Learning Mandarin Chinese Immersion Experience in Hangzhou, China

I have a good college friend who has been living in Hangzhou, China since November 2009. He has been teaching English at a small university there, and had no previous experience with Chinese language or culture. I asked him to write an account of his experiences with learning Chinese on the mainland through immersion. Below is what he wrote me (with some slight editing). I’ve added my relative experiences about these things in italics.

Hey hey hey,

Ok here goes, not sure what you are expecting with my perspective, but I’ve got lots of stories and can be happy to share.

Mandarin is a fascinating subject, rich in history, culture and subtle intricacies. It’s both simple and complex with some 1,000 phonemes comprising the entire scope of the language. However, HOMOPHONES are endless; and even more complicated is the fact that some characters can also have multiple meanings. The two most difficult aspects of the whole scope of the language are the tones and the written aspect. I’ll skip the basics, since you are probably already familiar with that much. The tones become even more complicated because different regions are heavily influenced by the local dialects and thus change some emphasis on the tones. Led Zeppelin’s Communication breakdown is a great theme song for most foreigners in China. Having patience, being diligent, and having the right methods will help get you around this issue, along with some tips below.

With all that said I must say that THERE IS HOPE! Especially with oral Chinese. Oral Chinese is incredibly simple (grammatically, and in volume). Maybe because Chinese people are not too verbose, the same types of  conversation and phrases are often recycled. An interesting story from a Russian colleague is that after studying Chinese for 7 years she became academically fluent in Chinese and even married a Chinese man who she only speaks Chinese with. Since being married, she took jobs as an English teacher, and says despite speaking Chinese daily and extensively, her Chinese has gotten worse simply because everyday Chinese is extremely simple.

Methods of learning: Use it or lose it. As soon as you hear a word, repeat it. There’s evidence in linguistics that people who can more accurately repeat a word phonetically (regardless of remembering it later) have great aptitude in learning language. Of course, using it in context is the best way to use it. This also goes with grammar. When you learn a new word from a person, try it in a few different contexts. For example: An1 jing4 (peaceful)…you hear, ‘zhe4 ge di4 fang1 hen3 an1 jing4′ (meaning, this place is very peaceful), you repeat and then say something like, ‘zhe4 ge yin1 yue4 hen3 an1 jing4….’ or ‘na4 ge sheng2 mao1 hen3 an1  jing4?’ (meaning, this music is very peaceful’ or ‘that panda is very peaceful’) for practice. For confirmation on whether your sentences are correct, you can ask your friends if you can use the word this way: “neng2 bu4 neng4?” or “dou1 ke3 yi3 ma?” (meaning, ‘can or can’t do this?’ or ‘can do both?”).

Test new words in all assortments of phrases. As a great coach and teacher once taught me, the only way to truly learn something is by trying it, and the more ways and different types of attempts you get, the more you learn both what is incorrect and what is correct.

Also, people on the mainland are desperately curious about wai4 guo2 ren2, which literally means “outside country person” (with the exception of small children, who on occasion will burst into tears). Take advantage of this! Even if it means you generally have the same conversation, you will become increasingly more capable with the same answers, and ready to ask more questions! Sometimes I like to bargain, simply to start a conversation, if the shopkeeper is friendly enough to keep up the chatter for several minutes, I will sometimes feel obligated to buy at least something small as an exchange for their conversation.

This is the part that really makes me want to visit the mainland. The people in Taipei just really aren’t all that curious about foreigners – and if they are, they insist on speaking to you in English. Every once in awhile I will get bombarded by several Taiwanese people who want to use their few English words on me. The typical question, “where are you from?” can be easily answered in Chinese (“wo3 shi4 mei4 guo2 ren2″, meaning “I am American”), to let them know that I can speak some Chinese. Then, undoubtedly, this will be followed with, “oh! ni3 hui4 shuo1 zhong1 wen2! hen3 hao3!” and can be a good opportunity to heighten their interest and provoke communication in Chinese.

A trick that I have learned from a Chinese friend…NEVER SURRENDER!
A) Never say, ‘ting1 bu4 dong3′ (meaning literally, ‘I hear, don’t understand’) it is an automatic conversation ender, and useful only when you want to minimize communication (which may happen, and you may want to do even if you do understand).
B) When a Chinese person asks you, ‘ni3 hui4 shuo1 zhong1 wen2 ma?,’ or, ‘ni4 de zhong1 wen2 zen3 me ya4?’ Always answer, ‘hui4, or ‘hao3′. Also, never say anything along the lines of, ‘wo de zhong wen bu hao’ it’s another conversation ender and an excuse for you to not communicate.

Indeed – keeping at using your Chinese can be extremely hard when the person speaking to you assumes your level to be at near-fluency; if the sentence is too fast or complicated, instead of saying “ting1 bu4 dong3,” try saying “qing3 ni3 zai4 shuo1 yi2 bian4″ or “qing3 ni3 man4 man4 shuo1″ (meaning, “please say again once more” or “please speak slowly”). If you still don’t understand, in my experience, “ting1 bu4 dong3″ is not necessarily a conversation ender, just as long as you make it clear to the other person that you want to figure out what their saying. Sometimes, actually, saying “ting1 bu4 dong3″ seems to have the opposite effect for me, and the person (usually a cab driver) will continue on with what they’re trying to say, practically ignoring my statement that I have no idea what they’re talking about!

Next tip, GESTICULATION!!! Sounds raunchy, but it’s damn helpful. I teach my students to ‘talk with their hands’. It will automatically make you a) more fluent with less filler words and pauses b) more expressive c) more easily understood. Obviously, not everything you do with your hands is specically and accurately understood, but a majority of interpersonal communication is already non-verbal. So keeping your hands in your pockets is never going to help you be understood. Furthermore, gesturing the appropriate tone definitely helps pronunciation and the listeners understanding.

Ah! I never thought about that before – but gesturing the tone can certainly be most helpful for people who have trouble mastering the tones. In my class, there are a few peoples who seem to turn everything into 2nd tone. I imagine if they adopted the practice of gesturing the tone, even if they’re pronouncing it wrong, it would be much much easier to understand them

Also, I’ve decided to learn the language in what I call the natural ‘whole language’ approach. In the same way a child learns a language, first orally, with concrete objects as much as possible and now a half year later making an effort to learn characters beyond that of: men, women, toilet, north, east, south, west, and other basics. Another friend who is working here as a French teacher has decided to have regular classes focusing on the reading of lengthy stories and explanations of symbolism behind each character. Their lessons often break down into lots of English, which results in him usually forfeiting during real communication settings. Since then, he defers to me when we are together and need to communicate to Chinese. This too is important. If you are around foreigners who speak great Chinese all the time, you will not get a chance to practice authentically as much.

Also, learning language in chunks is essential. Chinese friends that speak great English will often choose to practice their English. What you can get them to do is teach you a set or idiom and tell the story behind it.
Examples (spelling maybe not correct): ma3 ma hu3 hu, lao san lao si, jin di zhi wa, qin yan suo jian, duo peng you duo tiao lu, tu xue, shen ting ping, and you mei you nao zi!!! You’d be surprised with how quick you can learn these phrases, and how impressed native Chinese people will be when you say them!

From my experience, Rosetta Stone has been helpful with pronunciation, listening, and vocabulary…minimal with communication in real context. Textbooks are only good with a teacher to implement them and verify appropriateness and tone. Having a conversation partner is very helpful, and a friend who became near fluent gave me a great tip. Just go to a nearby University and post a flyer for a conversation partner. Chances are you will need to take it down within days after too many replies. After that you can meet a bunch of people and discover some one who is a very able Chinese conversationalist (can speak slow, balance English and Chinese appropriately, and teach you useful words phrases, and culture.) I also use a podcast of Chinese. It’s incredibly dull, but ok for listening. Sometimes I use it for listening practice, sometimes I use it when I want to take a nap while riding the bus.

Yes, yes, and yes! Learning in a structured environment has been very helpful to me. I’ve tried Rosetta stone as well, and it is helpful for learning basic Chinese vocabulary, pronunciation and some sentence structure – but not much more than that. I haven’t done language exchange yet, but I’m starting one next week, actually!

-T

Thanks to my good friend for his input on this interesting experience he is having on the mainland in Hangzhou, China. He is a smart guy; I can’t wait to visit him there, if possible!

Keep on the look out for my next post – very soon it will be! On the topic of some of my impressions of Taipei culture.

88 ! (typing lingo for “bye bye” – the pronunciation in Mandarin of the number 8 is “ba1″).

New Page Added!

臺灣

American culture is hard to describe, primarily because the country is huge and the livelihoods of people varies greatly from state to state. The country is very young, compared to other societies around the world. Thus, we don’t have much of a traditional culture to speak of. Honestly, I didn’t think there was much of an American culture to refer to when I was living in the States. Having grown up in the US, and with limited experiences outside of the country,  it was a bit difficult for me to conceptualise American culture. Even so, I had an idea of how American values are unique. I felt compelled to experience another culture firsthand to gain a better understanding of the large spectrum of human natures.

Before attempting to understand the culture of a country/society/etc., one must study a bit of their statistics and history. For this, I turned to a well-revered and trustworthy source: the Internet!!
The main island Taiwan has quite an interesting history. But, before we get into that, I also think it’s important to read up on some of the basics. Therefore, I have created a page on this blog that goes into some detail about different topics regarding Taiwan, such as: statistics on the population, languages, religions, history of Taiwan, and some links to facts and news websites for Taiwan.

If you’re interested, please check it out!

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An extremely late “update”

I’ve decided to relocate from another blog I had started because I’ve heard many great things about WordPress. Here is my first blog post, from 3/18/2010:

So…. I’ve been in Taipei for about two months now. To read up a bit about Taipei, click on the link, and then click on “Taipei travel guide” for loads of info on Taipei, or “interactive map” to learn about other places in Taiwan.

Two months sounds like a long time to me. After two whole months here, what have I done, exactly? Let’s see….

Just some background information about me:

I’m 22 and I recently graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science at the College of William and Mary. My major was Neuroscience. I really enjoy studying Neuroscience, and I hope to make a career in this field. I have been very interested in East Asian culture for several years now. Really, ever since I took a short trip to Seoul, South Korea about five years ago. You could say it was my “first exposure” to the wonders of Asian culture. I took a year of Japanese language at William and Mary, and I took some anthropology classes on Japan. At the end of the year, close to graduation, I met my current boyfriend . He was a graduate of William and Mary a year prior and he majored in Chinese studies and Environmental Policy. He studied in Beijing, China for about 6 months – he then moved to Tianjin, China for an additional two months. I wasn’t very interested in Chinese language or culture until I met him. We decided to travel to Asia together, and we settled on Taiwan. He wanted to go somewhere to practice Chinese, and I just pretty much wanted to go anywhere in East Asia. Taiwan interested us because I had heard it is very open to foreigners.

Taiwan is one of a few places in the world that systematically uses fantizi (traditional Chinese characters), along with Hong Kong and Macau. Traditional Chinese characters are also used as a part of the written language for Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Cantonese (and more?).

Many traditional (“standard”) characters are no longer used in mainland China. The Chinese mainland first introduced jiantizi (simplified) characters in 1956 – this was done on the theory that simplification of certain complex characters would make it easier for people to learn to read and write. However, if you want to learn to read and write both simplified and traditional Chinese characters, it is much easier to learn fantizi first. This is because the simplified characters still maintain the basic form and elements of the traditional characters, so it is not difficult to learn the simplified characters if you already know the fantizi. On the other hand, because the simplified characters omit some elements of the fantizi, it’s not so simple trying to learn the fantizi characters from their jiantizi versions. It’s not impossible, though, because simplification tended to follow a pattern, and once you become familiar with this pattern, you can generally guess what the fantizi may look like.

Here is some more information on fantizi and jiantizi.
Here is some general information on the Chinese language script.

But, I digress….! Many people have asked me, why Taiwan? I don’t have a consistent answer to this question. I’m not quite sure why. To tell you the truth, I was tired of America. It’s a funny thing to say, because America is huge, and the culture of America varies depending on where you are in the country. Nonetheless, the idea of moving to California didn’t excite me. I wanted to go halfway across the world, not halfway across the country. So… here I am in Taipei, Taiwan.

We (myself and my boyfriend) landed at Taoyuan International airport in Taipei on January 19, 2010 around 10pm local time here. The trip here took about 24 hours. Most of the time was spent in an airplane, whether waiting on the tarmac due to delay or actual flying time. We barely made our connection at Narita airport in Japan, so we went from a 15 hour flight from Detroit, MI straight to another four hour flight from Tokyo to Taipei. This was due to a two hour delay in the airplane at Detroit before take off – apparently there was some oil pressure gauge malfunction and they had to do a full “routine check-up” of the airplane before we were cleared to enter the sky.

We landed late at night in Taipei, tired and worn out. Gladly enough, we met up with a family friend there. A long time friend of my father’s ( to the tune of about 30 years!), Peter has lived outside of the USA for more than 20 years now. He studied Chinese language and culture in college and graduate school. Actually, he studied Mandarin in Taipei, Taiwan for a year or so during the late 1960′s.  Eventually, he ended up settling with a job at the Associated Press. He has been in Taipei now for about five years with his wife, whom he met when he lived in Israel. They have a son in fifth grade, whom they adopted as a baby from Vietnam. They let us stay with them in their apartment here in Taipei for about two weeks when we arrived. So wonderful! We spent much of our time walking around the area of TianMu  in the northern Shilin district of Taipei. This neighborhood is a very nice area. and is situated practically at the base of several mountains, full of great hiking trails – the most popular is called YangMingShan (Yangming mountain). Along with great hiking trails, it has really nice hot springs. Here is some information on hiking trails in Taipei – starting on the page about YangmMingShan and TianMu. This website is really useful, actually, if you’re interested in touring Taipei.

Also, here is some brief information on the different Taipei districts.

There are many foreigner families living in this area, due to the fact that this is the location for Taipei American School (TAS), Taipei Japanese School and Taipei European School (TES). The curriculum of these schools is mostly in English, and very advanced. In fact, currently TAS has a huge population of native Taiwanese children. The rule to get into this school is that your child must has a foreign passport. Thus, many rich Taiwanese parents will travel to the USA to give birth to their child so that their son or daughter has a foreign passport and can enroll at TAS or TES. TianMu is an area rich with japanese shopping malls and nice restaurants. It’s not very representative of the rest of Taipei. Nonetheless, it’s a great place to start if you’re fresh out of a nice American city/suburb and are the type that is easily susceptible to culture shock. Most of the people in TianMu speak an intermediate level of English, thus it is quite easy to live there for years and to never learn much Mandarin beyond “ni hao” and “xiexie”.

I found this to be the case of many of the foreign wives. They move to Taipei because their husband (most likely he is an engineer or business man of some sort) gets a nice job. They never get a job themselves here because their husband makes more than enough money for the whole family. Thus, you have a very active and dedicated PTA at these immersion schools. TAS is a hubbub of activity during and after school. Even on the weekends, there are people coming in and out for soccer practice (events organised by one of the mothers) and social meetings. The PTA is made up entirely of mothers and it is a tight-knit social group. Granted, many mothers spend their time studying Mandarin, but I’ve also come across plenty that don’t even have a basic understanding of the language. I guess I can understand, as it was never really their intention to move to Taiwan except for the fact that their husband got a great job here. Thus, they feel no obligation to assimilate to Taiwanese culture.

For me, I came here in need of a change. My boyfriend and I decided that we wanted to live somewhere closer to the center of Taipei city. I enrolled at the Mandarin Training Center (MTC) language school here at National Taiwan Normal University (Shi da) before we came over. The school is located in the Da An district in Taipei, which is actually quite close to the center of the city. I wanted to live somewhere within walking distance of this school.

We spent our first week in Taipei just hanging out and getting used to the pace of things. We then spent our second week searching intensely for apartments within walking distance of Shi da. We found a really great little place near the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall, which is a giant section of land set aside near the center of Taipei, officially dedicated as a memorial to Chiang Kai-Shek. It has beautiful Chinese architecture and a garden surrounds the entire area. (I’ll post some pictures later).

We moved into our apartment on February 3rd; we signed a lease to end the beginning of August 2010.

The Mandarin Training Center at Shi da is a very well known school for learning Mandarin as a second language. The school has been around for a long time – before mainland China opened up to Americans. Thus, all American students wishing to study Chinese in a Chinese-speaking land came here to Taiwan to study. MTC is the oldest Chinese language school still in operation. Each session of classes lasts three months and sessions are offered year-round. You must spend at least 15 hours a week in class if you are here in Taiwan on a student visitor visa. My session started March 4th, so I’ve been in school for almost two weeks now. My class time is a bit late in the evening, but my only other options were very early in the morning or around noon – however all of the noontime classes were full already and, to be honest, I am just not consistent enough with early morning classes to warrant signing up for that time. As a foreigner staying in Taiwan on a visitor visa for the purpose of study, I am obligated to have a good attendance record (no more than 11 hours of absence every session of school, which is three months long) and good grades. If I miss more than 11 hours of classes during my three month-long session, than I may not get my visitor visa extended. Knowing myself, I am likely to miss many classes if it is very early in the morning every Monday through Friday!

Anyways, my classes are pretty good so far. I will go into this more in later posts – information regarding visas in Taiwan, my experiences at MTC, etc.

I have so much to say about Taipei and my experiences and impressions here. So much so that I can’t try to fit it all in one post. I’ll have to update more often to catch up to my current experiences.

I think this is good for now, though!

Until next time (which will be really soon, because I have lots to catch up on),

再見！