Chinese Without Tears

            Last week my American neighbor here told me about a local online grocery service that offers lots of foreign items that we Westerners might crave once in awhile.  She said that prices at “Nogogo” are competitive, and better yet, they’ll deliver free anywhere here in Shenzhen if you spend at least 150 RMB, which is about $23.  Sounds good, I thought, and googled it.  Not only did I find brown rice and cheese, I found a few books:  specifically, a guidebook to the city I’d seen recommended, and then there was Chinese Without Tears – Learn 168 Chinese Characters in One Afternoon.  The title reminds me of those tiny, ridiculous, promise-the-impossible ads at the back of pulpy magazines.  I checked out the blurb for the book.  Hmmmm.  The approach sounded rational.  I was beginning to feel rather desperate to start working on my Chinese, as long as I’m going to be here awhile.  Moreover, the Weigle kids’ mom told me a few months ago that they’d start Chinese language study in school come September, and that they’d be looking forward to sharing this experience with me.  Yikes, recalling that added a little more pressure.  Then I heard that my niece Kate would also start studying Chinese this fall, as she begins her freshman year in college.  Yet another reason to get going!  Since my investigation into language learning here had not turned up any other practical first step, I ordered the book from Nogogo, despite the title.

            Did I learn 168 characters in one afternoon?  No way.  Even if my brain was capable of such a feat, I couldn’t sit still for a whole afternoon focusing on just that.   How about the “without tears” part?  So far, promise delivered.  I’m having fun with it, probably because I haven’t tried to learn more than a few new characters at a time.  I’ve studied only about 45 characters, as it takes lots of focus and repetition to learn not just the strokes of each one, but also the order of the strokes, and then I have to keep reviewing characters already learned.  I haven’t worked on the oral part much at all.

            Spoken Chinese is challenging for most of us Westerners because of its tonal nature.  There are only about 400 different syllables in spoken Chinese, which is about 10% of what we have in English.  So each Chinese syllable could have many meanings, depending on whether the tone is rising, falling, neutral, and so on.  Sometimes even native Chinese speakers get confused because by tone of a particular syllable in a word, and they end up writing out the characters to clarify.  Because I’m a visual learner, it seems a lot easier for me to learn written characters than to make my tones understood.  That doesn’t mean I won’t work on the oral part, but the road in that direction is looking long and bumpy.  This morning Terry walked by while I was practicing pronouncing a particular character, with the help of an online dictionary.  “You sound like a chicken!” he laughed.  I laughed, too, because I really did.

            Our evening meal tonight did not include either brown rice or cheese from Nogogo.  Most of the time I try to use ingredients I get at the little store/market a block away. I fixed a quick supper of dumpling soup, made with leftover veggie soup in the fridge and some frozen dumplings. I happened to look at the package of dumplings and was pleased to note that I recognized several characters, including the ones for water, meat, fire/heat and knife.  I don’t expect to achieve anything approaching proficiency in Chinese, but recognizing even a few characters on a package or a sign at this point gives me another reason to feel hopeful that China will seem less and less foreign as we spend more time here.  That’s a good feeling, one month after our arrival!