Six thousand impossible things before breakfast

6. Six thousand impossible things before breakfast

or
The trouble with Chinese

There is no getting away from it: learning Chinese is a pain-in-the-brain for the average Westerner. Once you've got over the shock of dealing with a tonal language, there is still the little matter of the script, upwards of 2,000 intricate little ideograms, and that's only to read the newspaper. Educated people would know between 5,000 - 7,000. Thousands more characters remain pickled for posterity in ancient literature. Then you get to Shanghai and realize there's something they forgot to tell you: only about 800 million Chinese speak Mandarin, the standard language based on the northern dialect spoken around Beijing, which is what most foreigners learn. In tune with egalitarian times, it has been renamed 普通话, Putonghua, the common language. Ironically, Westerners persist in calling it Mandarin, the language spoken by imperial China's ruling elite. How would the Soviet Union have reacted to hearing the rest of the world refer to Russian as 'the Czar's language,' I wonder ?

That leaves some 90 million speakers of the southern Shanghai and neighbouring dialects, plus more than 70 million Cantonese speakers, unaccounted for. Not considering the many minority languages of over 70 million people who are stricken with PR China citizenship without being ethnic Chinese - Uigur and Hakka and what have you. That's where the script comes in. To promote literacy, the government of the People's Republic made a concerted effort to simplify the traditional characters, and whatever brand of Chinese you speak, the script at least is the same for all (although Hong Kong, Taiwan and many overseas communities still use traditional script, they can of course read the simplified version). Assuming you have mastered all those little ideograms, in theory there is nothing to stop you having a lively correspondence with a one billion-strong readership, even though you might be mutually unintelligible to one another in conversation. So the script, like Putonghua, is a unifying factor.

In the tiresome way of totalitarian states, there is a political agenda tucked away behind this Putonghua business. The powers that be would like to keep the empire great and all in one piece. So they need to promote the idea of a united China where national brotherhood grows on trees. Every little helps, and the claim that all Chinese share a language is handy, even allowing for a few regional dialects. They gloss over the fact that these dialects are in fact distinct language groups. Ideologists can only take so much diversity.

Not that you care - Putonghua is enough of a mouthful for most Westerners. For a start you are well advised to rid yourself of conventional ideas about language. Nothing short of a cultural revolution inside the brain will do. Shed well-worn notions such as verb and noun; forget about irregular plurals; realize that you can do quite well without articles, both definite and indefinite; dispense with the conjugation of verbs and verb tenses. Where other languages groan under the yoke of byzantine grammar and spelling rules, Chinese can be bafflingly simple. It consists of unchangeable one-syllable words which you put together to form new meanings, like a gigantic puzzle. It can be beautifully economical, taking up even less space than English. The difficulties spring up in unexpected places.

German and Russian are generally rated as 'difficult' on account of the grammar and, in Russian, use of verb aspects.You may never master the finer points of written Italian or make fewer than 50 mistakes in a dictée set by the Académie française. You may never learn to pronounce 'röd gröd med flü' in Danish or sing Swedish with the correct intonation. However, once you've acquired the basics, none of these pitfalls will prevent you entirely from communicating with the people. No matter how awful your accent, how garbled your word order, how wrong your cases and use of verb aspects, how mispronounced your words, people can normally still guess what the learner is trying to say. Or you can at least read and look up words in the dictionary. Not so with Chinese.

Rule No 1: get used to dealing with words of one syllable, rather like do-re -mi, and learn to sing. Practice the tones: neutral, level, rising, descending and rising, descending. The rising tone sounds a bit like a question, or expression of surprise; the descending tone emphatic, slightly indignant. Something like: ma - ma? - ma-a? - ma! .

At first this is easy enough because you pronounce each one with careful exaggeration. The trouble starts when you have to link them up in a sentence - well, like the difference between singing one note and singing an entire tune. It can make you sound, and feel, like an ill-tuned piano. Even if you do manage to hit every single key correctly that doesn't necessarily make it a coherent message with a recognizable tune. It gets worse when you have to pick out the words you know in other people's telegraphic everyday speech. A lot of the time it's guesswork and you have to rely on context (although foreigners tend to agree that nine times out of ten it's safe to assume that the conversation is about food). Words of one syllable are of course much harder to recognize, especially when their sole distinguishing feature is the tone. And even that doesn't always work: there may be dozens of ba's, all meaning different things. Too many homophones - soundalikes - by far. Ming, second tone, can mean dark 冥, as it can mean light 明. Only when you see the written character can you tell which one it is, but you can't hear the difference.

Sometimes the syllables don't mean anything, but are just slipped in as particles and modifiers - like the Russian 'li' indicating a question. Fair enough, as long as there are enough other, much longer words in the sentence- say, anti-disestablishmentarianism - to help you figure out what the general drift is. But how are you supposed to tell which ba amid so many others doesn't actually mean anything, so you don't waste time trying to hunt it down in the dictionary (a long job, by the way - you really learn to appreciate the alphabet - any alphabet, even those you write back to front like Arabic and Hebrew).

This is where context and experience come in. You have to have lived through a certain number of situations to learn to expect what people are likely to say - so you start out by learning entire dialogue scenes off by heart. In the shop, the market the restaurant, the taxi, at the ticket counter, the doctor's, on the telephone, asking directions etc. This standard phrase book language will get you relatively far in everyday life, and is guaranteed to impress visiting friends from back home. But that's of course eyewash. Because as soon as the situation, or conversation, deviates from the set pattern, you are lost.

Rule No 2: do away with class distinctions - who needs verbs-nouns-adjectives when each word can take on practically any function, depending on its position in a sentence ? This is why word order is so important - certain syllables in a certain place, combined with certain other syllables, can only mean one (well, to be safe: a limited number of) things. Order word is the mixed up understand even in English if difficult can still you. Well, some of it. In Chinese, not a mumbling word. Tough luck.

Rule No 3: down with tenses - one, provided it is supplemented by 'todays, tomorrows' and yesterdays,and particles for the past and future, is more than enough. Even so, in my conversations with Chinese people I was never quite sure whether something was happening, had happened, would definitely happen or might (have) happen(ed). Mind you, that was the case whether the conversations were conducted in Chinese or English. We were just not used to looking for the same signs in one another's speech, and too inhibited to ask for clarification all the time - especially if something was still not clear after it had been explained. This lent a vagueness and sense of frustration to everyday communication that was at times amusing, at times maddening, especially during business negotiations. Did he just tell me he bought 36 tonnes of apricot kernels, will he buy them, does he think we should buy them, and if so, am I supposed to do anything about it?

But that's only part of the story - the spoken bit. Now for the writing. Need one bother with the written language? It's rather like the difference between snorkeling and scuba diving. Snorkelling is nice but will only get you so far. If you want to penetrate to the depths where all the hidden treasures lie, you need serious equipment. Only then can the language be properly imprinted on your brain, with indelible ink as it were, as opposed to using a cheap photocopying process that will fade with time. And you will be able to tell the difference between darkness 冥and light 明 beyond a shadow of a doubt, so to speak.

Rule No 4: abandon the bourgeois idea that letters or characters must represent certain sounds, and that you have to combine them in order to make up words. The way a character is written provides no clue as to its pronunciation or meaning. No obvious clue, that is - contrary to popular prejudice, the majority of Chinese characters do have a phonetic, as well as a semantic, component. It's just not very precise and takes a while to figure out.

Rule No 5: the devil is in the detail. Even though the script has been reformed so you wouldn't have to devote a lifetime to learning to write your own name, most recently by Mao Zedong, Chinese characters remain rather more complex, that is composed of many more strokes, than the average Latin letter. Each character is divided into root and main part, and you have to know which is which. Failing an alphabet, the Chinese side of the dictionary is organized by root. For the common or garden user of Chinese, there are 189 roots, composed of between one and some twenty strokes. To this, you add the main character, again organized by number of strokes, ranging from the basic one-stroke to the super deluxe twenty-something stroke model with bells and whistles. In penning the strokes you have to observe very exact rules - from top to bottom, left to right and so forth. In using Latin letters, people tend to develop their own way of writing pretty soon - after primary school, nobody cares much in which order you cross your t's and dot your i's, unless calligraphy is your hobby. Managing so few strokes doesn't require the same rigorous discipline as organizing the teeming masses - conceivably what Chinese governments have felt when asked their opinion of Western-style democracy. Belonging to the league of dyspraxic people who can never predict what their next 'e' is going to look like, I found the art of writing Chinese excessively hard going.

Other users of tonal languages, such as the Vietnamese, have romanized their script. The first Western visitors, often missionaries and scholars, tried to do the same with Chinese - capturing what they thought they heard and rendering it in their own languages, English, French, German, Portuguese, what have you. This accounts for the different spellings of many place names and names of people floating around in the West. Until the Chinese, possibly getting rather irritated by the patronizing ways of the foreign devils, decided to come up with their own standardized Roman version, pinyin, which has become the most widely used form of transliteration. It is very handy in that it enables you to find your way around at least one part of the dictionary, and cities where street names are mercifully also given in pinyin. It requires a few minor adjustments from the Western reader. For example, the letter 'q' is pronounced something like 't-ch' and 'j' becomes 't-s' ; 'p' and 't' have mostly been replaced with 'b' and 'd' - Beijing and Qingdao have thus erased memories of a shameful colonial past when any old foreigner could come along and call these proud cities names like Peking and Tsingtow. Tao and Taoism should rightly be pronounced Dao and Daoism - somehow harder for the eye to get used to. The Dao of Booh ? Sounds like a different Pooh of bears altogether.

To sum up: just think about the comparative difficulty of learning a new word in Chinese and, say, German or English, before even venturing as far as grammar and other complex considerations. In German and English you have to memorise pronunciation, meaning and spelling. In German you have to come to terms with a peculiar type of gender-bending whereby 'girl' is neuter and 'turnip' is feminine, an example famously cited by Mark Twain in his legendary speech on "The Awful German Language", but the pronunciation is fairly predictable. If your pronunciation and spelling are slightly off you will still be understood, in either language. Or at least you won't be at a much greater disadvantage than a delicately nurtured English rose from the home counties encountering a fellow English speaker from the wilds of Newcastle on Tyne. And since English and German use the same alphabet you can make your own deductions. Once you have mastered the word 'read' it won't take you long to figure out that it must be related to 'reader'. Nor do you need a dairy degree to churn your way from English butter to its German equivalent. In Chinese, with every new word you have to memorize pronunciation, tone, ideograph and meaning. And you have to get all of them right to be understood. Rather than making hundreds of words out of 24 relatively simple letters, you need to learn hundreds of intricate characters to have the same number of words at your disposal. Matters aren't helped by the fact that many of those words sound identical. There is no way you can guess your way through the language the way you can with Latin-based languages, for example. It all has to be learnt from scratch, every word is back to square one - at least to begin with. Of course, like any skill it gets easier with practice as you learn to discern the recurrent ingredients that go into the making of a character - but you do need rather a lot of determination and staying power. A character-building experience in every sense of the word ......

This is just the merest fleeting glimpse of the pitfalls inherent in learning Chinese; there are many more. But don't be discouraged ! Increasing numbers of foreigners are managing to acquire the language as opportunities for travel, study and exchange have grown exponentially since the 1980s - but it's just as well to start early and not to have too many distractions going on at the same time. Like trying to figure out how to reconcile the conflicting needs of Chinese corporations trying to sell striped silk hankies and irate Italian customers bent on blowing their noses with dotted ones; and variously coaxing and threatening the authorities of Shanghai's notoriously congested port to bundle your shipment off to Europe before fashion starts favouring paper tissues. As was to be my brief.

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