Chinese Character

When I was in fourth grade, I started taking my first foreign language: French.  I was fascinated by the different sounds, the musicality of the language, and how the intonations were so very different from ours.  Even though it was not as "practical" as Spanish (the only other option at the time), and the fact that my mother used to teach Spanish, it never occurred to me that I shouldn't learn a language I could only use far away.  As the years went on, my love for the language and its culture grew, evidenced by the Sorbonne t-shirt I literally wore to tatters and my "fleur de lis" vanity plate.  I even considered attending the University of Paris for my undergraduate degree (which is still a pipe dream of mine for graduate school).

As I moved on to college, I still took advanced French literature classes, but I wanted to explore more language horizons- so I took up Italian, eventually going to study in the University of Bologna after only taking it for two years.  I realized that not only did I like learning French, I love learning a new language; each has its own texture and taste,  like different spices or even different melodies. French is a bright sound, like a jaunty tune, and Italian is more rounded, luscious, exuberant and gestural.

Post-graduation, similarly to my nostalgia for reading heavy literature, I felt the loss of languages- after all, I had been taking at least one for the last 15 years.  Since I only know romance languages, I had thought about picking up something further east, but I never really had the push to do it.  A couple of weeks ago, however, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to the GLN (the Global Language Network) lottery.  GLN is a non-profit that was actually started by George Washington University students for the sole purpose of offering language classes for free- that's right, FREE. You enter a lottery before each session, and if you are lucky enough to win, you put down a small deposit (which you get back at the end) and take your new language!  I never thought I would win due to the high demand, but I threw my hat in the ring for Beginner Mandarin and Beginner Spanish (why not round out my romance languages, eh?).  To my surprise, I won the lottery for Beginner Mandarin, and the next week I was sitting in class and learning how to introduce myself in Chinese.

Of course, no one would ever say that taking an Asian language would be easy; for one thing, you have to learn a completely different alphabet.  Another aspect that is very difficult for Anglo speakers is thus: there are different tones which change the meaning of a word (four in Mandarin, eight in Cantonese... you get the idea).  This means that you could say the same word four different ways and it could literally have four different meanings- you could repeat the same phrase and it could make sense or could be complete gibberish, depending on the tones. Here are the four different tones:

The Four Tones of Mandarin

Pinyin	Chinese Character	Meaning	Tone
mā	媽	mother	First
má	麻	hemp	Second
mǎ	馬	horse	Third
mà	罵	scold	Fourth

(This is a quiz for trying to identify them- as you can see, it's not easy!)

My background in romance languages gave me no help with this, but for some reason, I have not been completely hopeless so far in identifying the right tone.  I realized, after the last class, that it's probably because I have a background in music.

Once upon a time, I was also trained classically in voice and vocal performance, including opera.  Interestingly enough, aural recall (that is, listening to a phrase and repeating it back) was never my forte (pun intended).  I was able to do it, but I always relied more on my sight reading skills.  But I could tell, based on the foundation classes in Mandarin, that one way to recognize the tones was to compare them to different notes on the scale. In my comparison, the first tone is as if you are singing a straight note, the second as if you are singing a descending scale, the third as if you sing descending then ascending, and the fourth is like an ascending scale.  I'm not saying that Mandarin is going to be a cinch for me because of this- for one thing, it is still pretty difficult for me to replicate the tones when I am speaking myself- but with any luck it will make me a little less hopeless. 

So far I have truly been enjoying class, but we'll see how frustrating the class gets in the end- I have heard that it can be quite daunting to even get a small grasp of Mandarin. But when someone has asked me lately why I am taking it, I just said bluntly, why not?