Anyone who gets to know me will quickly become familiar with my never-ending efforts to learn Mandarin. Before I moved to Shanghai just over a year ago, my best friend – who has lived here for five years already – assured me that I would be chattering away in fluent conversational Chinese before Christmas. “You pick up languages quickly,” he reminded me. “You’ll be fine.”

Photo: Aleera*

I’d taken a couple of months worth of lessons in the UK under the aegis of a timid Tianjin exchange student named Sophia whom I had found on Craigslist. We met weekly for lessons in a pub in East London, during which I would labour through our Mao-era textbook while she would glance around nervously. Progress wasn’t exactly zippy, but I consoled myself with the fact that once I arrived in Shanghai, I would get into the swing of things.

What concerned me was the rate of improvement – namely, zero. I like to think of myself as a bit of a language-geek, as I mastered French, Spanish, and Italian fairly quickly, and made efforts with Russian, Icelandic, and Catalan at various points throughout my youth. But Mandarin? I just didn’t get it. So many homonyms! So few sounds! Sure, it’s notoriously difficult – much harder than the Romance languages, and even those infamous Slavic and Slavonic tongues – but countless people learn it, so it can’t be impossible.

I decided to sign up for a term of lessons at a language school, since this seemed to be a common way of learning amongst my friends and colleagues. At the first school I went to visit, I was ushered into a room and given a test by the course co-ordinator. I garbled my way through a few routine sentences I already knew, including how piaoliang Shanghai is, and how fangbian I find its jiaotong system compared to Lundun de. To my shock, the co-ordinator proclaimed that I was Lower Intermediate level, and then inveigled me into signing up for two months of twice weekly one- on-one classes. This cost several thousand kuai (it pains me too much to specify) and, to add insult to injury, I was charged an extra hundred for a pathetically slim tome that was, apparently, the “course material”.

It consisted of five chapters of cloyingly glib, banal roleplay between two highly irritating Meiguoren wannabe-Sinophiles who were in China for the first time. And so I learned little. Despite pleas for more freedom in what we studied, and for instruction in hanzi and not just pinyin, my teacher went ahead with the prescribed course material.

Equally irritating was the woman on the front desk, who had clearly been to some sort of “dealing with people” training course where she had picked up some irritating traits like commenting on some aspect of her interlocutor’s appearance. “Susssaa!” she would cry whenever I passed her desk. “Your skin! So white!” or “Your clothe! So blue!” or, even more annoyingly, “Your eye! So big!” Tiring, to say the least.

Despite pressure from the co-ordinator to sign up for more classes once my initial two months were up, I decided to continue my studies alone. I stocked up on books and bought one of those surprisingly expensive electronic mini-dictionaries, downloaded Wenlin and signed up for daily sentences to be delivered to my inbox. I was fired with enthusiasm, believing that motivation alone would sustain me. I was wrong. By the time April came around, I was no better. My talents lay only in directing taxi drivers to my apartment block, and ordering Shanghai chao mian.

It was at this point that I decided to try language exchange; all were unmitigated failures. One guy spent much of the time either silent or hiding a fey giggle behind his hand; one girl got all sniffy with me when I divulged that I lived with my boyfriend outside of wedlock.

Last month heralded the first anniversary of my moving to Shanghai. In a year I had achieved everything I had set out to do, apart from learning Mandarin. So by the time I saw Heike’s advert, I was at the end of my tether and willing to try anything. “German Expat, 9 years in China, fluent Mandarin, available to teach.” It sounded odd at first – why learn Mandarin from a foreigner? Surely native speakers are the experts. But the more I thought about it, and the more I chatted on MSN with Heike, the more logical it sounded. She knew exactly what foreigners find hard about Mandarin – the quirks and idiosyncrasies which native speakers take for granted. She had studied Chinese hardcore for three years at university, followed by six years living and working in Changsha, Harbin, and Qingdao, so her level was phenomenally high.

What really appealed to me was her knowledge of characters. I’d always been interested in the origins of hanzi, but my former Chinese teachers had either been disinterested, perplexed that I actually wanted to know, or clueless. I guess it’s not super-useful to know why the character 西 looks the way it looks, but, as I said, I’m a bit of a language-geek. Luckily Heike is too, so we’re the perfect match.

I’ve been taking lessons with her for nearly a month now, and I’m making progress quicker than ever before. She has endless tips for me about grammar, punctuation, and stroke order, and since her English is native-level too, her explanations make perfect sense.

A lot of people think I’m crazy for learning Chinese from a German, especially since she charges more than a local would, but it’s the only thing that’s worked for me so far and I’m sticking with it. Besides, we all have our methods, and Mandarin is such a tricky language that if you find a way that’s right for you, you have to pursue it. Thanks to Heike, I’ve finally found mine.
 

Related Links
Talk The Talk: Mandarin Language Schools in Shanghai
The Big Mandarin Debate: Where to Study?
Is There Really a Mandarin Scam?
Where to Learn Chinese? University vs. Private Language Center

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