Mandarin in Éguó

I didn’t think about it too much, I just chose it. Decisions are much easier to make on impulse...

Kuban State University: entrance.


MANDARIN IN KRASNODAR

It’s now been 2 weeks since I started studying Mandarin at Kuban State University and a few things have become clear to me:

1)    I’m learning Mandarin for the same reason I read Harry Potter.

For years, practically-minded people who live dull-lives in boring old administrative jobs – who work for money rather than passion and who spend their days in front of computers, straining their little red eyes, before coming home and crying softly into their unsatisfied pillows – have been telling be that languages degrees are pointless. Despite the fact that these people are often uncreative, dull and so stressed that they can no longer achieve an erection, I listened to them and tried to explain logically that I wanted to excel at what I loved. Even if I end up dirt poor (which I doubt), I will be happy: surrounded by information that inspires me, entertains me and makes me appreciate my one attempt at human life. (Although maybe if I learn too much Chinese, I might start believing I’ll be reincarnated.)  

Anyway, the same people that love to tell me that languages are pointless, because you’ll never make money as a translator (failing to see, that I don’t want to be a translator.), like to say that the only worthwhile language to learn is Mandarin, because this is going to be the new lingua franca. (I doubt that Mandarin is going to be the next lingua franca for a variety of reasons, but that´s another topic.)

My automatic reaction was to therefore refuse to learn Mandarin. I became biased against the language. I wanted to learn for pleasure, not because someone told me too.  But, eventually, there always comes a point when interest triumphs over prejudice. There are only so many lovely Chinese motherly women you can meet along your travels, before you want to curl up in their arms and fall asleep under a rocking Chinese lullaby, dreaming of the winds passing through the bamboo and stroking the panda cub’s cheeks… So I decided to learn it for the people I have met and in the belief that every language is fascinating, every language is rich in new insights and every language broadens the way you perceive the world… I have no doubt this will be true.

This situation is in some ways analogous to my experience with Harry Potter. For years, everyone around me was reading it and telling me to read it. At the time, I didn´t like fantasy books or conforming to the masses (I was even an individualist in my tender childhood years). So I decided I would read for pleasure what I thought would be good and not what everyone else was recommending. 

Eventually, when I was already well into my teens, I decided I would just give in, find out what everyone was talking about and read all the books in one go… and, well, I liked it! It wasn’t, per se, a series of books that left me obsessed (like many fans) – I can barely even remember what happened. But it was a productive way to spend my time and a fun experience. So now I live in the hope that even if I forget all my Chinese (like the plot of Harry Potter), I will still have hours of pleasure, buzzing off the pleasure of learning languages. And if it does become the lingua franca, I guess that will make me one of those hipster kids: ‘Guys, come on… I totally started learning Mandarin first, you wittle-bittle copy cats! I had the Chinese symbol for swan tattooed on the underside of my toenails in 1996, and I was fluent in all the dialects surrounding the Mongolian frontier by 1998!”

2)  The teacher doesn’t actually speak fluent Chinese even though she studied at Moscow State

 (which is considered to be one of the best universities in Russia).

 I’m not really sure why this is: maybe the language is just so hard that she didn’t manage; maybe she’s never been to China; maybe she spent all her time learning symbols and reading ancient poetry in the original rather than learning conversational speech; or maybe she paid for her grades at university: apparently it’s possible to get into the best universities in Russia based on money rather than necessarily merit (not to say that there aren’t extremely intelligent people there). A lot of people have asked me whether I got into Cambridge by paying money, to which I reply that you need to be quite intelligent/knowledgeable to get in… or, you need to have been given all the opportunities in life to become knowledgeable or intelligent. I.e. you definitely have a better chance of getting in if you’ve been brought up in an environment that has enough financial resources to encourage your learning (a French tutor, a good school, access to textbooks…), but you’re not going to be able to bribe your way in with a dirty cheque or a posh accent: when it comes to the interviews, everybody should theoretically be judged on the same level.

The Russians seemed pretty impressed. To be honest, maybe the teacher has just forgotten a lot of her Mandarin: she has to look up a lot of the tones for words before she gives them to us as vocab. But in the words of my Chinese friend: ‘I know someone who knows her…and yeah, she can’t hold a normal conversation.’

This is a little depressing as it makes me feel that I might end up on a similar level even after decades of learning. But I hold fast to the belief that practice will make … maybe not perfect, but pretty darn good, Sally. So if I decide to pursue this interest for a good few years and then piss off to China for a while, I’ll probably end up a lot better than the teacher.  And if not, then it will still have been a useful experience, I hope.  I will at least be able to teach my grandchildren to eat with chopsticks and maybe add in some of the useful phrases I’ve learnt so far, such as: ‘It is a very large potato’, ‘Mother and little sister are buying vegetables’ and ‘I love to sing Russian folk songs’.

3)    Mandarin is therapeutic.

As stated before, the fact that the teacher can’t hold a normal conversation is, to say the least, discouraging to those of us who have some sort of vague dream of becoming fluent and really impressing our future Chinese mother-in-laws, but it is more than compensated by the beauty of learning – if only for learning’s sake. If I can someone put the deadlines to the back of my mind (and all the associated stress), learning Mandarin is a real pleasure. It is so beautiful and relaxing to sit with my oversized mug of tea under a dim lamp – or maybe the light of the sunset – and just draw pretty patterns of symbols over and over and over again, each time getting a little bit better, or, at least, caring less about how they look. Sometimes I completely zone out, clear my mind for a while, go off wandering… and then realize I’ve drawn a symbol about 100 times, but have no memory of what order the strokes are in or how it is pronounced because I’ve just been dreaming. 

Then I think ‘well, at least I can try to retrace the dream. Maybe it will be good for my writing. An inspiration’. But the dream is gone and faded, and all I have are lots of identical, ruled pages and the fond feeling of ‘maybe I managed to forget worries for a while, maybe I was in a peace for a while. Maybe there was no time for a while. Just the peace passed….’  After that kind of experience, I either feel really relaxed and want to sleep, or I remember I have to learn 20 symbols by tomorrow, get stressed and tell myself off for being such an incorrigible hippy.

4)    My symbols are poor, crippled little critters.

My REALLY battered textbook. 

 I’ve never had a visual memory: I’ve excelled at languages because I’ve worked hard and because I’ve been good at remembering words, at phrasing my thoughts in appropriate or interesting ways and at managing to pronounce the words pretty much correctly. And also because whatever talents I had were always backed up by an interest in culture and an obsession grammar that made me eat up reference books and Wikipedia lots of unnecessary pieces of information in the foreign language.

When it comes to Mandarin, the grammar is very easy (so that interest has been reduced), and the symbols are very complex. I have trouble drawing them correctly because my hand is not designed for artistic purposes i.e. I have bad hand-eye coordination. I can barely even draw a straight line. When I did art at school, I felt so terrible at it compared to the other students that it gave me panic attacks and I used to hide in the toilets instead. I was near top of the class at everything else – so why was I always the worst an art? It made me nervous. I used to try to draw a painting for hours and then, frustrated, give up, and looking at the soggy mess (I always used too much water), burst out in tears and dry the flimsy, wet paper on the radiator.

Now 7 years on, I’ve got better at accepting that my symbols look like little broken mutations of the other students’ virtuoso efforts. But I will love them anyway: broken, incorrect and fragile as they are. Maybe they’ll get better over time. Maybe this will be the key to fixing my hand-eye coordination and reducing my danger to society: bumping into people; failing to walk in straight lines; hitting innocent children on my bike… (although in my defence, that child DID jump out of a bush.) . In any case, I can always type on the computer using pinyin instead of writing by hand (advantages of the 21^st century).

5)    Mandarin may be helping me to speak better Russian (and vice versa)…. 

My textbook... which has the annoying habit of only showing traditional characters even though we've been instructed to learn simplified characters (i.e. I spend a lot of time googling and double checking characters)

Most people acknowledge that the more languages you’ve mastered or learnt, then easier it will be for you to learn a new one. There will be lots of grammar structures and sounds that you will be able to copy and paste from other languages, plus you will be constantly training the areas of your brain which are responsible for foreign language acquisition.

Well, this is in theory true. But Mandarin and Russian are extremely different. The sound systems and the grammar have very little in common. Mandarin grammar is fairly easy for an English speaker, Russian grammar is extremely, extremely difficult for an English speaker. Mandarin is pretty difficult to pronounce for an English speaker, Russian is also really quite difficult to pronounce for an English speaker (but not in the same ways i.e. tones vs. consonant clusters + soft/hard sounds). I have been helped by English sounds in pronouncing some Mandarin consonants, but not so much by Russian sounds. My Chinese tutor, Ai Jing, seems to think English is a much better starting language for learning Chinese than Russian.

Moreover, I’m starting to wonder whether ‘Far Eastern Studies’ was the best choice for my Russian language skills. Of course, studying with Russians and in Russian means that I have extra conversational practice in Russian and I find the lectures interesting. But the problem is that I’ve turned into a perpetual schemer. My grades here don’t affect my grades in Cambridge. As a result, if I have to get up at 6.30 for a lecture… I just… don’t. And given that my teacher for the  Mandarin classes isn’t the best (she just tells us what to learn, not how to learn), I often feel it’s better just to learn the material at home. She follows the text book to the word, so I will always know what will be happening in the next lesson. Moreover, she draws the symbols too quickly for me to copy down correctly, so I always end up googling the correct stroke order when I get home anyway. 

The alternative would have been to study at a Russian language course for foreigners – but I was worried that the level would be too low and that I would end up only having foreign friends. Maybe I would have been better to study something like literature or linguistics – or maybe I would then the level would have been too high and I would have sunk down into a swamp of new vocabulary so deep that it would have just been impossible at the beginning to stop myself from getting discouraged. It’s hard to know what the right thing would have been to do, but now I’m combining Russian with Mandarin, going to lectures in Russian and speaking only Russian with my friends. I hope this will be enough Russian for now. I’m trying to top it up by reading Harry Potter in Russian, but I often don’t have time. I would have read something else (I’m not a huge Harry Potter fan, as you’ve already read), but I find it much less discouraging to read books where I understand 70%-90% of the words straight away. That way I can learn a few new words a day without impeding my understanding of the text. If I try to read Tolstoi right now, I will only end up wanting to jump off a bridge into a pernicious river of old Slavonic terms.

6)    Mandarin has introduced me to new people.

A picture of me hanging out with my Chinese teacher and an Armenian friend. We drank tea and had a typical russian ФОТОСЕССИЯ (fotosessija) 

A lot of Chinese people I’ve met are just so… lovely. Gentle, patient, understanding. I’ve managed to do a deal with a woman called, Ài Jìng. Once a week I meet up with her for free: she teaches me Chinese and I teach her English. Her tiny little bedroom (which she shares with 2 other Chinese students) is very cute, her tea is tasty and she’s really helpful.

She is also very entertaining. Especially when she tells me that I am accidentally pronouncing words wrong and saying crazy phrases. For example, I recently became an unexpected patriot when I told her that I loved my country, rather than my dog. (I don’t even have a dog, but I was just really proud that I knew how to say that sentence.) I also asked her what Chinese people thought about cats, rather than Chairman Mao. It did seem a bit strange when she said Chairman Mao was gentle and nice to stroke…

I’m starting to wonder whether I should just drop the ineffective classes at uni, increase my visits to Ài Jìng’s comfortable little den and learn Russian from my friends and from reading. Maybe I could get a Russian tutor for pronunciation, grammar and correction of texts.

In any case, I’m pretty dissatisfied that I’ve paid £800 for the first semester (even if this will be largely refunded by my university) and I don’t want to go to the classes. But then again, as an exchange student, who hasn’t graduated yet, there’s pretty much no way to get an easy, long-term Russian visa without studying at a university….

I don’t know whether I will be able to pursue Mandarin professionally after my university course in Russia, but maybe it will become a personal hobby: a good way to fill my evenings for, say, 10 years and an excuse to visit a beautiful country with fascinating people.

In any case, I am trying my best, and we will see how things progress....

Wish me luck. I’m starting to like this strange language!

Take care, my beauties!