Hindustan Times
Back to school in Beijing
My first teacher in Beijing made me repeat ‘jerk’ and ‘church’ several times until I could growl the Mandarin Rrrr. After a gap, I’m now back to school where a 26-year-old Song laoshi (Teacher Song) stares at me wide-eyed and orders: angry, I want more angry!’
The petite woman’s attempt to look fierce so I get the pitch of the fourth Mandarin tone right (like in the final tone of the word angry) looks so funny that I laugh.
There’s nothing predictable about learning Chinese in China. The only thing I’ve found amusingly in common is a line that was a standard joke about visiting Pune homes at meal times. “Ni che fan le ma? (have you eaten?)” the Chinese might ask soon after an introduction.
On November 1, a bone-chilling Beijing winter arrived on its earliest date in 22 years, and the central heating of my apartment promptly broke down. Faced with the prospect that I might sleep through entire sub-zero mornings, I enrolled in morning Mandarin classes.
Basic Mandarin is easy. You can eat up entire prepositions and articles. For example, ‘you wait taxi’? But there’s a chance of hitting a plateau unless you have an excellent teacher. You may ask a teacher how to structure the Mandarin equivalent of long and complex English sentences that the teacher may not understand unless you repeat several times in different ways. The option to plodding through private tutoring is a university degree that costs thousands of dollars or private classes that put you through a six-hour daily grind for four months.
My second-level classes are in a high-rise where three companies advertise free trial lessons! Private tutors! I went for the cheapest course of 80 RMB (Rs 560) per hour with the option to pay monthly fees.
Its competitor demanded 120 RMB (Rs 840) per hour but the ‘English-speaking’ course consultant on the phone couldn’t write down my surname. She stuck on the letters P and T, and insisted they were B and D (who doesn’t get T for Tokyo?) till I hung up with my mind made up.
Another company expected an extra registration fee, plus 100 RMB (Rs 700) per hour plus down payment for 50 hours (Rs 35,000). I could have bought a ticket to Mumbai in that down payment to rewire my brain to practise the opposite of English. Think fall-snow (xia xue) fall-rain (xia yu)…
Finally on a foggy Saturday that warned of another snowy day lurking ahead, I met Teacher Song. As is the unwritten social custom in China, we spent 10 minutes on autopilot praising our outfits, guessing each other’s ages wrong and comparing our winter jackets while she tutored me on fashion at the local zoo market. All this was very nice, except that there’s a 10-minute compulsory break — so I actually crammed Chinese for only 50 minutes. Or less.
The shoptalk made her ask me the name of the Indian currency.
“Rupee,’’ I said.
“Ruby?’’ she asked.
“P for pen,’’ I explained.
“Oh, bi for pen,’’ she exclaimed and wrote the Chinese word for pen — bi — on the board. Earlier in the class, when I said ‘time’ she had written ‘dime’ on the whiteboard and stared at me quizzically.
I offered P for Poland, P for Peking University, P for Peking duck to the baffled Teacher with an English major and four years experience teaching English-speaking foreigners. Then I wrote R-u-p-e-e on the board. “Oh, I understand,’’ she said. “Rubee!”
(6 votes, average: 4.83 out of 5)
Loading ...Posted by Reshma Patil on Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Filed under China · Tagged Beijing, Beijing winter, China, Chinese, Mandarin, Peking University
Good writing with a little drama. I’m impressed with your motivation and ability for learning Chinese. You have described an interesting linguistic fact.
When the Chinese, Americans and so on pronounce P and T, they let out more air. The Indians let out less air. The South Americans’ P when they speak Spanish and the Japanese’s P when they speak Japanese sound similar to Indians’ P.
So people in some countries pronounce soft sounding P and T and other hard sounding ones. I have lived in US for 20+ years. The hard P and T still sound like B and D to my ears. I have also tried to pronounce the hard P and T but sound B and D came out of my mouth.
The Chinese cannot compare with the native English speakers in understanding spoken English. When Americans miss a sound or a word, they can guess it from the entire sentence. Like you were talking about “time” not “dime”. But a missed syllable can throw off the Chinese.
Keep warm!
[Reply]
Reshma Reply:
November 9th, 2009 at 9:25 am
very interesting, thanks for writing in…
[Reply]
P for Pudong, D for Dalian and T for Tianjin.
Localise, localise, localise!!
[Reply]
Reshma Reply:
November 9th, 2009 at 9:24 am
Thanks for the tip!
[Reply]
Hen hao!
I think the fun in learning Chinese begins with understanding of this confusion in pronunciation of English letters. What we consider as English is generally the Pinyin. [Pinyin is used for romanization of Mandarin. Computer keyboards and mobile phone keypads use pinyin to convert roman keys into Mandarin character.]
This common experience of ‘p’ & ‘b’ , ‘t’ & ‘d’ could be due to the difference in Pinyin and English for pronunciation of the same letters. Not sure why English was not directly used rather than developing another system of pinyin. This would have made us write & pronounce ‘Wuxi’ as ‘Wushi’ , ‘HongQiao’ as ‘HungChiao’, ‘Pudong’ as ‘ Phutung’, ‘Dalian’ as ‘ Talian’, ‘Tianjin’ as ‘ Thianjin’.
[Reply]
Lovely piece Patil
[Reply]
Dont u think these guys r crazy to still communicate in pics ..isnt it what their characters are .. to write house — draw one ..phew
[Reply]