China in Chicago
I’m learning Chinese.
I had my first lesson last night, on the 21st floor of a downtown office building on LaSalle Street, here in Chicago.
The class was filled with people much younger than I am. Considerably younger.
The teacher’s name is Andy. He’s China-born, spent I think he said 18 years in Beijing. He’s been teaching Chinese for twenty years.
Why am I learning, trying to learn, Chinese? Well, I’m 78, soon to be 79 (July 11. Please make a contribution to the Richard Goodman Fund for Sustainable Aging), and I want to keep the brain cells alert. I love languages. Plus, I’ve always wanted to learn a non-Roman language.
Andy packed a lot on the 2 1/4 hours of the class. Here’s some of what I learned.
The Chinese language—here I am making a general pronouncement about the language after a 145-minute exposure to it—is a kind of shorthand when, grammatically speaking, you compare it to English. There are no tenses, for example. At least no past or future tenses. Just now. Chinese can speak of the past or future, but not in the way we do it in English. Oh, and there are no plurals.
I find this refreshing.
Each word, or character, is a single syllable. There are no multi-syllable words in Chinese. No “indefatigable” or “conclusively.” Words are combined with other words to produce multi-syllable phrases. But in Chinese, with perhaps a few exceptions, it’s one word, one syllable.
Chinese more than makes up for that paring down with sounds that are complex and highly disruptive to the mouth and tongue. Andy instructed us on how to say the Chinese letters and what he calls “finals” and “phonetics.” Some of them are daunting. I have simply never placed my mouth and tongue in those positions before.
It’s sort of like taking a yoga class for the first time and being asked to place your body in certain positions it’s never been placed in before. In fact, Chinese is a kind of yoga for the mouth and tongue. As you try, it doesn’t feel like the tongue should be doing these things. In fact, at one point I felt it was pleading me to stop.
Chinese, Andy informed us, is a tonal language. That is, words have tones. The pronunciation can rise, or fall, or rise and fall. For example, the word for “good,” which is hǎo (Substack makes the “ǎ” look a bit weird, for some reason), descends and rises. Thus the ˇ mark above the word to indicate the tone; it’s a kind of singing.
I liked Andy. He was constantly joking. These were sort of Dad jokes, Chinese teaching version. My kind of humor! They were corny, sweet-intentioned and, despite their corniness, effective. That’s because we all need reassurance. At one point, he had us all speak Chinese words and phrases together. They got increasingly difficult to say.
“Great!” he said, after a group effort. We did this again and then again, ending with Wǒ hěn gāoxìng jiàndao nǐ. “I am very glad to meet you.” Difficult! I stumbled. Then Andy paused and closed his eyes.
“I close my eyes, and what do I see?” he asked.
Silence. None of us knew.
“I see a group of Chinese people saying these words!!!!”
He meant us.
All of the class—well, at least me—felt a small surge of pride at this patently false observation. It always amazes me how susceptible we are to outright flattery.
That kind thing keeps me going.
Finally, the class was over. I walked out that evening with the freshness and fullness of mind that comes with learning.
Goodnight, Andy!
Zàijiàn!
Translation: See you soon!
Fabulous!
I find languages fascinating as well. Thanks for sharing, Richard!