When travelling abroad (as a European or an originally European language native speaker), you can travel to many places in the world, where even without understanding the meaning of words, one would recognise the particular letter, symbol or word. When you arrive in Taiwan, you get bombarded with many characters and picture-like signs. Almost any language looks wholly foreign and incomprehensible. While quite simple, the reason shocks virtually any person lacking the fantastic ability to speak Chinese.
Taiwan has many signs with Chinese characters! (Photo by Markus Winkler)
After the initial shock of not seeing any of the Roman alphabet letters, you hear some languages around you. Don't be shocked, but they might not even be Chinese (to be precise, Mandarin Chinese, which in Taiwan is called 國語 – the national language). Still, other languages are spoken in Taiwan, including Hokla, Hakka and many others. While as an English speaker, it is not that difficult to pick up the basics of French, if one doesn't have any experience with a tonal language like Chinese, I believe it is impossible to pick Chinese just from listening to the locals.
How to start learning Chinese? (Photo by Jerry Wang)
So, we beg to ask the question – How do you start learning such a language? Before I try to give you a quick guide (or a timeline with "things to do"), I would like to remind the readers that this article is written by a person coming from Europe, where the tonality of a language is almost non-existent since most of the Indo-European languages used in Europe have a system based on "stress" and "intonation" in which saying the same word in different tonality makes no difference in the meaning of the word. For example, if you say ma1 媽 or ma2嘛, the meaning is entirely different, one meaning mother, the other a type of plant.
Getting back to the guide, the quick answer is to practice a lot, give it a lot of time (count it in tens of years rather than months or "a year or two" and be very patient with yourselves. As this isn't shocking to most of us who struggled to learn any other non-native language, we delve further into how actually to learn Chinese.
6 steps to learning Chinese and speaking like a native (Photo by Isaac Chou)
I believe learning Chinese (from my experience and those of others) can be divided into six main periods:
- Learning the basics in the classroom
- Imitating and listening to the locals
- Using primary language in everyday life
- Having deeper conversations, being able to function normally in daily life
- Having the fluency to talk about any topics
- Becoming native-like fluent (in my opinion, a treat impossible without upbringing in Taiwan or a country with somewhat similar cultural and societal points of reference)
The last four steps require the same thing over and over – talking, listening, parroting, immersing in the culture etc. I will only focus on steps 1-3.
While at my level, I believe classroom Chinese is not the most essential of things (while if you have the time, do consider it at any level), the very beginnings of Chinese are a Chinese-classes-regularly must. Suppose you are in Taiwan, China, or any other Chinese-speaking region. I recommend taking university-provided Chinese courses and private tutoring.
Put in your heart into 10 classroom hours a week, 2-4 with a private tutor and in 4-6 months, you will be good to abandon the safety of a school to move to step 2, which doesn't need much explanation – go out, enjoy your life, but do start to listen more carefully to how locals talk, express themselves, react and try to catch the most common expressions, mimic them, and if your friends are willing, ask them to help you out.
On a more personal note, it should be at the end of step 4 (although I still imagine at least a year or two before step 5 hits in). The biggest challenge I face nowadays is that people know my Chinese is good (enough) for me to converse on almost any topic, so they naturally start talking faster and more casually. When the issues move to complex subjects (like listening to contract negotiation), some words/meanings need to be understood in translation. But hey, I think I've been making progress within those couple of years, and I am somewhat satisfied with my current level.
Learning Chinese is no easy task, but as somebody competent once said, "the sweetest fruit is one of thy hard labour". So get down to it, and let's learn some 國語！
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