contort their tongues in very unfamiliar positions.
Rhian explains, “When you are teaching a Westerner
a European language, of course you have to teach
pronunciation, but they can generally pronounce a
majority of the sounds. If they are learning Mandarin,
they might not be able to make all those sounds straight
away, so that can take a lot of practice.”
The good news
But not all aspects of Mandarin are challenging to
Westerners. There are some areas that are much
easier to grasp than when learning another European
language. Grammar, for example, is much more
straightforward in Mandarin, especially in the early
stages. Sentences are formed according to simple
formula – time, subject, verb, object – and there are no
irregular verbs, no subject/verb agreement, no genders,
no tenses (apart from the “yesterday”, “today” or
“
tomorrow” that indicate tense) and no plurals. Those
long hours of poring over pluperfect tenses and puzzling
over whether a word was masculine or feminine, which
can be a headache in some European languages, are just
not necessary in Mandarin, which can be a very welcome
and refreshing change. Whether you are learning
the language or teaching it, time spent on Mandarin
grammar is much less than with a Western language.
Also, once you have learnt the basic numbers in
Mandarin, from one to ten, you have opened many doors.
You will be not only be able to count to 99, but also
say the days of the week, and the months of the year as
these are given a number, rather than a name. The slog
of learning different names for different numbers, and
different names for each weekday and month – as with
European languages – is completely eliminated.
Common to all language learning, the keys to
success are interest, practice and perseverance – plus
the confidence to just dive in and speak. For Westerners
learning Mandarin, it will certainly be a very different
journey to that of studying another European language
–
the learning curves, the challenges and the teaching
methods will all differ. But, as a student’s competence
increases, hopefully the phrase “It’s all Chinese to me”
will be supplanted with “
Vive la différence
.”
…
once you have learnt the basic
numbers in Mandarin, from one
to ten, you have opened many
doors.
一
五
十
March 2013
69