Grammar and Tones

I moved together with my wonderful wife to China in 2017. The first weeks we stayed in a hotel in the university district of Beijing until we sorted out our accommodation. In the neighbourhood there was a small shopping mall with lots of little noodle and snack shops that was called “Kǎi shí guǎngchǎng 凯时广场“. My wife and I affectionately called it “Kaiserplatz” – German for “emperor’s square”, just because it sounded remotely similar. Making up names for places in each other’s language had long been tradition of intercultural understanding in grammar and tones for us.

Ordering beef noodles

The first night, we walked into a noodle shop and in my mind I repeated the sentence “Wǒ xiǎng yào niúròu miàn 我想要牛肉面” – I would like to have beef noodles – over and over again. We walked up to the counter, the waitress looked at my white face, and before I could get out a single syllable, she turned round to my wife and asked her what I wanted and my wife gave her the full order.

My wife is an outstanding interpreter, but she is not a good teacher. Whenever we went anywhere she was quick to translate for me. So I decided to find a Chinese teacher, teacher Wang, that I first saw three times a week, but soon increased to 5 times a week.

In the beginning, I barely understood anything, and it seemed like we were just continuously looking at texts with thousands of characters I had never seen before. It was very reading-based rather than conversational, since Chinese is really based around characters – it is basically impossible to learn Chinese without learning Chinese characters. Once I could express myself a little bit, we did have some conversations, and because teacher Wang was an incredible curious person who was interested in a million and one things, we constantly got into discussions about that were way beyond my level. I remember once we had a discussion about electric cars and why these were so much more common in China than in Europe, when I was still struggling to order beef noodles. A good dictionary app was indispensable…

Accepting each other’s misconceptions

One day, we had a discussion around oil prices. Don’t ask me how we got there. With teacher Wang I constantly ended up discussion all sorts of random topics. We had probably started studying “my daily routine” (I get up in the morning, drink a coffee, cycle to work) and somehow got into: I cycle because I think that cars pollute the environment, and anyways petrol has become really expensive…

Then teacher Wang started explaining me that the petrol prices were as they were because America controlling them and forcing the gulf states to sell them at the prices that they dictate. I was confused. This statement didn’t seem to make sense. I had only understood half of the words she said, so I assumed I misunderstood. Then she went on explaining me that the reason America was forcing the world to sell oil at the prices they set was so that they could control China. I got the feeling that I had not misunderstood the words. Now I was expecting her to explain that this is just what the Chinese state media propaganda claims, but everybody knows that this is nonsense. But instead she got into the low prices of Chinese products: America was forcing China to to export their products really cheaply by artificially deflating the Chinese currency. I tentatively asked if she was sure it wasn’t the Chinese government who fixed their own currency and had very tight controls on exchanging Chinese Renminbi. But she insisted that this was all just a big plot orchestrated by America.

This was the moment when I realised that she was serious.

She really believed this. She believed the Chinese state propaganda. Until that point I had always assumed that everybody must know that the Chinese media – including social media – are under tight state control and are used to manipulate the public. And people do know. It is impossible not to notice, but this is a topic for another post. But people believe the lies anyways.

I really enjoyed discussions with teacher Wang, she was a wonderful teacher. But from then on I was careful to divert the discussions when they became too political. Chinese people do the same. It is a big cultural faux pas to get people into discussions about the Communist party’s failures, or restrictions to individual rights. This is understandable, because people can get into big trouble for being disloyal to the party. They talk about policies like about the weather: somethings that is just a given, a force of nature, a fact that you cannot change. Like the weather: you might note that it’s raining today, but you wouldn’t say that the clouds were really mean and inconsiderate today for letting the rain fall.

Learning what topics are socially acceptable to talk about was one aspect of learning the Chinese language itself. As I became more competent at Chinese, I realised the the wildest conspiracy theories were widely believed, and I learnt that these be better not challenged – at least not if you are trying to make friends or be a polite neighbour, or be a respectable son-in-law.

Understanding grammar and tones also involves understanding social and cultural etiquette, and unfortunately sometimes that are things that you literally cannot say in a foreign social and linguistic context.