Grammar and Tones

“The best way to learn a language is to find a girlfriend (or boyfriend)“. I’ve have heard this statement so many times that it makes me tired. I do see where the people saying this are coming from: learning a foreign language is hard, and most people in the English-speaking world don’t speak any language other than their native tongue, at least not to a level that would be of any practical use. Then they see happy intercultural couples, going on dates, having romantic dinners, laughing in the park and having a good time together. They are talking to each other in a foreign language (well, at least one of them). With a girlfriend, learning a foreign language is fun, light-hearted, romantic and easy. Just like love itself.

This view is as naïve as assuming that a romantic comedy is representative of real life.

What are you saying?

First: you don’t know what they are saying! They might just be saying “I don’t understand you” all the time. On one of my early trips to China, well before I knew any Chinese, I made a friend in a hostel that had already been travelling in China for a while and said he know some – not a lot – Chinese. “The most important character you have to know is chuàn 串”, he said. “It looks like two pieces of meat on a skewer and that’s exactly what it means”. So the two of us set out to find some 串串 for dinner. We walked into a shop and the guy started a lengthy conversation with the shop owner. They were talking about the dishes, the were pointing around at the products he was selling and discussing what they were used for, they were talking where my friend was coming from and the shop owner pulled out a map of China to show him his hometown and tell him how he grew up.

I was impressed! I asked him “what did you talk about?” And he said “I don’t know, he was speaking a weird dialect that I don’t understand and I just kept repeating “I don’t understand what you’re saying”. So much about my interpretation about what they had been talking about.

A group of young Chinese guys was sitting outside the shop eating 串串 and were very entertained by the two foreigners and the one guy who could say “I don’t understand” in Chinese so well. So they waved to us to come over and eat with them. We enjoyed food and drink with them, laughed together, tried to figure out what each other was saying and in the end agreed that the only thing we had mutually understood was “gānbēi 干杯” – cheers.

One man’s gain is another (wo)man’s loss

Second: they might already speak the language. Being able to speak to someone generally helps making friends or girlfriends/boyfriends. Sure the exotic nature of somebody from a foreign country speaking a foreign language can be very attractive. But few people remain interested if they are there is just no conversation at all beyond what you could talk about to with a 2-year-old.

Chances are that if you see an intercultural couple, at least one of them already knew the other language at least to some degree before they even met. This might include languages that are mutually intelligible to a large degree: In my student years I was sharing a house with a bunch of other international students in England. One of my flatmates was a very nice girl from Spain. Her name was Maria, just like all of the four exchange students from Spain that I met during that year in England. Maria seems to be a popular name in Spain… Maria was so disorganised that she would forget her own head if it wasn’t attached, and hence, when we were wanting to meet our Spanish friends in the pub, we would be so slow, that even by Spanish standards we were outrageously late.

One day, Maria met an Italian guy, they started to hangout with each other, and I sometimes overheard their conversations in the kitchen. I speak Spanish but I don’t really understand Italian, so I understood about 50% of their conversation: She was speaking Spanish, he was speaking Italian, and since the two languages are very similar, they are mutually intelligible for native speakers. After a while, I noticed that I understood more and more of their conversation, and eventually I realised, that the guy had started to speak Spanish, too! He had picked it up while talking to his girlfriend. While this was quite impressive (and certainly an enjoyable way of learning a language), one should keep in mind that the two could understand each other from the very beginning because of the similarity of their languages. This is a huge head start when learning a language!

The flip side of the coin is that she had not picked up a single word of Italian!

The thing is, the real benefit of having a girlfriend / boyfriend that speaks a foreign language is when you already understand the language well enough so just have to refine it.

A good translator is a poor teacher

This also brings us to the third point: only one of the two is actually learning the language. The other one is teaching the language. Not everyone is a good teacher, though. When it comes to languages a good teacher is one that pushes the other one to speak and listen to the foreign language. Maria was a good teacher: she just spoke Spanish and never bulged. Her boyfriend had no choice than try to understand her in Spanish and try to explain her what she didn’t understand, in Spanish. This gave him a lot of practise. He, on the other did not teach her a lot because gradually shifted towards Spanish, so Maria was exposed less and less to Italian.

My wonderful wife was an excellent interpreter. She was actually incredible good at translating whatever was being said at lightning speed from Chinese to English and from English to Chinese – and this even though here wasn’t even all that great at the time. I’m not a linguist, but I believe that it’s very different skillsets that make people good interpreters and that make people good language learners: for interpreting you need to be fast, you need to be able to read between the lines, to guess out what someone is going to say, to fill the blanks of what you didn’t understand. To learn a language, you need to memorise vocabulary, study grammar rules, and practise pronouncing tones. My wife is a genius at the former, but not very good at the latter. Now, after 10 years of speaking English to me, and half of that time living in England, her English grammar is still… let’s say it could be better. Hence the name of this blog.

But her translating skill was incredible even at a time when she barely spoke English. This meant that when we moved to China, she was so quick at translating for me that I did not even get a chance to practise my Chinese when I was out and about with her. We would go to a noodle shop and before I could say “beef noodles” in Chinese, may wife would already be looking at me and say “She just asked you what dish you would like, I’m gonna order beef noodles for you”, and turn back round and place the order for me.

Even years later, when I was already pretty fluent in Chinese (because I had been taking classes 5 days a week!), we might, say, check into a hotel and the staff would ask for our “hùzhào 护照”, and my wife immediately turn round to me and say “passport!”, to which I might respond something like “真的吗？我完全没想到入住酒店还需要护照啊！这是我在中国生活五年来第一次入住酒店！”, meaning “Really? I would have never expected that we need a passport to check into a hotel! This is the first time I ever check in a hotel in five years of living in China!” (Irony is a whole different story that you can read about in this post.)

In the beginning I found this incredibly frustrating – I wanted to learn and practise Chinese. Over time, however, I came to accept this as one of cute and loveable characteristics of my wife. Sure, it was handy, when we were doing some banking business, or going to a hospital, or doing things that surpassed my Chinese level. But it didn’t help me learn Chinese a bit. What helped my learn Chinese, was my Chinese teacher. And my mother-in-law, who didn’t speak a word of English (and, who was actually a teacher!).

And you know what? That’s totally ok! I didn’t marry my wife as a shortcut to learn Chinese. I didn’t start learning Chinese as a shortcut to my wife’s heart, either. I married my wife because I love her and because she is truly a wonderful person that is full of passion for life, that radiates joy and loves and cares about me. And I learnt Chinese because I found the language interesting, and because I was living in China and wanted to speak the local language. The two don’t need to go together.