Where I started – My First Words!

Notepad, Tones.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was actually pretty freaked out when I read all these posts online about the complexities of Chinese tones and saw them as an extra barrier to learning. But, if we take characters out of the equation for the time being and just look at pinyin (which is, I’m sure, the way it will stay for me for a while!) – the tones actually provide you with a pronunciation guide built into the text – priceless!

Of course, all languages have their punctuation rules and quirks – as does Mandarin, but the added bonus of the tones being present in pinyin is that element of confidence you can have in your pace and pitch as a speaker.

My aim was to get started on learning right away, and I decided that getting an understanding of the tones was an important place to start. I chose a YouTube video I found researching – you can find it here

So this was my first lesson! And I spoke my first words in Mandarin. You might find my interpretations on what I learned interesting, and after ‘lesson’ one I am feeling really inspired about continuing to learn more and more.

I have found that it’s really useful to watch/listen to your video or audio once throughout without taking any notes or pausing to practice. Then go back through a second time and take the opportunities for practice or to use your notebook. I feel hurried otherwise, and that definitely stops me remembering what I’m learning!

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I also realised watching this video, that it’s the first time I really listened to how the Chinese language sounds. It felt odd trying to recreate the sounds, but once you try and get rid of that initial fear – it feels great.

Those scary looking characters begin to make a little sense once you break them down. Each character represents a syllable; and each syllable is composed of: An ‘initial’ a ‘final’ and a tone. I found it helpful to think of these as the 3 stages of pronunciation.  This is as much as I’ve grasped about initial, and final – the focus of this tutorial was on the tones themselves – so I won’t dwell on those now or I’ll confuse myself (never mind anyone else).

There are 4 Tones. Each tone indicates the variations in pitch whilst speaking. So as well as vocabulary, grammar and accent – it’s important that intonation is correct. It’s pretty wild how what is essentially the same word, can be given a completely different meaning through a small tweak in tone.

When you look at pinyin text, you can see the tones marked at the top of the text, similar to accents in French, for example.

Wǒ bù tài xiǎng hē kělè.

I don’t think it would be possible to understand what this sounds like until you hear a native speaker explain it to you. But as you listen you’ll be able to come up with words in your own language/accent that mirror the sound of the tone (not the pronunciation of any associated pinyin). I’ve done just that as you will see from my notes at the top of the post, I took suggestions from the you tube tutorial and blended it with examples that I use in my day to day speak, so when I forget how the tone should sound, I have a point of reference.

The relative pitch and duration of each tone is also important, but I think that’s more than I can cope with for one lesson on tones!

This diagram from sinosplice.com nicely illustrates the relative pitches between the tones.

Getting Started – deciding how to learn.

Not really knowing anything about the Mandarin language and alphabet, or about Chinese culture and context; knowing where to start was tough. Complicated obviously (in my opinion) by the fact that Mandarin doesn’t use the Latin alphabet. I’m not a language learning pro either, so should I be starting with the alphabet, with pronunciation? Or with vocabulary and writing characters? Should I buy a book, an audio course, find a tutor? This was going to be an ongoing project, I needed to be organised – and not necessarily by following someone else’s tried and tested method, this was also going to be about me finding the *best* way for me to learn.

I decided the first thing I needed to know, was to find out what I didn’t know. It just so happens that when it comes to Chinese – apparently, you could fill a library of volumes with that.

First up was Google. I’m a scientist at heart, I like definitive answers. So wading through the varied articles that are thrown up under ‘Learning Mandarin’ was quite stressful. Lots of people telling me I could be “fluent in three months” or “speak in thirty days or your money back”. Quite honestly I felt like I wanted someone to hand me a process map – one that showed me the foolproof method for going from English to Mandarin.

The danger for me was always going to be spending too much time in the research phase and never actually moving to the doing part! (I do so love to plan!)

After a day of reading online and trying to locate myself some resources to build my own learning plan, these are the things I learned, discovered and decided.

1. I stumbled on an interview with a chap called Dan – who writes a language and culture blog called Chinese-Breeze his opening line in the interview:

“If you spend too much time worrying about whether you will ever reach fluency, firstly, that is time you will not be spending injecting Chinese into your brain, but secondly, and most importantly, it will become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy – you won’t enjoy the process, will associate Chinese with stress and essentially never become fluent.”

this was timely advice for me, and I’ve bookmarked Dan’s site as I think it will really help me in future (I’m not digging too deep into other people’s journies yet, I wanted to focus on exploring options that would work best for me) – but do read the interview on Lingoholic, it has some excellent start up tips.

[this is the point when I realised that there were some great resources in form of online blogs, written by people not to dissimilar from me – create a bookmarks folder and log all the resources you find in organised categories]

2. After reading a few extracts of articles I came across lots of people talking about ‘Chinese Tones’ – how difficult it made learning the language and that it was essential to master them.

I could already see that when reading Chinese Characters – of which I have NO idea about, how the heck was I supposed to turn what is essentially (at the moment, to me) a scribble, into a correctly pronounced sound?! I did stop breathing for a while here.

Fortunately I already knew about Pinyin from a news article I read, it had a discussion about how some Chinese organisations felt that the Chinese Characters were holding back it’s economy because of the apparent communication difficulties it creates. Had I taken my own advice (above) I would have bookmarked the article and shared it with you here!

Pinyin is the official system used to transcribe the pronunciation of Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet. It was also the shining light in my hopes of being able to pronounce anything in Mandarin – pinyin has a system of marking the ‘tones’ of which I was so afraid. But still, there were going to be a lot of new sounds, and I read something about ‘intials’ and ‘finals’ and looked away before I got scared.

Don’t let tones scare you. I suggest you quickly jump into a detailed explanation – I watched this YouTube video and found it extremely helpful.

[I now knew that YouTube was going to be a great resource for me too]

3. I wanted a way to track my learning, and make sure I was progressing. Lots of language sites mentioned Anki – this is a piece of SRS software which I had never even heard of. In fact, in this context I had no idea what SRS stood for. The tip – be prepared to log your learning and have a system in place to review it. I haven’t got started with Anki yet; but I’ll let you know how I get on!

-Don’t concentrate on the mammoth task ahead, focus on small and measurable bits of progress.

-Try not to get ‘stuck in the research phase’ to delay getting started.

-Bookmark and follow interesting blogs, and consider subscribing to a YouTube tutorial

-Get a notebook – use it

The Resolution

It started when my partner began working overseas in Asia, he made a passing comment that we ought to learn Mandarin together. I’ve only met a handful of native English speakers who have taken on the challenge of learning a non-latin language; and their ability to do so has always fascinated me. I’ve never been a linguistic genius, I studied French and German at school until I was 16 – my written French is probably better than my accent; and although I can recite every grammatical table in German (Der, Die, Das, Die, Den, Die Das Die….) the best I can offer as a speaker is ‘Please fill up my petrol tank’. Since school I picked up pleasantries in lots of European tongues; and did once decide that I ought to learn Arabic but then the right-left concept got the better of me.

On New Years Eve 2014 I was home alone with the dog (a classic firework hater) whilst Andrew was traveling to China. ‘Right’ I decided. I’m going to learn Mandarin. And that was that. I’ve never really had a New Years resolution before, so I wasn’t quite sure what to do with this one.

I initially hit the problem of, ‘Oh my Goodness where on earth do I start’. So whilst I was trying to figure this out I decided that I’d track my process along the way; hopefully meet some other learners and perhaps help out a couple more.

Welcome to the Mandarin Mystery.