Ni hao! Wo jiao aimi

While I’m here in China, I have three and a half hours of language classes every morning. Learning Mandarin might be the most difficult thing I’ve ever attempted in my (admittedly short) life.

First of all, the pronunciation is different to anything you’ll ever hear in Europe. Different letters combined make such random sounds, sounds I can’t even being to imagine making myself. The letter Q makes a ‘ch’ sound, the letter R makes a ‘zzz’ sound, E makes a ‘ue’ sound and so on. Once you’ve vaguely (and I mean vaguely) understood that, there are the four tones to contend with. In English we express emotion by changing the tone of our voice, for example, to ask a question our voices get higher at the end of the sentence. In Chinese, if you change the tone of your voice you change the meaning of the word you’re trying to say. So ‘ma’ said in one tone of voice means mother, but in another tone means donkey! Not a mistake I’d like to make.

If you can get through all that – and I still haven’t, to be honest – you can move on to the characters. For us Westerners there’s something called pinyin, which is where Chinese words are spelt sort-of phonetically in English letters. But that’s rarely used in China, it’s basically a learning aid, so you have to know the proper Chinese symbols for everything. There is no logic to these, or if there is I’m yet to find it. Some of them look like little pictures of what they mean, but not all of them. Some of them are several other characters stuck together. Some of them I swear are just squiggles.

I don’t think this would be too much of a problem in business – every manufacturer I’ve visited so far seems to have at least one person able to speak English. But when you’re in deepest darkest China, even the smallest tasks like ordering food in a restaurant become huge problems.
In some ways, I can’t wait to come home and know what I’m eating!

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