The beautiful thing about the month of April is the first blooming flowers, longer sunny days in the world’s Northern hemisphere, and a non-stop celebration and events related to languages, books, and creativity. April 20 – Chinese Language Day, April 21 – World Creativity and Innovation Day, April 23 – World Book and Copyright Day, English Language Day as well as Spanish Language Day.
Starting with the Chinese language, I must admit to having a long and personal relationship with it. Years ago, my dear American-Chinese friend invited me to join her and her children, who were growing up in Norway, to attend Chinese Sunday School, which I did and did not stop attending for the next six years. Thanks to my brilliant friend, my typically quiet Norwegian Sunday would transform into a vibrant and loud Chinese one. In a lovely distant, otherwise sleepy, Oslo suburb, the long corridors of a school were getting filled with lively Chinese children’s chat, music tunes, and Tai Chi practices, smell of traditional snacks and tea, bright and inspiring Chinese language teachers, and classmates. Not to mention the events and national celebrations during the year, such as Chinese New Year, also known as the Spring Festival, I was voluntarily dragged into. All this new world and experience without even stepping a foot on the Chinese soil. Until finally, one day I had a chance to travel to Beijing and experience this colorful and fascinating culture firsthand.
The students of the Chinese Sunday School in Oslo were mainly the Norwegian Chinese diaspora children, representatives of other Asian ethnicities who plan on traveling, working, or studying in China, also ethnical Norwegians who have Chinese spouses. My motivation to join the school clearly was the possibility to see my friend every Sunday and the curiosity about the language. The language seemed to be quite a challenge at first to one who has her background in European languages and is not that skillful in drawing. But that didn’t scare me.
Chinese has many dialects, and the one the school was teaching was Mandarin, which is the standard and spoken in the capital of China and by the majority of Chinese. There are over a billion native and L2* speakers of this language.
Chinese is a tonal language, so the first step was to get familiar with the tones of words written in pinyin – spelling in the Roman alphabetic script based on Chinese characters’ pronunciation. Four different tones/intonations are used to distinguish otherwise identical words. Let’s say I want to say number ‘eight’, which is ‘ba’ in Chinese with a high-level tone, and if I wanted to say ‘father’, it is also ‘ba’ but pronounced with a high falling to low tone. The remaining tones are high rising, low rising, and sometimes a neutral tone is considered the fifth one. Pinyin is important and used for typing on the computer or to text on the phone: first, you type in the word, and a row of possibilities for Chinese characters is displayed where one now needs to be recognized and chosen according to the context.
The characters hanzi represent either one word or, in most cases, one syllable and are the second step in the learning process. There are about 10000 Chinese characters but you can do fine knowing 2-3000 of them in order to be able to read newspapers. Luckily, the characters we are learning today are a simplified version thanks to the People’s Republic of China and its founder Mao Zedong who initiated a plan to simplify more than 1700 characters in 1955. The writing form used for typing is called songti, the one used to write with a brush is called zhengkai and the handwriting script is shouxieti. Strict rules need to be followed when writing a character – first left then right strokes, first top then the bottom, first horizontal then vertical, and so on. Marvelous, isn’t it? Most laborious for me was the process of matching a word learned in pinyin with the suitable character while at the same time trying to draw it and make it comprehensible.
The next step and challenge, though not too difficult to overcome, was to make a sentence by putting together the tone words, plenty of which I had acquired by then. . The syntax, word order in a sentence, though quite straight-forward, can seem not as natural to someone who speaks English or Russian. A sentence “I don’t like it very much” would look like “Bu tai xihuan” literally “don’t – too (much) – to like.” Or a question “Can you play tennis?” in Chinese is “Ni hui da wangqiu ma?” the literal meaning of which is “You -to be able-to play-tennis-interrogative particle ma?”.
When I finally unexpectedly got the opportunity to travel to China – I have to brag here a little and confess – yes, I tried to use the little language that I had learned by the time when buying a Chinese paper and a local Vogue issue in a newspaper stand, also in several shops making somewhat successful conversation bits. I was on top of the world and felt truly rewarded for the countless Sundays of hard work.
Motivation is everything in language learning. It is most important in order to start rote learning words and operating intricate grammar. Good motivation can be a trip you are planning to the country where they speak the language, a film or a book you would like to read in an original one, also your dream job might require some knowledge of a particular language. Find your motivation and take on a challenge.
*L2 – a second language, not the native language (first language or L1), learned later as a foreign language which can also be another language used in the speaker’s home country.
Sources: Kenneth Katzner “The languages of the World”, Moderne Kinesisk for begynnere Dangdai Zhongwen.
Ventral Striatum 