Very soon after starting to write with Jinlin I realized that learning some Chinese would be a very good idea. Chinese education system is not very strong in teaching foreign languages and her English skills were accordingly low - although still infinitely better than my non-existent in Chinese. So initially we mostly used various translation programs for our emails, instant messages and video chat. The translation programs work surprisingly well and when combined with video chat allow even nice combination with body language.
Although it might seem that for the subtle language of love one needs a good mutual language, I have found it otherwise. Clumsy language and translation errors do surprisingly little to the feeling that sweet words convey and sometimes simple and clumsy language can be outright cute. Or what would you say of this text in Jinlins second email to me on October 8, 2011: "You have not lost, because I feel good to you. I was feeling. Do you understand? I am very glad to know you. Waiting for you my number. I with you. I look to you." Personally I find such words heart-melting, which is of course exactly what happened ;-)
Some of my friends were naturally afterward curious why did I not filter from the multitude of Chinese woman in the Internet only those that had reasonable English skills to start with. The short answer is that I did, but Jinlin did not: she was the one initially contacting me. And before long I realized she had the character, the cuteness, the humor, the courage, the interests, the depth and the love that kept me chatting on and on. At that point the optimism and excitement of getting to a relationship made the language problem seem like a minor issue easily solvable. And partly such optimism is warranted: the same love that gives rise to the optimism provides energy and determinism to help it happen.
Despite initial success with the translation tools, I continued to be aware that translation would not be easily usable in our forthcoming real meetings. So the language-learning goal remained urgent. We soon determined that from our first contact in October 2011 we would have to wait nine months before getting first close together in July 2012. This constraint was determined by the very important university entrance exam Jinlin would have in June 2012 and the very intensive period of study preceding the exam. While nine months is admittedly a long time to wait, it was crucial for development of the rudimentary language skills that we so badly needed when finally traveling, eating, shopping and loving in China in June 2012.
Jinlin started with some level of English against my total lack of Chinese. Also her younger age provides some advantage in learning new languages and she had strong will to learn both English and my native language Finnish. Still I knew that she wouldn't be able in practice to put as much effort to language learning as she wanted because of the great demands of the forthcoming exam. So that added to the importance of me learning Chinese. But I did not only need to learn Chinese, I wanted as well. You know, the kind of primitive will to be active in a relationship, to show care, to do the right thing, to engage in activities that remind of the loved one when the distance is long.
And frankly, I did find it funny to try "something completely different" as Monty Python would say. I have never been particularly language-oriented person, I rather prefer math, programming and hard sciences. I did do my high school in the U.K. and got good English skills as a side effect, but learning a language was never the focus or the main point. I happened to learn English well and I though I am never going to learn another language again.
But now I have indeed learned some Chinese. As with many activities in life, it was good that I did not know in the beginning what a gigantic task it would be to become fluent in Chinese. If I would have known, I might have given up the effort before even starting it. But I had much optimism and now I am so far that I do not want to give up learning more even though I realize the magnitude of the task.
The main reason spoken mandarin Chinese is difficult is that it is very compact in terms of sounds: it lacks the characteristic redundancy of languages like English and Finnish. By redundancy I mean that most words in the dictionary are two or more syllables long and most words have a single meaning. This means that making a slight error in pronouncing a word usually leads to listener guessing the correct word or the word becoming meaningless gibberish. The gist of Chinese is this: there is no meaningless gibberish. Most Chinese words are just a single syllable long and almost all syllables have multiple completely different meanings. And the meanings depend on the tone (pitch) of the voice, there being five different tones.
Let's take the syllable "Ma" as example. It has variations "Ma" (neutral tone), "Mā" (high tone), "Má" (rising tone), "Mà" (lowering tone) and "Mǎ" (low tone). The high tone Mā means mother. The low tone "Mǎ" can mean horse or ant or code - guess from the context. The lowering "Mà" means curse. The rising "Má" means hemp. The neutral "Ma" means toad or water well or morphine. This is typical example, not a rare case. For a more extreme example, take the syllable / word "Shi" for which dictionary lists over 50 completely different meanings depending on the tone and context. So, the title of this blog post can be spoken as "Mā hé mà mǎ". With Chinese characters this is written as 妈和骂马, so there is less possibility for confusion. But that does not help when learning to speak or understand spoken mandarin. Not that I would have easy time learning those characters either.
So even with perfect pronouncing a syllable has usually many possible interpretations and the correct one should be determined from context. And when you are beginner and have slight errors in pronouncing, all hell breaks loose. Especially when beginner speaks very simple sentences or single words with little context to help determining meaning. Most of the time Chinese people will not hear you speaking gibberish but they will hear you speaking sounds that mean something completely different from your intention. And this is not theoretical, it happens. In real life, with me and Jinlin, it happens often when I open my mouth. I try to hold on to the principle that best way to learn speaking language is just to keep speaking and practicing it in real situations even when your skills are low. But this feature of the Chinese language - the fact that you can be talking of cursing horses when you want to talk of your girlfriends mother - has really been challenging my principles here.
To have some balance, I must add that we have found something in the Finnish language that is virtually impossible for Chinese people to learn to say. This is the strong Finnish "R"-sound that is characterized by tongue vibrating at low frequency in the mouth. There is nothing like that in Chinese nor in English and two weeks of attempts by Jinlin saw now audible progress towards the correct sound. So in the end I said to her she can just say "L" or the English soft "R" (with no tongue vibrations) instead. Luckily, because of the redundancy of words and syllables, in most cases that will still result in comprehensible sentences. :-)
Although it might seem that for the subtle language of love one needs a good mutual language, I have found it otherwise. Clumsy language and translation errors do surprisingly little to the feeling that sweet words convey and sometimes simple and clumsy language can be outright cute. Or what would you say of this text in Jinlins second email to me on October 8, 2011: "You have not lost, because I feel good to you. I was feeling. Do you understand? I am very glad to know you. Waiting for you my number. I with you. I look to you." Personally I find such words heart-melting, which is of course exactly what happened ;-)
Some of my friends were naturally afterward curious why did I not filter from the multitude of Chinese woman in the Internet only those that had reasonable English skills to start with. The short answer is that I did, but Jinlin did not: she was the one initially contacting me. And before long I realized she had the character, the cuteness, the humor, the courage, the interests, the depth and the love that kept me chatting on and on. At that point the optimism and excitement of getting to a relationship made the language problem seem like a minor issue easily solvable. And partly such optimism is warranted: the same love that gives rise to the optimism provides energy and determinism to help it happen.
Despite initial success with the translation tools, I continued to be aware that translation would not be easily usable in our forthcoming real meetings. So the language-learning goal remained urgent. We soon determined that from our first contact in October 2011 we would have to wait nine months before getting first close together in July 2012. This constraint was determined by the very important university entrance exam Jinlin would have in June 2012 and the very intensive period of study preceding the exam. While nine months is admittedly a long time to wait, it was crucial for development of the rudimentary language skills that we so badly needed when finally traveling, eating, shopping and loving in China in June 2012.
Jinlin started with some level of English against my total lack of Chinese. Also her younger age provides some advantage in learning new languages and she had strong will to learn both English and my native language Finnish. Still I knew that she wouldn't be able in practice to put as much effort to language learning as she wanted because of the great demands of the forthcoming exam. So that added to the importance of me learning Chinese. But I did not only need to learn Chinese, I wanted as well. You know, the kind of primitive will to be active in a relationship, to show care, to do the right thing, to engage in activities that remind of the loved one when the distance is long.
And frankly, I did find it funny to try "something completely different" as Monty Python would say. I have never been particularly language-oriented person, I rather prefer math, programming and hard sciences. I did do my high school in the U.K. and got good English skills as a side effect, but learning a language was never the focus or the main point. I happened to learn English well and I though I am never going to learn another language again.
But now I have indeed learned some Chinese. As with many activities in life, it was good that I did not know in the beginning what a gigantic task it would be to become fluent in Chinese. If I would have known, I might have given up the effort before even starting it. But I had much optimism and now I am so far that I do not want to give up learning more even though I realize the magnitude of the task.
So, what about the mothers and horses?
Chinese is hard to learn. Yes, the characters are difficult. But even if you forget about the characters and focus fully in speaking, Chinese is still hard. To be fair, I'll specify: learning speaking Chinese is hard for a 38-year old male like myself not especially skilled in languages and having most recent experience of language learning some 20 years ago. Even before discovering Chinese is hard I had already decided that for writing the characters, translation programs would be fine for me forever. What I really needed is to be able to speak with my girlfriend, and preferably on a higher level than "-sex? -okay" (There are unbelievable cases of some Eastern-Finland quiet men importing wives from Philippines in the 1980's and actually desiring not to learn any common language with them "to keep the nagging at minimum!")The main reason spoken mandarin Chinese is difficult is that it is very compact in terms of sounds: it lacks the characteristic redundancy of languages like English and Finnish. By redundancy I mean that most words in the dictionary are two or more syllables long and most words have a single meaning. This means that making a slight error in pronouncing a word usually leads to listener guessing the correct word or the word becoming meaningless gibberish. The gist of Chinese is this: there is no meaningless gibberish. Most Chinese words are just a single syllable long and almost all syllables have multiple completely different meanings. And the meanings depend on the tone (pitch) of the voice, there being five different tones.
Let's take the syllable "Ma" as example. It has variations "Ma" (neutral tone), "Mā" (high tone), "Má" (rising tone), "Mà" (lowering tone) and "Mǎ" (low tone). The high tone Mā means mother. The low tone "Mǎ" can mean horse or ant or code - guess from the context. The lowering "Mà" means curse. The rising "Má" means hemp. The neutral "Ma" means toad or water well or morphine. This is typical example, not a rare case. For a more extreme example, take the syllable / word "Shi" for which dictionary lists over 50 completely different meanings depending on the tone and context. So, the title of this blog post can be spoken as "Mā hé mà mǎ". With Chinese characters this is written as 妈和骂马, so there is less possibility for confusion. But that does not help when learning to speak or understand spoken mandarin. Not that I would have easy time learning those characters either.
So even with perfect pronouncing a syllable has usually many possible interpretations and the correct one should be determined from context. And when you are beginner and have slight errors in pronouncing, all hell breaks loose. Especially when beginner speaks very simple sentences or single words with little context to help determining meaning. Most of the time Chinese people will not hear you speaking gibberish but they will hear you speaking sounds that mean something completely different from your intention. And this is not theoretical, it happens. In real life, with me and Jinlin, it happens often when I open my mouth. I try to hold on to the principle that best way to learn speaking language is just to keep speaking and practicing it in real situations even when your skills are low. But this feature of the Chinese language - the fact that you can be talking of cursing horses when you want to talk of your girlfriends mother - has really been challenging my principles here.
To have some balance, I must add that we have found something in the Finnish language that is virtually impossible for Chinese people to learn to say. This is the strong Finnish "R"-sound that is characterized by tongue vibrating at low frequency in the mouth. There is nothing like that in Chinese nor in English and two weeks of attempts by Jinlin saw now audible progress towards the correct sound. So in the end I said to her she can just say "L" or the English soft "R" (with no tongue vibrations) instead. Luckily, because of the redundancy of words and syllables, in most cases that will still result in comprehensible sentences. :-)
Pelkele!
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