Well, I’ve been studying Chinese from August 23rd to today, April 20th – about six months. Since I’m in a reflective mood tonight, I’d like to put down some thoughts that have been circulating in my mind throughout my learning experience.
Chinese isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Incredulous as I am writing that, I actually think it’s true. That first day of Chinese 121, I really had no preconceptions about Chinese; I knew about the tones and vaguely about the ideograph system, but beyond that Chinese was conceptually foreign to me, just like it is to many Americans. I think that’s why I was so surprised and delighted by the simplicity of Chinese grammatical structures – no tedious verb conjugation, no confusing noun declensions, tense indicated by auxiliary particles – it really is a beautifully structured language. I think that beauty is the reason why I fell in love with Chinese so quickly.
Of course, Chinese is no walk in the 公园. Plenty of hurdles exist for any nonnative speaker: tones, morpheme similarity, ideograph system, not to mention that daunting deluge of homonyms, such as 是事试and 视 and about fifty other fourth tones “shi” words. But is it this homogeneity that makes Chinese so much fun to learn; I have to be a detective, piecing together the context clues to figure out what is being said.
Of course, I don’t really have a lot of perspective on language learning experiences. I studied German for four years in high school, but I’m really not close to fluency. In fact, at the rate I’m learning Chinese, I will probably surpass my German competency by next year, especially if I go to China.
But for now, all that matters is the happiness I get from studying Chinese.
