Road to master Mandarin is filled with both potholes and promise

At this point, I’ve been learning Chinese for two years now. I can honestly say that, in that time, there is no doubt that my improvement has been significant.

When I arrived in Beijing in 2019, I didn’t really know any Chinese, save for a few words that I had memorized from an app on my smartphone. At first, I wasn’t overly concerned with this lack of knowledge because I figured I could get by, with technology being what it is these days. In fact, that initial thought still rings true. Some of my fellow foreign colleagues have been here in Beijing for years and still don’t know much Mandarin.

However, I soon realized that, for me, learning Chinese is really important. I thought I would encounter more English speakers in Beijing because of its somewhat cosmopolitan nature, but I was wrong. Even with Chinese mobile apps that cater to English speakers (apps that I do indeed make frequent use of), the fact is, if you don’t know Chinese here, life can be unnecessarily complicated.

I decided then that I would hire a private Chinese teacher to help me, with an emphasis on speaking and listening. I started studying with her in August 2019, and because of her — and with help from my Chinese friends — my knowledge of the language has vastly improved.

Like with all language learning, though, it seems that the more I learn about Chinese, the more difficult it gets.

The greatest challenge for me is the use of tones when I speak. I’m well aware of the four tones Chinese people use to communicate, but remembering the individual tones for every word is quite difficult. Tones are not generally important in English; they are usually used to convey emotions such as anger, sadness and surprise, or to show that a question is being asked. But in Chinese, literally every word has its own tone, and if you don’t know them, it can sometimes be hard to communicate. The solution to this, of course, is to frequently practice speaking and hearing these words until you memorize the tones for each.

Another issue for me is that in Chinese, there are many words that basically mean the same thing, but with slight variations, whereas in English, we would just use the same word. For example, in Chinese, there are several words that mean “can” and “but”, but in English, we would generally just say those two words. Naturally, the more words I learn, the less of a problem this will be over time.

And don’t get me started on grammatical structure. The way that Chinese people construct sentences is sometimes the exact opposite of English. For instance, a question like “What is this?” in English translates to zhe shi shen me in Chinese, or “This is what?”. My teacher is doing a pretty good job of teaching me grammar to help me overcome these obstacles so that I can be better understood when I speak.

Then there’s the issue of accents. China is such a large country, and with so many people spread all around, there are bound to be many ways that the language is spoken. I have had some difficulty understanding some Chinese words, depending on the origin of the person who is speaking them. For example, it seems people from Sichuan province will swallow certain sounds when they speak; shuo (to speak) sounds more like “suo” when they say it, as if the “h” doesn’t exist. There’s not much I can do about this, other than just gaining more experience speaking with Chinese people who are not from Beijing.

I still have a long road ahead of me on my journey to fluency. There remains a lot of vocabulary and grammatical concepts for me to learn. But the point is, I’m on the road, and though it has been persistently bumpy, I’m confident that if I stay the course, I’ll eventually arrive at that destination.