Grammar and Tones

I moved to China with my wife just after we got married in 2017. Until then, I had always taken great pride in the fact that I learnt the local language in all the places I had been living in before.

German

I’m fluent in German. That’s easy, because I am German.

English

I’m fluent in English. In Germany, we learn English for at least 8 years at school. Not an activity that I ever enjoyed, but neither an activity I could avoid. I had a baptism of fire when I went on an exchange year to Scotland: there is nothing that can prepare you for the mental overload when trying to disentangle Scottish syllables and sounds into English ones, and especially when it’s the first time you’re actually being away from your home country. They day I arrived, I was struggling with even the simplest tasks, like asking for a travel adapter in a shop after realising that the UK did not have the same sockets as Europe – or really as the rest of the world. It was 2008, and the internet was expensive and slow, which is how I now rationalise away this knowledge gap. After a year, I felt comfortable talking to most people, but it always required a rather intense mental effort to listen, understand, and respond. We had a Scottish cleaning lady, though, that came once a week to clean up the mess that this bunch of students left behind, and she typically made some conversation with us. Till the last day, I have to admit, I did not understand a word she was saying, and till today I don’t know if she was telling us off for being such a dirty lot, or chatting about the nice weather in Scotland, because it had not rained for a whole day once.

All that changed abruptly when I moved to southern England the year after. The moment I arrived and first spoke to someone, I thought: “Wow! I can understand every single word!”. Turns out English is easier than Scottish, for non-native speakers at least.

Spanish

I’m fluent in Spanish. Since I had had such a great success with “English English”, I thought it’d be time to learn another language, and I picked Spanish. Primarily, because I thought Spanish is similar to Latin, and since I had learnt Latin at school (primarily to avoid having to learn a “real” language), I thought it couldn’t be so hard to learn. Spain is a 2 hour flight from Germany (and in fact the coast is regularly filled with Germans). I thought I’d take a summer term break off and study Spanish for 2 months. It turned out that spending a 1000 euros on a flight to South America, was overall still cheaper then a 20 euro flight to Spain, when adding up the living cost and cost of language classes for 2 months. Hence, I booked a ticket to Ecuador and off I went. Ecuador is a wonderful place. Since it’s right on the equator (hence, the name), it’s got the same weather all year round. The weather only varies by location, not over the year: the coast is hot and sunny, the capital Quito at 3000 m altitude has a pleasant spring weather, and if you go up the Andes even further, you eventually reach British weather. I spent every week in a different location, and took one-on-one Spanish classes (for as little as 5 dollars) in the mornings and explored the country in the afternoons. After 8 weeks, I was functional in Spanish.

Later, I started a Master’s degree in Madrid, in Spain. My friends constantly made fun of my Latino accent. “A German that speaks like a Latino”. Very funny, apparently. An accent, however, changes quite quickly in a foreign language, since you don’t really have any “natural” accent that you know from birth. So eventually I started speaking Spanish with a plain old German accent.

Where the grammar and tones misunderstandings set in, was however, the Spanish formal “you”. Spanish Spanish has a formal you (“Ustedes”) and an informal you (“Vosotros”) – one used with friends and family, one used with people of authority and in business. Latin American Spanish doesn’t have this feature: they always use the formal version. While I was aware of this fact, I had simply not learnt the grammatical forms of the informal Castilian Spanish you. So as hard as I tried, I simply had no choice than to address my friends as if I was speaking to my professors or to the committee in a hiring interview. At first, this made my fellow students look at me as if I wasn’t really talking to them. When they realised I was talking to them, they thought I must explicitly not want to be friends with them.

Here again, the grammar misunderstandings are subtle: my Spanish was good enough so they would have expected me to use the right Castilian Spanish form. Since I didn’t, they assumed, I did this on purpose. After I explained my dilemma, however, they did decide to be friends with me, and simply make fun of my Latino accent…

Eventually, I did learn Castilian Spanish properly, of course.

French

I’m not fluent in French. French was my big failure. I had taken French classes for a year, since I though, English wasn’t too hard, and Spanish wasn’t too hard, so how hard can French be? Well, French is not extremely hard, but it does require some more effort than taking a class once a week for a year. Nevertheless, in my young naivety, I packed my bags and moved to Belgium, and enrolled myself in a Master’s programme in mathematical physics.

I didn’t understand a word.

But I went to all the classes every day, sat there, tried to understand what the professors were saying, read the maths books and tried to understand not only what the equations were saying, but what the whole book was saying. I also went to the market every day, to buy fresh cheese and saucisson, and French Fries – which the Belgians invented – from the local shop that claimed to sell the best French fries in the whole country. This shop was located in the middle of the European district in central Brussels (where I was living at the time), right next to the European Commission. Yet, the lady selling the fries, refused to speak anything other than French and pretended that she didn’t understand a word of English.

Eventually, I became quite good at ordering cheese and salami and fries in French. So, I can confidently say that I wouldn’t starve in French.

Eventually, I also became quite good at understanding lectures about abstract mathematics in French. Not that that’s very helpful. I cannot maintain any conversation that goes beyond “bonjour, monsieur, I’m a student of mathematical physics and I’d like to have a croissant, merci beaucoup, au revoir, monsieur“.

My university transcript has big letters “Session non réussie” written across it. Luckily, I don’t know what that means.

Chinese

And then came Chinese. How hard could it be? The first time I went to China on a study trip in 2014, which is when I first met my wife whose head all of sudden popped up in the row in front if me in the tour bus, I was intrigued by – besides my wife – the underground map. All the station names had totally different characters – hundreds and thousands of different characters. But I noticed that most stations ended in the same character: 站. After listening to the announcements on the underground for about a hundred times, I started realising that (what a surprise) the announcement was always the same and only the station name changed. And I figured out that the word following the name of the station was “zhàn”. From there I was hooked.

All these thousands of random characters, all these strange foreign sounds that don’t even sound like a language to my ear, and yet it was possible to figure out the meaning and the sound of some of these characters.

I downloaded flashcard app and started learning Chinese characters like crazy. I spent every free minute taking out my phone and reviewing some characters. You need to know at least 3000 characters to be able to read simple texts. I finished level 1, then level 2, then level 3, and that got me to…. 600 characters.

Back in London, where I was living at the time, I joined every Chinese learning opportunity I could find. There were Chinese learning meetups, university Chinese classes, Chinese reading clubs, at times I spent 3 or 4 nights a week at these. And of course, I had books, I had apps, and I was constantly reviewing flashcards.

Oh, and I had a Chinese girlfriend. But that didn’t help with my Chinese learning (but that’s a topic for another post). Instead, I taught her English and listened patiently to her finding the words, helping her trying to guess out what she wanted to say, and waited excitedly for every word she was saying. Soon she was so fluent in English and talking so much that I can barely keep up. Though, grammar kept to be a sticking point, just like my tones.

After about a year, I finally started to recognise sounds in Chinese. I started to hear the differences in the tones. I started to hear differences in the Chinese sounds /sh/ /zh/ /x/ and /q/ that all kind of sound like the English sh. I guess, the abundance of sounds that to Western ears sound like sh is where the derogatory phrase “ching chang chong” comes from. It took me a year to finally notice the subtle differences between these sounds. Maybe the world would be a better place if everyone learnt that Chinese is a much richer language than “ching chang chong“, but then again, a year is no easy feat, and that’s not to speak it or even to understand it, but just to notice the differences.

After 4 years of learning Chinese in London, we moved to Beijing. I’d walk into a shop and say “Nǐ hǎo 你好” (hello) and people would look at me as if I was speaking an alien language. Then they’d try to speak English to me, but since the level of English in Beijing (outside the Embassy district) is generally quite low, they’d typically either say nothing, or speak to my wife if she was with me. It made me feel like a baby.

I then started taking Chinese one-on-one classes. First 3 times a week, but soon I increased it to 5 times a week, 2 hours each. My teacher and I would read texts together and practise reading them, summarising them, and talking about them, but every single character seemed to be one I had never seen before. Sometimes, I might have seen them just in the previous sentence, but my brain could just not keep track of them. It seemed like no matter how many characters I learnt, every text still consisted of exclusively new characters.

This went on for two years, and during this time, my experience talking to people was always the same: they would not even recognise that I was speaking Chinese to them, they’d assume that I wouldn’t understand them anyways, and they’d turn towards my wife and talking about me as if I was mute and dumb.

This changed in 2019, after living in China for two years. My German family was visiting us in Beijing for a week or two and they were meeting my Chinese in-laws, who were keen to show them outstanding hospitality. At a big dinner around a round table for about 15 people, with a multitude of Chinese delicacies to try, my father-in-law said a few nice welcoming words to my father and brother and his family. And I translated them to German. My dad responded with a few nice – albeit not as well crafted – words, and I translated them to Chinese. There you have it: both my dad and my father-in-law definitely did not understand a single syllable of what the other one was saying, but they did understand my translation. I was speaking Chinese, and I was being understood.

From then on, I finally started noticing some progress. I kept taking classes, kept reading a lot, and I kept practising. I spoke more confidently, so that the people I was speaking to would actually notice that I was speaking Chinese and not mumbling something in English. And I tried to speak with enough confidence that people would have the feeling that I would understand them if they responded in Chinese (even though I often didn’t). In 2020 I gave my first (and only) lecture in Chinese at Peking University, where I was a lecturer at the time. The lecture was meticulously prepared together with my Chinese teacher, and the students did understand, as shown by the clever questions they asked afterwards – which I didn’t understand and had to ask someone to translate for me. I never quite got to a fully functional level in a professional setting, but I eventually learnt to talk about a wide variety of topics in casual settings.

When they hear that I know Chinese, people sometimes say I have a talent in learning languages, or that I have a wife that helped my learn Chinese, or that I’m somehow very gifted. None of this is true. It’s taken me thousands of hours of hard frustrating work to learn Chinese, and I’m merely conversational. It’s now been 10 years, and my 3-year-old son’s Chinese is just surpassing my level.

I’m not that smart. Chinese told me to get off that high horse.