Nǐhǎo! It’s been a few days since I last posted, and I have learned so much. I’ll try to pick up where I left off, and share some of the most interesting things I’ve learned so far:
I arrived in Zhuhai on Saturday night, and didn’t get too much time to settle in before my classes started in full swing. Since I am only here for three weeks and will be getting the equivalent of three full course credits, I knew my days would be busy but I did not expect them to be as busy as they really are. The three course I am taking are called: Chinese Language and Literature, Chinese Characters and Culture and Contemporary Chinese Culture. The first two courses are designed to be done in a class room, while the Contemporary Culture course involves guest lectures and field trips. My days start at 8:00 am and go until 6:00 or 9:00 at night, depending on the day. It seems like a really long time to be in class, but I am finding that all of the information is very interesting, so it doesn't seem quite as long.
In my Literature class, we are looking at the history of writing in China and the way that the writing system has preserved so much about China's history. One of the really neat things (in my opinion) is the way that the Chinese have named their cities. The place names are really logical, for example Beijing: "Bei" means "north" and "jing" means "capital" so Beijing in the capital in the north. Zhuhai the same "zhu" means "pearl" or "coat" and "hai" means "ocean" so Zhuhai is like the pearl from the ocean.
My favourite course is definitely Chinese Characters and Culture. It's being taught by one of the BNUZ professors and is not so much about learning to read specific characters as it is learning the history and background of where and how China's writing system developed. For someone like me, learning to read is really hard because Chinese characters each represent different words. So you need to actually know how to speak before you can learn how to read. What's interesting for me is that since the characters are representative of words, I can understand the meaning of them from English. For example, I can know that the symbol 中 means "middle" but I may not know to pronounce this word in Mandarin.
We have spent this week looking at the way the original Chinese characters were designed and how they have transformed over the centuries. Today we had a special presenter come into our class to teach us calligraphy! We were all given a brush and an ink pot and learned how to write the basic strokes, and some basic characters.
None of my classes are focused directly on learning how to speak Mandarin, so I have been working with Katherine and some of the other students from Canada to learn some basic phrases. Mandarin, and many other Asian languages developed a secondary writing system called Pinyin, which is a phonetic transcription of the word. For example, the word 你好 means "hello" and is written in Pinyin as "nǐhǎo." This has made it really easy for me to pick up on how to pronounce certain words. Here are some of the phrases I know:
nǐ hui shuō yīngyǔ ma? -> do you speak English
xièxie -> thank you (the x represents a "sh" sound)
qǐng -> please (q is a "ch" sound)
zǎochén hǎo -> good morning
I can also count to ten: yi, er, san, is, wu, liu, qi, ba jiu, shi!
One of the toughest things about learning Mandarin is the fact that it is a tonal language and English is not. Mandarin has four tones: rising, falling, falling-rising and neutral, and the problem I'm having is that I can't really hear the difference. I guess since I never had to worry about contrasting tones, there's no reason I ever needed to learn to distinguish between them. So this means that the word "ma" has four different meanings depending on which tone is used, so it's hard for me to always make sure I'm saying the right word.
It's been really eye-opening to go to a place where I understand absolutely nothing and can read absolutely none of the words. When I've travelled in the past, I've been able to recognize words or at least sound them out and make some sense of them. But here, I don't think I could even order a coffee without using some English words or pointing to the menu. And there's no way I could read a menu without pictures! Being here so far has made me realize how much I really don't know but it's pushing me to learn as much as I can while I am here.
Today was my first day off, and we spent it going to Gongbei! I will post some pictures about that soon. Thanks for reding!! :)
