I’d like to say “never take language for granted”, but unless you live your life an uncertain, dithering gratitude seeker in every available moment, you will go about your daily life without thinking about an alternative you in a universe in which you lack one of the basic necessities of functioning in a society. However, the ability to walk through the street, go into a shop, sort out daily admin tasks or strike up a conversation with a stranger is an underrated power that is sapped away in another country and replaced by the familiar feeling of embarrassment and awkwardly smiling as foreign sounds spurt out in your general direction.
Chinese is a difficult language. No alphabet, thousands of seemingly impenetrable symbols and each word is pronounced with one of four tones. Confusing the right word with the wrong tone can be the difference between grass and fuck.
I came to China with very little in way of predisposition or background knowledge. In fact I took the questionable move of moving to a city on the other side of the world that I’d never heard of. It took some time to align myself with the baffling tower of babble that the country is. China is enormous. Almost ungraspable from the diminutive rock that the UK is. You can fly on a plane for about 5 hours and still be in China. Do the same from Heathrow and you’ll soar over most of Europe.
The UK is very old, filled to the brim with the bones of dead souls and chunks of languages. The Anglo Saxon tones that flow out of the jowls of Geordies, the stiff grumbles of a Yorkshireman right down to the West country clucks all invoke the legacy of a nation which has chewed up tongues from half the globe and patched them into a language that differs drastically between very short distances. Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield are within miles of one another and yet the native accents vary so wildly. The UK is a linguistic melting pot that manages to all be considered English in spite of the phonetic divisions and still it grows.
I’ve met lots of Americans here, and it got me thinking. Accents really don’t vary a great deal there, and if they do, it’s usually a result of something external like immigration. The US is an enormous country, yet a very young one. Big and young in contrast to the UK’s small and old. The timeline of the development of American English simply cannot contend with the thousands of years that the language of the British Isles has bubbled away for.
What happens if you were to combine the characteristics of these two English speaking countries? You end up with China. A country that is both gargantuan and absurdly old. A country where language and geography are deeply linked. I’m not schooled well enough in Chinese history to comment on how it impacts Chinese tongues, but a vague knowing that the country went through long periods of unification and fragmentation adds to the feel that Mandarin Chinese is more like a title given to a language that not many people actually speak.
Whilst busying myself with apps and books to desperately survive taxi driver small talk, I came upon a realisation. The aggressive Sichuan dialect that every Chongqing local spoke made a mockery of the language I was trying to learn. The accent was harsh, they used words all the time that would be impossible to grasp even for other Chinese people (many of them swear words) and my version of Chinese barely registered with their ears.
After four years, my Chinese is passable. Nothing special but enough to get me through a day. Throw me in a hospital or an immigration office on my own and I’ll become a 26 year old lost child, but I’ve managed to develop to the point that I can hold my own in a restaurant, bar, or enough to sustain banter with my students.
As much as I hide behind that damned dialect, my lack of discipline is what held me back from being a bilingual marvel. Chinese is fascinating to learn, and slowly unlocking new levels of the world around you through familiarising yourself with characters and phrases is an incredibly rewarding and addictive experience. It’s also time and energy consuming and riddled with frustrations. I still crack out the books at semi regular intervals, I’m a way off from where I would like to be but I have certainly been humbled by my frequent meetings with Embarrassment and developed a heightened sensitivity to body language from desperate experiences of attempting to extract meaning from opaque walls of words.
The most important thing is that my Chinese is good enough to recognise when students are swearing or talking about me when they think they can get away with it. And that feels like a superpower.
