Getting beyond "ni hao" Charles Rycroft (United
Nations International Children's Fund-Beijing) |
|
www.chinaview.cn
2006-05-12 10:26:32 |
There are exceptions, of
course, such as those who arrive with degrees in Chinese, have spent years
living in a remote Chinese village or who are given a one or even two-year
course by their far-sighted employers before they even get off the plane. For the rest of us, certain
patterns emerge. We all know the highly-motivated new arrivals who negotiate an intensive learning package with their
employer, who then makes progressively heavy demands on them "to get
started on their real job." The eight-hours-a-day
quickly becomes four and then as their job picks up speed they enter the
downwards spiral of having to cancel classes. Combine this with a feeling of
making very slow progress and you have quickly lost that
high-motivation-and-positive feedback required for progress with any human endeavour. When it comes to feedback,
many of us will know that terrible sinking feeling as we realize that the
Chinese our teacher appears or affects to understand is not always understood
by others. Worse is when such moments
occur precisely when we are gleefully showing-off our Chinese to visiting
families and friends. We may then find ourselves desperately maintaining face
with a "he is not from These drop-outs will
inevitably pick up a few words and phrases but will not have got as far as
mastering Chinese tones, let alone studying Chinese grammar, so that their
isolated words and phrases stay just that. Ways of learning Dig a little deeper and you
may also find their intensive group classes which looked like such good value
(to the employer) were often little more than mass rote learning exercises.
This time could have been spent more productively in the language laboratory
their school did not have. One-on-one lessons seem to
fare a little better, and for the same reasons of the new job picking-up
pace, the postponing and cancelling of lessons and that frustrating feeling
of making little headway. We run into the wall of being unable to get very far
beyond the "ni hao."
Indeed, it's only because
that phrase is a universal greeting that makes it possible for our Chinese
colleagues to consistently understand what we may have been pronouncing
incorrectly for years. Some of us discover late in the game that in order to
continue making progress, we should have taken the hard but high road of
studying Chinese characters instead of opting for pinyin (phonetic system for
Chinese characters). Indeed, what has become
frequently heard mantras for our failure is blaming the bad advice we were
given (or was it good advice we rejected?) plus the methods used to teach
Chinese. Language experts (never
actually cited, of course) agree that Chinese methods are more suited to
learning how to write (meaning to reproduce strokes in the correct form and
order) rather than learning how to speak the language, which anyway tends to
be true of language learning methods everywhere. But we foreigners are
nothing but creative people who have developed not only many different
excuses but also ways of failing. My own preference was to
become the assiduous compiler and memorizer of impressive-looking word lists
which we carry everywhere with us. Because we never learn the
grammar, nor listen attentively enough to develop confidence with our actual
speaking of Chinese, we might as well be memorizing telephone
directories, which of course has additionally futile connotations in
the Middle Kingdom. Then there's the
"horizontal learner" who mimics their Chinese partner, repeating
Chinese phrases perfectly. Still, they barely learn to mimic a few choice
phrases in The best advised of
foreigners place their faith in audio gizmos, which they listen to on their
bikes and in their fitness clubs, proudly explaining how they are studying
Chinese. Others encounter irresistibly packaged e-learning courses while out
buying their DVDs or purchase useful-looking pocket translators. But after the initial
novelty is over, they are pretty soon back to surfing the Net, listening to
music on their iPods and leaving their translators
buried deep in their brief-cases. And so it goes. We, the longer-term
residents, bravely soldier on by switching between different but seemingly
equally futile methods of learning Chinese, meanwhile finding Da Shan (Mark Rowswell, a
Canadian who can speak perfect Chinese and has been a popular performer on We go to meetings where for
years we have been opening our speeches by explaining in broken Chinese why
we will not be speaking the language every other speaker will be using that
day. We may even enter denial by wilfully
understating the time we have spent in Maybe the only way we can
begin to get back on the road of linguistic fulfilment
is therefore through a "Language Failures Anonymous" session, at
which I promise to be the very first to get up and announce in excellent
English: "My name is Charles,
and I've been in (Source: |