I'm sorry, I don't speak Mandarin!

I’ve been here 10 weeks now and I am still struggling pathetically with learning the language. I have learnt simple vocabulary and phrases such as; colours, some animals, basic food, greetings, numbers 1 – 100, days of the week and months.

Learning is going very slow.

I’m bilingual in Welsh and English and I am told this is meant to make learning other languages easier. I learnt Italian in University. It was difficult but easy at the same time. There were a lot of grammar rules to learn but a lot of the vocabulary was fairly similar to English. You can make educated guesses if you don’t know the exact meaning. Although I am not fluent in Italian, I can say I progressed a lot in four years of learning the language.

With Mandarin, I can’t make educated guesses, I can’t try to follow a conversation and I can’t even read menus or signs on the street because they use a completely different writing system. Even if I said a word in a slightly different tone, I could completely change the meaning of the word and possibly insult someone. When you speak Mandarin, you have to be so careful to say the right word in the right way! There are four main different tones! I can’t even begin to tell you how different Mandarin is to English.

When I was in Italy, I had friends studying there who didn’t speak any Italian. I always wondered how they coped and how they survived. Yet, here I am, in exactly the same situation as they were, except even less people speak English here!

People tell me I’m so brave to be here on my own at a young age and not know much of the language. I just think I’m crazy!

Most of the foreigners here have been here for over two years and so their Mandarin is good! At the moment, I don’t plan to be here longer than a year so it will be interesting to see how much I learn in one year. From the ways things are going at the moment, it seems I won’t learn too much. I won’t become fluent, let’s put it that way!

Despite this, I am learning an awful lot about Chinese culture.

When I’m on a bus, waiting for a bus or walking in the street, random strangers always talk to me!! I always look at them with a blank look on my face but they keep talking! So I say in Mandarin, ‘I don’t understand. I don’t speak Chinese.’ Then they progress to talk to me! They talk and talk and talk. So I put on my best fake smile and say in Mandarin, ‘yes’ every now and then to make it even more obvious that I don’t understand. They keep on talking!

Once I turned away from two old ladies who were talking to me to see if my bus was coming and they gave me a slap on my arm to make sure I was still paying attention…even though it was obvious I did not understand a word!!

If any of the locals would talk about me in front of me, I wouldn’t know! This did make me a bit nervous at the beginning, but now I don’t really care!

The language barrier is still a difficulty and it always will be but I will keep trying to learn Mandarin!

Despite the difficulty of learning Mandarin, I will not give up!! If I did learn Mandarin, I would have the most random but most interesting knowledge of languages; Welsh, English, Italian and Mandarin!

China is continually growing and becoming more and more powerful in world affairs. If I even had a little knowledge of Mandarin, I feel that this could impress future employers and make it easier to understand and communicate with Chinese people in the future. I would feel that I have accomplished another skill and I would be proud of my self. Time will tell if I succeed in speaking Mandarin!