Despite worries on the part of the Chinese government that the lack of foreigners learning Chinese, “may affect efforts to soften China's global image,” more foreigners are cracking open Chinese textbooks (if only once or twice) and struggling with the tones and mysterious Morse-code-gone-crazy characters of the Chinese language.

Having spent, I feel embarrassed when I say this, over 3 years (really just six semesters, and since a semester is only 3-4 months isn’t it really more like 2 years?) studying Mandarin in the States and in China, I’m no longer convinced that learning Chinese is practical once you reach puberty. But, if you’re having children as I write this – bring them here now so they’re developing little brains can soak it up like a sponge. A sponge that later in life will thank you, and cause you to thank yourself, as you sit comfortably in the cushy nursing home they’re paying for with their high-powered global business job.

Photo: Helga’s Lobster Stew

However, as much as I may discourage people from studying Chinese (and I can only imagine how much more difficult Shanghainese and Cantonese are than Mandarin – I find four tones to be at least four too many) there is a caveat to this warning: if you are living in China or planning on living in China for some period of time, you should study. If you’re working, get a tutor or sign up for night classes at a private school - it’s exceedingly difficult to learn Chinese on your own. Keep your expectations low but give it all you got. Time and effort spent learning some characters will be repaid in full when you’re confronted with a bus schedule, or desperately trying to find a bathroom.

For this article I consulted a panel of “foreign experts” (at least they got the first part right) who’ve studied Chinese for anywhere from 6 months to 6 years. All the really bad reasons are mine though:

1) It makes your life much easier

If you can’t buy or order food you will die. If you can’t find the bathroom in time you’ll wish you were dead. If you can pick numbers out of a conversation between a real estate agent and landlord you’re less likely to pay a super-inflated price, you’ll probably be able to get it down to just plain old inflated.

Photo: plastic spatula

2) When your Chinese girlfriend/boyfriend's family comes to stay with you for weeks at a time it'll be just a little less awkward.

Many people advocate learning Chinese as a way of getting far more familiar with the natives. What people don’t talk about is what happens when your significant other’s family comes to stay with you. If you can’t speak some Chinese, communication won’t be so much strained as nonexistent. And what if you’re S.O. has to work all the time leaving you watching Chinese TV with the folks for hours on end?

Equally important – if you’re really interested in someone, don’t you want to be able to understand them better, and better appreciate the world which they come from and will always, in some way, exist in? Wouldn’t you want the same from them?

3) If you love pain, you’ll love Chinese

Sometimes Chinese seems relatively benign: there aren’t any conjugations and barely any tenses; verbs aren’t one way when you’re talking to a man and another when you’re talking to a woman. You don’t have to agonize over the politics and semantic mechanics of how to conjugate a verb when you’re talking to a group of 10 women and one man.

David Sedaris – who started studying French in his 30s – describes the challenge of learning gendered nouns in his book Me Talk Pretty One Day: “Against all reason, the Grand Canyon is masculine.” And some solutions: I’ve started referring to everything in the plural, which can get expensive but has solved a lot of my problems,” he explains, “A masculine kilo of feminine tomatoes presents a problem easily solved by asking for two kilos of tomatoes.”

So why is Chinese so hard then? Mandarin only has four tones (really four plus a neutral tone so it’s more like 5, or at least 4 and a half, and when you say certain tone combinations together the tones switch or one gets cut in half…) but they’re monsters. Few foreigners ever really nail the sound of Mandarin and those that do are usually quietly envied and silently loathed by other foreigners (Canadian freak of nature Da Shan being the most extreme example). I have neither the time nor enough valium to get into characters – if the Chinese government wants more foreigners to learn Chinese they should introduce an alphabet. At that point they could cut all funding to Confucius Institutes and spend it on guards to keep the rush of foreigners from getting into China.

Most of the time, or at least some of it, learning Chinese is a good pain. When you work out you suffer on the treadmill, your shins ache, the machines shocks you when you try to lower the pace, your sweat is splattered around you like a Pollock painting and you wish for a quick death to end the pain (maybe this is just me). But when you’re done you feel amazing: euphoric, overflowing with warmth and energy. Learning Chinese is pretty much the same, albeit a bit less sweaty. The classes hurt, the homework hurts, you’re frustrated almost to tears with how dumb you are, but when you communicate – even if it’s only a few words – successfully, you feel like you just finished the New York Marathon and are ready to run it again barefoot..

Part 2: 7 Reasons You Should Learn Chinese 4-7

Leave your reasons for and against learning Chinese in the comment box below. 谢谢合作!
 

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