve already learned – and they often use a synonym that we don’t know.

These friends of ours (LiLi's ayi's family) speak
little to no English, so Mandarin is
essential when hanging out with them.

One nice thing about learning Chinese is that because the Pinyin Romanization (using these letters instead of characters) was only completed in the 50’s there are no exceptions.  When it’s spelled out – that’s exactly how you say it.  So, it’s very easy to make progress on our own because it’s not like every word needs to have its own phonetic description.  However, with the characters it’s then like we have to learn an entire second language since it’s almost completely unrelated (though many characters have one half that gives the general meaning (animal) and one half that gives how you say it “ma” and the two make the exact meaning).

There are four tones in Chinese plus the less common ‘no tone’.  Coming from a language that doesn’t use them, the tones are interesting.  They are slightly different ways of saying the same general sound.  Think about how you normally say “Hello”, how you say it as a question, and how you might say it abruptly to someone who was late arriving.  In Chinese those would be three completely different words.  The sound “I” (spelled ai in Pinyin), depending on the tone, means Dust, Cancer, Short, and Love.

So far, I haven’t put much emphasis on the tones in Chinese – I could hardly hear them as different when I started – but they’re starting to make more sense now.  I’m now working on going through the 400 words that I’ve already memorized and add in the tone so that I can say them more accurately.

Knowing Mandarin allows us to make
quick purchases with ease.

So, here’s the craziest part of their language: there are only 1200 different sounds in the language, which includes the four different tones, which makes for a total unique spelling of syllables at only 350.  In English there are over 8000.  That means when in English we have the same sound for to, two, and too – in Chinese there are eight times as many similar sounds. The sound “shi” (sure) is applied to about 100 different characters – however, most of these characters are not terribly comprehensible on their own – they’re always tied to others.  For instance, “to” is its own word but also shows up in “tonight” “tomorrow” and so on.  There is a poem in Chinese that only uses the sound “shi”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den.

In Sanmen, the older locals don’t always speak Mandarin, which makes things difficult.  We call their dialect “Sanmenese” but it is technically called the “Wu” dialect.  We’re still having some trouble determining exactly how different it is from Mandarin.  They use the same written characters – and therefore the exact same grammar.  It appears to be further away than just a heavy accent (think Scottish) but certainly not as bad as English to German.  So it would probably qualify as a Creole.  Although confusing at times, we can still usually negotiate these situations using charades if nothing else.

We love living in China, and the fact the every little bit of language acquisition makes our experience even better is good motivation to keep studying.  We’re confident that by the time Vicki’s family visits in December we’ll make mostly competent tour guides!

**NOTE: We didn't include tones in any of our written Pinyin because we haven't yet found a program that allows us to type them.

A bit of Italian

The Spouse Club just did their first of our planned cooking lessons last week.  Three Italian spouses/significant others here made Spaghetti Carbonara, Pizza Margherita, Penne al Salmone, and foccacia with tomatoes.  We borrowed the kitchen of a local “restaurant” (down the street – but they never have customers.  They are actually closing down on Sunday) and started cleaning at 10AM and cooking by 11AM.  When we realized the restaurant didn’t have an oven we had to go retrieve three toaster ovens from our apartments!  The place did have two burners and two sinks though, plus the dinnerware and tables.  Our spouses and friends then joined us for lunch at noon.  It was a lot of fun.  There was a pool table so Elli and the other kids (eight of them ages 3 to 12 representing Chinese, Vietnamese, El Salvadorian, Italian, and American ethnicities) played the whole time.  The older kids love watching Elli and she certainly loves big kids.  One of the woman who ran the restaurant started a game where Elli would stand on the pool table and try to intercept balls while the kids played.  She loves being the center of attention.  As David, the leader of the Spouse Group, remarked while watching the kids play: Elli sure does live in an interesting world.

Community

At a local beach

First, sorry about the month-long delay – we’ll try to update the blog about every week.   If you use Microsoft Outlook, then you can scroll to the (almost) bottom of this blog and click the “Subscribe to: Posts” – this will then send all of the blog entries to your RSS feeds in outlook.  Or, you can set up this blog to go to whatever RSS reader you use.

A morning view from
the shore road

We mentioned previously that living here on site is a lot like being in college again – living in close proximity to people and having a relatively small population of people that you see over and over again.  Another way it is like our Geneva College experience is the existence of community.  We are surrounded by close friends.

The kids at the Spouse Group tea

While “site guys” have largely been characterized as single or unaccompanied (family is back in the U.S.), a lot of the engineers on this project have come with families and a lot of the younger ones are also planning on growing their families (two babies are already on their way: one due in January and one in February).  There is a Spouse Club here, which Vicki is active in.  They get together for tea and conversation every Wednesday afternoon and plan organized trips and activities.  They also do a lot of informal activities together like bike rides, shopping trips, and recreational activities.  Vicki is putting together a website for the group to make communication easier.

Elli likes to visit the fish and Sky
at the building management
office on site.

In addition to organized community we’ve also cultivated some more intimate relationships. We’ve had some friends over for dinner and have utilized others for free babysitting while we have Mandarin lessons or go for a long bike ride.  Elli even slept over at someone’s house one evening so we could get an early start on a bike ride.  Elli is the surrogate grand kid for several couples here!

Another important part of our community is the weekly barbeque.  Every Friday night there is a barbeque at the American Restaurant which was started by an entrepreneurial Chinese man (Brian) a short walk outside the nuclear power plant gate.  It is 50RMB ($7.50) per person (plus drinks) for an all you can eat family style dinner (i.e. long table and you pass the food).  There are about 30-40 people there every Friday night for the excellent food and social time.  Some of the neighbors to this restaurant usually take Elli from us.  They have chickens and ducks, so Elli likes to visit them!  We actually just hired the neighbor to work as a part-time ayi (ah-ee) (“auntie”) for Elli, so she can learn some Mandarin!  

Ferry ride to She Pan Dao
during a weekly group ride

Eating breakfast on the beach
after riding there with friends.
Eight of us ate for $9.

Group photo on the beach 

community through cycling.  There is a group we often ride with on the weekends who do ~50km rides.  The pace of that group is good for pedaling with a baby (Mark thinks it’s a little slow – but slower is MUCH better than too fast) and it is nice to just ride without having to worry about navigating since the group leader has already planned the route.  On Friday we also did a 5:15AM ride with some friends who are just getting into riding.  We rode to a reservoir and back for a total distance of 27km.  While not very far or long (for us), the community is important and it gets us out of bed and pedaling early.  They enjoyed Friday so much that a Saturday ride was also planned.  We rode to a beach that is 21km away, ate breakfast there, and rode home.  It was a nice morning.

While we’ve only been here a couple of months, our new friends seem like they are going to be a great bunch to have along on this Asian adventure.

Recent Highlights:

Buddha in a mountain

During W101 we can't take
photos like this!



A beautiful road for a ride

• Missing our first Wilderness 101 (ultra mountain bike race in central PA) in 6 years (for Vicki) and 8 years (for Mark) was a sad occasion.  So in lieu of the Wilderness 101 (which was July 30^th) we went for a long road ride. Elli slept over and then spent the next day with her surrogate grandparents (the lead electrical startup engineer and his wife) so we could do this long ride.  It was our first long ride in a very long time so it went as well as a first long ride in a long time goes… not as good as we might like but satisfying.  We did 180km in 9 hours.  We rode past some pretty awesome scenery and even came across a giant Buddha carved into the side of a mountain.

Elli with her friends

Group photo at She Pan Dao



Sitting in an elephant's trunk

• The Spouse Club recently went on a day trip to She Pan Dao (shah pahn dow) (Snake Coil Island), a local island about 10 kilometers from the nuclear power plant that has a couple of tourist caves that were old quarries/pirate coves/contemplation resorts (they date from the Song Dynasty (960-1269)).  We had actually done our own family trip here 10 days before.  Anyway, seven of us spouses/kids rode bicycles to the ferry and the rest of the group (another 10 people) were dropped off by a bus.  Two Chinese boys (ages 10 and 11) joined us for the trip (their parents are engineers here and they are visiting during their summer break) and they took a particular interest in Elli.  I didn’t have to carry her at all – they were her personal guides.  The 10 year-old has stopped by a few times now to play with Elli.  She really likes when her big kid friends come to play.

  

  L-R: Sienna (13 months),
  Elli (16 months), and Greg
  (22 months)

   

   

  
  

  
  

• They are putting in a playground right outside our apartment building.  Itwill be nice to have a structured environment for Elli to play.
  
• Elli went to her first swim party.  She was the first in the water and the last one out.  She really likes to swim.