Toneless Chinese

Chinese has four tones. The first doesn't really have an inflection but the pitch is higher then you'd think it'd be. The second goes up like you're asking a question, I have the habit of raising my eyebrows whenever I try to really emphasize this tone. The third goes down and up and there's really nothing like it in English. The fourth goes down sort of like your scolding a child, for this one I keep wagging my finger at some imaginary transgressor. When one of my tutors really emphasizes a tone I can hear it pretty clearly but put a whole sentence together and it all just melts away. Ken keeps talking about wanting to speak toneless Chinese the problem though is that the tones indicate which of many words you are referring to. "Shi" for example can be one of about eight of the most important words in Chinese depending on the tone. It can mean anything from the number 10, which is also used in counting some higher numbers, to the verb "to be," which is one of the most common verbs. The phrase "Excuse me, could you please speak slower," has "yi" in it three different times, which three different tones and meanings. On top of that there are also quite a few words in Chinese which simply are pronounced exactly the same. In River Town the author mentions that there is some dispute over the translation of the name of a nearby mountain since it's name in spoken Chinese could have two different meanings, and it was only recently that anyone had really written it down.

Also characters which have meanings on their own can form part of a group of characters that make up a word. The phrase from before had the character for the number one in it. To add another layer to all this There are a number of sounds in Chinese that simply don't exist in English and distinctions between things that seem exactly the same. "X" and "Sh" have some incredibly slight differentiation in their sound that is almost completely unrecognizable to me. One of the first things that's important to learn when learning Chinese is Pinyin which Chinese written with an English alphabet, actually they have that u with the two dots over it, a umlaut I think, also. Since Chinese is always written the same but spoken totally differently in different places they chose the dialect they spoke in Beijing and made it the bases for Pinyin. Using the English alphabet with modified sounds and combinations they made Pinyin a phonetic recording of this Beijing dialect. The nice thing then about Pinyin is that it's totally phonetic so if you know the word it's easy to spell, but you still have to learn what sound the letters make in Pinyin. "ao" for example makes the sound that "ou" does in English and "ou" makes a sound like "o."

Beyond all this is the challenge of learning a huge number of words, something which I am amazingly bad at. Another nice thing though is that the language is grammatically simple and often the order of words doesn't actually matter. There are a few annoying things like counting words, words that go in front of numbers that change depending on what is being counted, but if you use "ge" the most common one people get what you mean. I have a couple of tutors for this including Carrie and two of my students Winter and Olivia. Winter is a real task master and is constantly pushing me to do more. Carrie know enough English and would rather just talk in English which means that I have to be on point to get stuff done. It's also amazing that even with a lot of study when I try to actually say something simple to people out in the world, about half the time they just look at me like I'm crazy. I have no idea why the things coming out of my mouth are so different that no possible meaning can be inferred from them, but I seem to utterly confuse the Chinese.