"To know you very happy": Adventures in learning Mandarin.

“Writing cannot express all words, words cannot encompass all ideas.”

— Confucius

Life on a student budget these days means I’m not getting out and about as much as I normally would.

“Where are you going next?” people often ask, or maybe, “When’s the next trip planned for?” I know these are natural questions to ask someone studying travel writing, but they always cause a slight swell of panic in me when I realize I haven’t actually got any travels planned for the next….well, let’s just say a while, yeah?

To help keep the wanderlust somewhat sated, I’ve been looking for different things to get involved in, to sort of trick my brain into thinking it’s somewhere new. A mental mirage, perhaps?

The university I work for has a traditional Chinese medicine department that has recently started running various short courses for staff members. They offer everything from Chinese folk dance to self-massage to Taijiquan, which I hear is a type of martial arts. What caught my eye, however, was Survival Chinese, a 4-week introduction to Mandarin offered for a mere twenty pounds. The time and cost commitments were just right to fit both my schedule and budget.

From the first five minutes of the first class, I knew I’d made the right choice. When I think about it now, it’s fairly impressive how much our instructor managed to squeeze into an hour and a half–we covered pinyin, the system of transcribing Chinese characters invented by Zhou Youguang in the 1950s; the “four tones,” which include level, rising, falling-rising, and falling; and enough basic phrases to ensure I can charm my way into any Chinese heart.

One of the first phrases we learned was “nice to meet you.” There were only three of us in the class, so we got a lot of individual attention. The instructor would go down our row and put us all on the spot. “Rén shi nǐ hěn gāo xîng,” she had us repeat after her until we all got it. I loved the inflection of the phrase, learning how to skip up and down across the words like a stone over the surface of a pond.

She broke the phrase down, explaining the meaning of each character. Rén shi means ‘to know,’ nǐis ‘you,’ and hěn is very. “Gāo xîng means ‘happy,’” she explained. “Many times in Chinese two words will mean one thing. Sometimes one word is not enough.”

It was all I could do to stay focused on getting my tones right as I immediately thought of a post I wrote last year just after my return from French Polynesia. It’s called called Found in Translation and is about the beauty of literal translations from one language to another and how their definitions can actually create more meaning, rather than let understanding fall through the cracks. Our instructor’s off-handed remark only confirmed my belief in the power of translation.

I was reminded as well of an article I’d read last October in RECCE: Literary Journeys for the Discerning Traveler, a fantastic travel e-mag edited by the acclaimed Don George. The spotlight of that issue’s Brilliant Books section was on writer and researcher Deborah Fallows and her latest book, Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language.

I’d loved reading about her adventures in China at the time, but naturally, it meant a little more this time around given my own new forays into the language. In the book’s introduction, Fallows writes:

“As I tried to to learn to speak Mandarin, I also learned about how the language works–its words, its sounds, its grammar and its history. I often found a connection between some point of the language–a particular word or the use of a phrase, for example–and how that point could elucidate something very “Chinese” I would encounter in my everyday life in China. The language helped me understand what I saw on the streets or on our travels around the country–how people made their livings, their habits, their behavior toward each other, how they dealt with adversity, and how they celebrated.”

It was this extra layer of understanding that comes with learning a foreign language that got me excited again in a drab London classroom one cold February evening. To struggle over new sounds, to learn new meanings, that is what I live for–no matter if I’m at home or on the road.

As a Czech proverb reads: