Here’s more oddities of the Chinese language as heard by the ears of a Westerner. By the way, I get questions about why I use the term “Westerner” as opposed to “American”. The reason is that you hear that term so much more often here in China than “British”, “American”, “Dutch”, “German”, etc. We all look the same anyway, at least to the Chinese. Also, once you begin learning a tonal language like Mandarin, you might as well use a much broader group like “Westerner” or “Speaker of an Indo-European” language since that’s much more inclusive than “English Speaker”. I suspect just about all Indo-European language speakers will have the same difficulties with Mandarin. The number one, of course, for oral Mandarin is…the tones! Here’s a quick review: Chinese has four tones (there’s a 5th neutral, but it doesn’t really count):

1) A high even tone (tone 1)
2) A tone that starts low and rises high (tone 2)
3) A tone that starts medium, dips down, then returns to the medium tone (tone 3)
4) A quick tone that starts high and moves forcefully down to a low tone (tone 4)

You can hear a cupla examples on this weird website (you mouse over rows in the table).

One of my favorite examples:

1) Yu (tone 1) – Means “mud”
2) Yu (tone 2) – Means “fish”
3) Yu (tone 3) – Means “rain”
4) Yu (tone 4) – Means “jade”

See, this all really does makes sense; it’s like music. A “C” two octaves above an “A” sounds a lot different, right? Following non-tonal language rules (like English), you’d say that they sounded the same because the notes both lasted one second long and were played on a piano. You wouldn’t say they were different until they were really different, like when played on different instruments.

So the key is to be able to think of the word “fish” not as “Yu”, but as “Yu” at a certain pitch and inflection. We English speakers are hardwired to not count the pitch and inflection as part of what determines the uniqueness of the word. So, we have to do our best to unlearn this, hence all the difficulties.

Here’s an example that happened just yesterday. I was listening to colleagues talk (I get lots of practice with this) and was able to recognize the word “Li Zhi”, which in the Western world is pronounced “Lee-chee” (because we generally can’t say “Zhi”). So, I immediately thought, “Oh they’re talking about the Lychee fruit.” Afterwards, I asked and got a bit of a laugh. “No, we were talking about someone quitting work!”

Oh.

See, “Li Zhi”, the fruit, is “Li (tone 4) Zhi (tone 1)”. “To quit work” is “Li (tone 2), Zhi (tone 2)”. So, I started explaining about how to a Westerner’s ear, those sound almost identical, especially when spoken fast. Two of my colleagues immediately suggested that as I learn new vocabulary, I should also learn the character as well, because the character will help you remember the word. I didn’t really see that logic and learning the characters is another battle probably worse than the tones to fight. But, I took that under advisement.

Later on that day, I asked someone else the difference in the two, and they too suggested that I learn the character. So, as a test, I challenged, “OK, why don’t you draw me the characters for Li4 Zhi1 and I’ll see how easy it is to remember based on that.” Here are the characters for the fruit Lychee:

荔栉

So, of course my response was, “How is that supposed to look like fruit???” The answer was quite telling:

The first character represents the berries of the Lychee. See that the first character is composed of three “Li4″ characters at the bottom?

Li4:

力

That’s supposed to look like three berries. “Li4″ by the way, means “strength”. I don’t get the connection between strength and berries though. The next character has another primary character appearing on the left side, the character “Mu4″ which means “Wood”. In this case, “Zhi1″ means “Branch”. Pretty neat, eh?

Mu4:

木

Now, the dirty little secret is that once you’re fluent in Chinese, tones don’t really matter because it’s the context of a sentence that determines what a word means. When you’re speaking your Chinese at 100mph, you don’t really put in all the different tones perfectly; you let the context do the work for you. So, imagine this sentence:

“Oh, guess what. Our colleague, Bill, quit work today. He went to work at QQ.”

No native speaker will think:

“Oh, guess what. Our colleague, Bill, lychee fruit today. He went to work at QQ.”

So, that’s another insidious reason that the learning curve for Mandarin is so steep. You have to pay attention to tones early on because you don’t know enough words to establish a context!   不好！