Tsinghua

Learning Chinese is a huge challenge, like learning any language. However, if you are a native English-speaker there is a good chance that Chinese is   NOT like any language you have learned before. It is entirely different from European languages; the differences can be welcome and they can be terrifyingly confusing. But they are all interesting (or so you will think until you become sick of them). No words need to be conjugated. So you don’t need to remember any grammatical tables or verb endings. Nouns do not have genders. Sometimes the grammar can seem (and be) very simple. Lovely.

In learning Chinese you will experience periods of very rapid learning followed by long stretches where you don’t feel you are learning anything new. But if you persevere, it is well worth it. The following are just a few thoughts on various aspects of the language.

Chinese Characters

Chinese characters appear incredibly challenging. They are. There are perhaps as many as 40 000. However, for general fluency 6-8000 should be fine. They say you need 2000 to read a newspaper. This is true if you want to read it very slowly and without understanding all the specifics of a story. BUT the characters are very interesting and reveal a lot about Chinese culture (particularly its ancient culture) – the evolution of many of them can be traced back over 3000 years. They also provide a common written language for China’s hundreds of dialects. If you want to develop a good understanding of Chinese, they are essential.

When you start learning Chinese, it is a good idea to learn the radicals, which are small components of characters. These carry meaning and/or indicate something about how  to pronounce the character. I didn’t really learn about this until I took a course on characters at BLCU. It helped enormously and makes it much, much easier to guess characters you don’t know and to learn new characters quickly.

One of the best ways I found early-on was to use flashcards to learn characters. Two good computer programmes are Byki, which lets you create your own cards, and remembr.it, a website-based programme which you use every day and which tests you regularly. remembr.it is more effective unless you have very good self-discipline. Both cost around £20-40 for the full version.

However, flashcards are only helpful up to a point – once you have reached a reasonable level of Chinese they may cease to be useful. I stopped using them last term, and have since found it much more effective to uses Chinese-Chinese dictionaries (particularly dictionaries of usage –  BCLU Press has a good one). However, in the early stages flashcards can be extremely helpful in terms of allowing you to memorize new words relatively quickly. I find they are still good for learning individual characters, but they are not particularly good in terms of providing contextual information.

Pinyin

Pinyin literally refers to any form of phonetic writing, including the Latin alphabet. Usually, though, it is used to refer to Hanyu Pinyin, which is the accepted form of Romanization used in mainland China. It is one of the first things you will learn when studying Chinese, and is quite easy to pick up. However, there are some sounds which in English are difficult to differentiate (such as ‘z’ and ‘c’ in pinyin). Chinese, unlike English, has a limited range of possible syllables. This means that many words sound the same – often they will have different tones, but not always. However, the written words (in character form) are different – characters are units of meaning (hence there are so many), and it is perfectly possible to learn either written or spoken Chinese without knowing anything about the other.

Tones

Chinese has four tones, plus a neutral tone which varies depending on which of the other tones it follows. The tone of a word is often vital in determining its meaning. This is a nightmare for learners who speak non-tonal languages, and there is no easy way to deal with it. You must just remember and concentrate on each word. This is much more difficult than it sounds – in English, we change our tone all the time depending on the mood we are trying to convey. You will naturally do this when you speak Chinese. BUT if you do this when you speak Chinese, you change the tone of each word and change the meaning, often rendering your words unintelligible. Unfortunately I have no good advice on how to deal with this, other than to make Chinese friends who are happy to correct you constantly.

Words

It may sound odd, but Chinese does not have words in the same way that English does. This is primarily because each character (and syllable) is an independent unit of meaning. Often, creating a word involves simply combining two or sometimes three. However, they are not always combined, and when they are they can be put together in all kinds of combinations, rather like Lego. Moreover, longer phrases are often abbreviated simply by removing characters/syllables – Beijing Yuyan Daxue/北京语言大学 (BLCU), for example, becomes Beiyu/北语, which if read literally means ‘northern language’. Chinese also has particles, which are characters/syllables with no intrinsic meaning but which change the entire sentence. Ba/吧, for example, turns a sentence into a suggestion. Ma/吗 turns it into a question. Le/liao/了 is nightmarishly complicated, usually indicating the completion of an action. However, it can be used in many different ways to indicate subtle differences in time and so forth, and often seems to be used differently in each sentence.

The above four aspects are probably those which, at the start, will seem the most alien and most difficult. However, I have found that as one progresses and becomes used to them, whilst they can remain tedious (e.g. rote-learning characters), they cease to be the most difficult part of learning. This is because once you have gotten past the stage of learning how to buy things, ask for directions and talk about the weather, you start to venture into deeper waters in which the differences between the logical bases of English and Chinese become more and more apparent. You also encounter deeper conceptual differences between the two cultures. I have found this is especially true when writing essays. Last term we had to write several short essays on basic topics. When I went through them with Chinese friends, they often told me the argument didn’t work (for example, it should be presented in a different order). Regarding one essay in particular, what had been a fantastic argument in English totally failed in Chinese. I can’t remember what it was, but it was to do with the meaning of happiness. I had filled up a hundred or so characters of my five-hundred character requirement explaining a point, only to be told that, in Chinese, the entire explanation was redundant as anyone would get it from the first sentence. Great.

Hopefully this isn’t too off-putting. Chinese is a fascinating language, and the more you learn the more you will enjoy it. It will teach you a great deal about Chinese culture, and in the process you will also learn a lot about the idiosyncracies of your mother tongue. The best thing to do is practice every day, and try to immerse yourself by talking, reading and listening to Chinese as much as you can.

Settling in to a new environment is never easy. And coming to study in China is no different. Actually, before coming here to study I had visited China four times, to travel, teach English and carry out my dissertation research. When I first came here, I fell in love with the country. The subsequent times I felt glad to be back. This time, however, I was terrified.

Now, I love it here. Studying in Beijing is brilliant and BLCU’s teachers are incredibly good. The campus is beautiful. The people are friendly. It is easy and cheap to get into the city centre. The food is good and very well-priced. There are plenty of opportunities to go sightseeing. And, of course, everyone’s Chinese is progressing incredibly quickly. I wish I had kept all this in mind when I arrived; I hope this post can provide some advice to anyone else who comes to study here on how to get through the difficult phase at the beginning.

The first few days here were an odd mixture of jet lag, loneliness and incomprehensible bureaucracy. What follows is a list, in no particular order, of things to expect when you arrive.

1) There are relatively few Chinese students here, and you may well need to go out of your way to meet them, e.g. by putting up a poster explaining you want to make Chinese friends or find a language partner. DO THIS. Every Chinese student I have met here has been very friendly and eager to introduce China and learn about England. Many of the best friends I have made here are Chinese. If you do not do this then why study here?

2) Most students here are international – this is provides a wonderful opportunity to meet people from all over the world. I never imagined I would meet people from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Peru, Cameroon or North Korea.

3) Do not expect to rely on English when you arrive – though English can get you through the complicated registration process (just about). Learn some Chinese before you get here.

4) Making friends can seem incredibly difficult when you first arrive. Very few international students come from English-speaking countries; with the exception of the odd American or Canadian (and, very, very occasionally, another Brit), Chinese is the common language for me and my classmates. This might sound obvious – but remember how you felt when you started university. And then imagine that but with only around one in every ten people speaking English. It can feel very lonely; for the first few days you may very well not meet another English-speaker, but there will be plenty of Koreans, Japanese and Russians talking happily with each other in their native languages. You will get a very good idea of how it feels for a foreign student in the UK. So, all the more reason to approach people and say “ni hao.”

5) Find things to do in the first week. The first few days do not have lessons, and all you will need to do is the occasional registration procedure. This is the perfect time to explore Beijing; if you are serious about learning Chinese, you will find that your supply of free time rapidly runs dry.

6) The bureaucratic procedures can be extremely frustrating. BLCU’s website offers a helpful list of registration hurdles. Read it. http://www.blcu.edu.cn/lxsc/en/Registration.asp  BUT bear in mind that although from reading this you may get the impression this can all be done in a day or two, the process is actually drawn out over about two weeks. I arrived with a day to spare before the official start,thinking I would need it to get all this done. I got to step three by 10.30am on Saturday and was told that I couldn’t continue until Monday. The process itself has a very clear structure in hindsight; what can be frustrating is the fact that this structure is not clear from within (if that makes any sense…). Especially with the visa…

7) Do not book a flight to anywhere (including within China) for the National Day holiday, unless you are absolutely sure your Residence Permit will be ready. Around a month into the term, there is a week’s holiday for National Day. So I booked a plane ticket to Singapore. Little did I know that obtaining one’s Residence Permit (one of the items on the registration list) takes two weeks (not the five days listed on the Beijing police department website) given the amount of traffic from university registration. So I had to cancel the ticket. The visa you get for studying here is only valid for a month, and it is void if you leave China without having upgraded it to a Permit. Getting a Permit means handing in your passport. Your passport is the ONLY valid form of ID you have in China, and you need it to take a domestic flight too. However, if you have Korean or Japanese nationality you may already have your permit by this point; this is because the registration is staggered according tot he number of students from each country.

8 ) You will have a roommate. Luckily my roommate is great and we get on well. If you are used to having your own room at university in England, this is a big change. You will both share a room about the same size as a typical UK dorm room. Also, you will more than likely have to speak to each other in Chinese – the university makes a special effort to pair people with roommate from different countries.

9) The workload (if you genuinely want to improve your Chinese) is huge. You will be learning around 150 new words per week, with homework every day. I will do another post another time about studying. For now, suffice to say that the teaching quality in incredible. And the style is Chinese – this is incredibly effective, because it emphasizes memorization. However, our education system does not prepare you for this; you will be extremely busy.

10) Culture shock. I will probably do another post on this at some point. If, like me, you have been to China before, then you will be used to a lot of the major differences. If you have not, then you must be prepared to immerse yourself into an entirely different culture. From the start you must try to be as objective as possible – this can be very difficult. Living in another country is not at all like travelling through one.

That’s all for now. And I hope it hasn’t put you off. If I can think of any more on this theme I will post it.

Will

The first post comes a little late, as I have now been in Beijing since the beginning of September and had the blog since the end of October…

I hope that I can use this blog to introduce life in Beijing to the UCL community, and in particular to those students considering taking up the opportunity to apply for UCL’s two Chinese Government Scholarships.

Currently, I am studying Chinese language at Beijing Language and Culture University, and will be until August. Next year, I have a place at Qinghua to study Chinese Language and Literature.

So, welcome!