(Actually) Now is the time to learn Chinese ...
Bored with the 20th CCP Congress ? Sick of hearing about Xi Jin Ping and negative news ?.. can't get a visa or too scared to go to China anyway ? NUP ! Now IS THE TIME to learn Chinese (properly).
Why learn Chinese now ?
Mainly because it’s easier than ever before! But I’ll get to that in a minute…
please make an effort to know the Chinese perspective. To start with, study Mandarin.
On November 20, 2019 “The Australian” published inflammatory article by Wang Xining (previous Charge d’affaires at the embassy of China), which ended with the above statement. The ideas expressed in the article expose how out of touch Wang was, and how isolated he was from Australians and anything other than the CCP bubble.
I was outraged. Decades earlier I had put substantial effort into learning Chinese. I could communicate verbally quite well. I had travelled back and forth to China over many years. And in the previous few years I had noticed the level of hostility rising, and would hear almost the same words used to express various political sentiments, in conversations with different people thousands of kilometres away from each other, but subject to the same education, media, movies and social media management.
Their opinions and beliefs were clearly centrally managed, and the tool to understand this, was Chinese language skills.
I began the process of improving my reading skills and upgrading my overall Chinese language skills.
Once I started trying to read what Chinese people read, watch what they watch, a sickening wave of understanding came over me. I had used spoken communication skills to do business and make money, but I had not achieved the language competence required to understand Chinese at a level where I could regularly read their news, watch their movies and TV shows. So I could not talk about issues with Chinese people, knowing where their ideas were coming from.
The cost is that when talking to Chinese people I had only a shallow impression of what lies their heads were filled with, what hatreds their hearts had been soaked in, and what was really going on in China.
And it wasn’t just me:
The implication is that most people who live in China for a period, even if they speak conversational Chinese, don’t know the source material for what people’s opinions are formed by. It’s like going to the USA and not watching Fox News or CNN1 and winging it by making conversation. You’d learn something about the USA but you wouldn’t know how peoples views were formed.
This matters if the country is important and the peoples ideas are hostile.
In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king mad.
I could usually guess the gist of news articles. I could mostly communicate at least one on one, face-to-face or by text messages. I had incomplete impressions of what was going on in China. These impressions were often totally at odds with those who cannot speak or read Chinese, who fly in, do business via interpreters and go home, to another country or to the expat bubble. They are deaf, dumb and blind, and they “knew” I was wrong about China:
“Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” - don’t be stupid, everyone knows that means freewheeling capitalism forever !
The turn away from China’s expected direction became evident as early as the early 2000s.
Wang is right, but for the wrong reasons.
If you study Mandarin, you will be fooled less by propaganda, and have a better chance to understand what Chinese people think and why. If we want to counter Chinese influence, we need a large and diverse body of people who have Mandarin language competence, not just rely on recent migrants from China and hope for the best.
One Day, Things Will Change:
We don’t know when, but at some point, maybe through unexpected radical change, or maybe in slow steps, China will be more a part of the world beyond it’s borders and less of being an opponent.
Will we have become so negative that we won’t realise there has been positive change if and when it happens?
Knowing more about China, with language skills as a core tool for this, will be essential to being able to recognise and respond to change.
This is especially the case because it is increasingly hard to visit China, and safely communicate and interact with Chinese people.
Easier Than Ever Before:
There were good reasons not to learn Chinese in the past. The time involved in getting to a decent level was too high to be justified financially, especially considering time spent studying is time not working and getting paid.
The same time spent studying a computer language could get you a job.
If Chinese language skills are required for a job, it’s usually code for “you need to be Chinese to be hired in this job”. So you didn’t bother.
It WAS Just Too Hard:
Back in the olden days, pre - iPhone, studying Chinese presented too many challenges:
Dictionary: It was too hard to look up words without knowing the sound
Fine if you can speak Chinese but need to look up characters
Good dictionaries don’t fit into pockets.
Find that tricky character:
Identify the radical
find the list
count the other strokes
find the character number
flip forward to find the character you were after…
Twenty minutes later, Voila, we found it…
Hard to Memorise:
Memorising Chinese characters by rote, writing on paper is interesting at first, but it soon feels like punishment, like doing schoolyard detention.
Stroke Order:
Getting the stroke order right is critical, apparently.
Some say characters are easy to remember because they look like the thing they represent. Some of us are less imaginative.
Which text ? Back in the day, there was no standard text book, and no clear path from beginning to undefined destinations.
Which Mandarin ? While still the case with older or less educated people, Mandarin was different everywhere. This was due to the influence of the underlying local dialect people spoke at home. You needed to learn the idiosyncrasies of each place eg
Taiwan
你試試看 should be: nǐ shì shì kān, in the class room, but in the street, its nǐ sì sì kān
我不知道 should be: wǒ bù zhī dào, in the street, its wǒ bù zì dào
國語日報 should be: gúo yǔ rì bào, in the classroom, in the street its gúo yǔ zì bào, zhi and ri sounding the same, like zi in the previous example.
Sichuan
胡锦涛吃麻辣火锅 should be hú jǐn tāo chī má là hǔo gūo. But seems like in Sichuan they say: fú jǐn tāo chī má nà hǔo gūo.
Free to air TV had subtitles, but was not pausable. Unlike Netflix or YouTube, you couldn’t stop to look up new words in the dictionary. And in the old days SBS had only the odd Chinese movie from time to time. Now SBS is a nuisance because it has English subtitles that can’t be switched to Chinese.
NOW Stop Complaining and Start Studying
Obvious text choice -HSK:
Now studying Chinese so much easier. You’ve got a unified standard text - the HSK Chinese system which is efficient and starts at the beginning and develops to a high level. It has substantial audio resources and you can bet this will just get better over time with every new iteration.
Propaganda ? Tucked away maybe there is a bit, but LESS than older materials. And if you study written Chinese you are in large part studying propaganda. That’s a big part of why you are studying it.
Forget Paper: You can use your iPad or your phone or your computer. You can highlight the word you don’t know and hear how it’s pronounced, look up its meaning even translate a section of text to make sure you understood it. If you use google translate, it keeps the words you looked up as a handy revision list. The words you needed in conversation are probably more relevant than what’s in your text book.
You can scan a piece of paper with your phone, convert to text and then translate it easily.
Chinese Central News has pages where you have the entire text of what is said below the video - you could read it make sure you understood it and then listen to it and get used to the sound and the correct pronunciation. Or read as they speak.
You can watch a video on YouTube or Netflix or any one of a range of Chinese video apps on your phone like bili bili and listen to it with subtitles to help. With the latest MacOS / iOS you can pause the video, highlight the words you don’t know, and use the translate function.2
Standard Mandarin is now much more widespread. Younger people are speaking and pronouncing more or less the same way. This makes it much easier to learn standard Mandarin in one place and use it elsewhere across China. Just speak mostly to young people when you travel.
To avoid talking in English tell them you are Russian and hate the English language. They might even buy you a beer.
I got this idea from a Russian friend who I thought could not speak English and we always spoke Chinese. Then I met his Chinese girlfriend and she only spoke to him in English especially when her friends were around. In the same situation today they might be speaking Chinese. Or not on speaking terms.
Did you study simplified but want to read traditional? Generally speaking you can just press the button on a newspaper app and change it from simplified to traditional or vice versa.
Character learning apps help in learning correct stroke order and imprint on the brain. The main character learning app I use is “Chinese writer”. It shows me the traditional and simplified version of what I’m trying to learn, and the stroke order. Trace the character with an Apple Pencil on an iPad, or use your finger on your phone.
Voice Dictation: on the one hand it makes it easier to compose an email or text message, on the other hand if the software doesn’t think you got the tones or pronunciation right, maybe a human can’t either. This is somewhat countered by context recognition, but it’s still helpful to isolate blatant pronunciation errors.
Speechling is an app that allows you to dictate from a prompt and then within 24 hours a human grades your response in terms of correct pronunciation including tones. Perhaps they are building up a database to do this better with AI in future..
Less Netflix, More Study (unless it’s a Chinese show):
Now is the time to go back to studying Chinese - and aim for a high level ! - or start from scratch if you are young.
Xi might be closing the door on China, but technology has opened a window. Journalists, academics, business people and ordinary folk should reassess what in the past was legitimately too daunting a task (studying Chinese), and replace Netflix and veg with time spent studying.📚
Or whatever forms opinions in the USA these days….
Translate on video works directly with YouTube videos and videos recorded to apple photos. For many other services, you need to screen record and then watch your recorded version. Netflix prevents recording video, the work around is to screenshot the scene with the words you wanted to translate, and it gives a black page with the text only. Save to photos and then use translate in the photos app to end the confusion. Or just watch Chinese movies on YouTube !