Why Chinese?

[Wippen (inactive)]

13 hours ago, Shelley said:

and committed suicide 2 weeks later.

I know it had nothing to do with chinese unrequited love according to the note.

Unfortunately that can happen. Sociologist Francesco Alberoni describes the process of being in love like a revoluation, like a new life that opens up If that love is unrequited, this send that person into a depressive state. http://www.alberoni.it/pdf/iloveyou.pdf

[Guest]

On 24/03/2018 at 5:36 AM, Shelley said:

I have only had one person, a very good friend of mine, come to me and say I want to learn Chinese, can you point me in the right direction. After suggesting textbooks and practically forcing Pleco on him, he up and went and committed suicide 2 weeks later.

I know it had nothing to do with chinese unrequited love according to the note.

 

Chinese aside for a moment, I am so sorry that this happened.

[Shelley]

I am over the worst now, thank you @Napkat.

[ParkeNYU]

It's really all about the characters.

[Lumbering Ox]

2 hours ago, ParkeNYU said:

It's really all about the characters.

I thought it was all about the base.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAJsZWhj6GI

But I could have been misinformed.

[Guest]

On 27/03/2018 at 12:52 PM, Lumbering Ox said:

On 27/03/2018 at 10:09 AM, ParkeNYU said:

It's really all about the characters.

I thought it was all about the base.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAJsZWhj6GI

But I could have been misinformed.

 

I thought doing the hokey cokey and turning around is what it's all about?

 

Times have changed, man.

[Moon rabbit]

Last year I wanted to attend calligraphy classes at Confucius institute. I filled out the form, but later they told me that institute will not be organizing calligraphy classes in the autumn/winter semester.  Not enogh people applied or something...I forgot.  Since I was there I said to myself "Well since you here, you can learn Chinese language instead of calligraphy".  That's how I started learning Chinese language and it was a great choice.

[TaxiAsh]

We learned languages in the UK as children (French / German / Latin) and I remember enough to probably greet someone, but little more. I was interested in it at the time.

 

However, after looking a little into Mandarin and watching the China season of programmes on the BBC over Christmas, I thought I would buy basic book and see how it goes.

 

In 3 months I think I've learned more than all those years at school!

[Nick Fisher]

For me, it all started way back in 2002.

 

In my (relatively small) city in Australia, my exposure to China people was limited to Jet Li and the wave of HK migrants ahead of the 1997 handover. In other words, very little.

 

True, my younger brother was studying Chinese in high school. But that didn't really play much of a role.

 

I was thinking ahead, trying to figure out what skill would be most useful ten years into the future. At the time, I really didn't know what I wanted to do, but I figured that whatever it was, it'd be international - and the more I researched, the more I figured that China would play an increasingly important role in the world economy and political system. So I enrolled in Chinese in my first year of university, something which put me on the road to where I am today.

 

18 years later - having worked and studied in China and now regularly speaking Chinese in Singapore - the reasoning for the decision was definitely correct. The only thing that changed was the romanticism - the China you imagine as a 17 year old in the early 2000s is certainly not the China in reality in 2020.

 

[abcdefg]

2 hours ago, Nick Fisher said:

18 years later - having worked and studied in China and now regularly speaking Chinese in Singapore - the reasoning for the decision was definitely correct.

 

Have you always lived and worked in Singapore, or have you lived in the Chinese Mainland as well? What do you do there?

[Nick Fisher]

8 minutes ago, abcdefg said:

Have you always lived and worked in Singapore, or have you lived in the Chinese Mainland as well? What do you do there?

I worked in Beijing from 2011 to 2015 in a property company. Singapore is much 

more recent, I only moved here a few months ago (unluckily just as the whole world went into lockdown!)

[imron]

3 hours ago, Nick Fisher said:

the China you imagine as a 17 year old in the early 2000s is certainly not the China in reality in 2020.

As someone who lived in China in the early 2000s, the reality of things back then wasn’t nearly like what people imagined either. 

[Nick Fisher]

13 minutes ago, imron said:

As someone who lived in China in the early 2000s, the reality of things back then wasn’t nearly like what people imagined either. 

Very true!

[imron]

Split discussion on China in the early 2000s here.

[jaapgrolleman]

I moved to Shanghai but got by just using English just fine, so I didn't really want to learn it. I figured I'd only live there for a year or two, not worth the effort. Then my manager forced me to learn Mandarin. I left that company but I kept up the studies, and now Shanghai has become my home for almost 4 years already.

[Woodford]

I'm fond of telling stories, so here goes...

My background was originally in ancient languages. I studied Latin in High School, and in my adult life since then (I'm 34 now), I've reviewed my Latin and picked up Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew. At a certain point, I was really itching for the fresh feeling of a "living" language that people still use today. I tried a few European languages (Russian, Spanish, German), and I just lacked the perseverance for it, for various reasons. Being an ancient/literary language learner, I had a particular distaste for all the cutesy, touristy learning materials: "Excuse me, where is the bathroom? When is the next train? Let's count to ten!"). I remember Russian being particularly fun, but the teacher abruptly left and went back to Russia before I got very far, and I never picked it back up. I tried a little Arabic, but was discouraged when I found out that most of its speakers don't use Modern Standard Arabic, but one of many subdialects. My wife speaks German fluently, so this year I've returned to it and have been slowly chipping away at it. There's no way on earth she'll ever finish studying Chinese (she began with me, but didn't continue), so German can be our one shared foreign language. The Duolingo course, while certainly not perfect, does the job well, and it's been a million times easier than Chinese.

 

Back around 2012, I went to a local Chinese school and tried taking lessons there. My old high school friend studied Chinese, and I thought he was the coolest person ever. Chinese felt so exotic, fun, and challenging to me. As an American who grew up with tons and tons of Chinese-manufactured goods, I would see a lot of multi-lingual instruction manuals with those cool-looking Chinese characters in them. Those characters seemed to be saying, "You'll never be able to read us!" It's just a wall of impenetrable mystery, and learning to "crack the code" was almost a form of exploration. The language has so many speakers, and there are so many of them in my own country. So I thought, "Why not Chinese?" The Chinese school gave me a very warm reception and paired me up with a foreign exchange student from China (Inner Mongolia). For whatever reason, we didn't hit it off well. She said, "Why do you want to learn Chinese?" When I didn't give an answer that satisfied her, she gave me an intense, skeptical glare and heaved a deep sigh. That set the tone for the 2-4 brief weeks I spent with her. Her feedback was often quite blunt and visibly annoyed. During that period of my life, I had busied myself past the breaking point, and I got overwhelmed. Chinese study was the first thing to go. I wrote a brief email to the school that said I was quitting, and, per the agreement, they could keep all my tuition money. I imagined them on the receiving end of my email, thinking, "Oh, yes....yet another quitter! Same old story." At the time, I thought my failure was due to my overly busy schedule and my lack of motivation to continue in Chinese. But in retrospect, I think it's also because I wasn't compatible with my teacher, at all.

 

A few years later (around 2016), I met and married my wife, and we taught English as a Second Language to visiting Chinese scholars. It was just an awesome experience, and even though I don't do it anymore, I still keep in touch with a good Chinese friend I met during that time. Of course, these scholars were all extremely intelligent, interesting people. I loved hearing all the Mandarin background chatter as they spoke among themselves. I got an invitation to my first hot pot gathering, which was a communal eating experience that far surpassed anything I had known from my upbringing in American culture. My appetite for learning Chinese was awakened once again. I thought, "I always wanted to learn Chinese, didn't I? Well, why don't I just do it?"

 

In Fall 2016, my wife and I audited a university course, taught by mutual friend who emigrated to the US from China around 15 years ago. She was the most extroverted person I had ever known--really encouraging, and filled with infinite energy. On maybe our second class, she gave us a sheet of paper with some stock Chinese phrases and took us to the local Chinese grocery store to try using those phrases with strangers. I was completely mortified, but I guess it's an experience I'll never forget. Unfortunately, the class still had its own downsides. It only moved at the pace of the slowest student (who wasn't studying or doing his homework). I was introduced to the basics, like stroke order, tones, the first 200 or so words, etc. But not a whole lot of content. I didn't apply myself too diligently, and I continued to focus my attention on Latin and other ancient languages outside of class time. My wife and I sailed through two semesters and then stopped the following summer.

That summer, I was beginning to realize that my latest effort was failing again. Did I really want to learn Chinese, or did I just think I wanted to? How many languages am I going to start and then not finish? What do I want to do with my life, anyway? At any rate, yes, I DO want to learn Chinese. So I need to make it happen. I took the old class textbook, made flashcards for 300-500 words, and started cramming through them. Then I discovered Mandarin Companion graded readers and got hooked on them. Then I bought a ton of other graded readers. Then I turned to native content. Since then, I haven't turned back!

[TaxiAsh]

On 2/11/2022 at 6:08 PM, Woodford said:

Then I discovered Mandarin Companion graded readers and got hooked on them. Then I bought a ton of other graded readers.

Great story!

 

I wanted to ask you... I discovered these Mandarin companion books, I just finished my first one, and bought 3 more now to work on next. What other ones did you find?

I finished Journey to centre of earth, bought Great Expectations 1+2 and Jekyll and Hyde. I find these excellent for reading. But all the other ones I can find are the levels below, and I can just about manage these ones at the level 3. 

[Woodford]

On 2/11/2022 at 1:45 PM, TaxiAsh said:

What other ones did you find?

The series I used a lot were Chinese Breeze, Sinolingua's Graded Chinese Readers, and Rainbow Bridge. I ordered them all from this store (my experience as a customer was quite good, and the books shipped from Hong Kong to the US): https://www.purpleculture.net/reading-materials-c-1_101/

There might be a better place to look, or better graded reader series. But for me, that was a huge find.

[alantin]

@TaxiAsh, pleco has a bunch of graded readers of various levels as a plugin too.

[TaxiAsh]

On 2/11/2022 at 7:56 PM, Woodford said:

The series I used a lot were Chinese Breeze

Wow, thanks! They are available on Amazon! That's me sorted for a year! haha

 

Do you find the level grading system similar to Mandarin companion? If so I will look at level 3 again.

 

To keep on topic, my post in here was a little further up, from March 2020 when I had my Easy Peasy chinese book, which is  just numbers and a few phrases.

 Now I love learning, and made so many friends in China along the way. It's the most interesting thing I've ever learned! I wish I had found it earlier.