Chinese: Beautiful Country
Several months ago I made a couple of New Year’s Resolutions. One of these was setting up a bug tracker - yeah, well, that’s still in progress, though I’m thinking of going with the appealing (and Ruby on Rails written) SimpleTicket.
But one resolution I have already been following through with is learning a non-western language. I chose Mandarin Chinese, one because it seems very useful considering the future outlook, and second was that it was available on a night I had available.
Chinese is actually easier to learn than I had thought at the outset. Some of the annoyances of English, such as conjugation aren’t present. For example, “I be” “I am”, “He is”, “She is”, “We are”, are all just “- be”. Though these are replaced by equally difficult translations. For example, there is a different word for Maternal Grandmother and Grandfather vs. Paternal Grandparents. There is even a different term for older vs. younger brother and older vs. younger sister.
We’ve also learned some of the country names. America is “Meiguo”, or 美国. Literally, this means “Beautiful Country”. I found this very endearing… until I learned it’s because the character 美 (Mei) which means beautiful just has the same sound as the “me” in America.
Other countries include:
- 法国 － Faguo is France (lawful country)
- 得国 － Deguo is Germany (moral country)
- 加拿大 － Jianada is Canada (just sounds a lot like Cha-nah-dah)
My name is 
May 9th, 2006 at 12:51 am (#)
Hi Andy,
isn’t it “I am”?
Pat
May 9th, 2006 at 9:24 am (#)
It’s interesting for me to see how Chinese handles things differently from Japanese. In Japanese, America is either アメリカ (just “amerika” in syllables) or beikoku (米国), where the 米 means rice but comes from an all-kanji (a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateji”>ateji) way of writing “amerika” rather than from any connection between America and rice.
May 9th, 2006 at 9:24 am (#)
Let me try that again…
It’s interesting for me to see how Chinese handles things differently from Japanese. In Japanese, America is either アメリカ (just “amerika” in syllables) or beikoku (米国), where the 米 means rice but comes from an all-kanji (ateji) way of writing “amerika” rather than from any connection between America and rice.
May 9th, 2006 at 9:42 am (#)
@patrick - yeah yeah, you’d think English wasn’t my first language, like you!
@katie - good example of how the Japanese Kanji is very similar to the Chinese Hanzi, except you’ll get caught 20% of the time. Like 国, which obviously means “kingdom” or country in both Japanese & Chinese, but has a different sound (obviously). but the 米 (bei) vs. 美 (mei).
May 9th, 2006 at 3:37 pm (#)
Hey,
The trick to learning Chinese without devoting your whole life to it is to simply learn Pinyin and forget about the characters (tho I recommend learning at least 50 or so just to get the feel for it). Spoken Chinese by contrast with the written is actually one of the easiest in the world (apparently).
First off, purchase or download Pimsleurs Chinese (bittorrent is available if u want to be dirty pirate hehe), also.. download the archive of chinesepod.com, be sure to listen to these during work time etc.
Next off, get yourself some tutors, be that university students or otherwise, what I do is teach them English and they teach me Chinese so it costs me nothing.
Oh and lastly, hit the pronounciation solidly for at least 6 weeks. Visit Sinosplice.com for example to find pronunciation guides, there are a few others around, these will help. Get the pronunciation nailed early. Ps don’t fret about tones, it takes a few weeks and then you will click, use tricks like shouting out the fourth tone, moving head up and down for third, etc. It’s like riding a bike, once u got it u got it.
Anyhoo, after you crack pronunciation (say 2-3 months) you will feel your progress is slowing. That signals time to invest heavily in vocab and sentence structure. Refer to Leitner learning model for flash card memorization.
Anyhoo, good luck!
TiM
May 9th, 2006 at 5:47 pm (#)
Excellent suggestions Tim! I’ve already found, and *highly recommend* ChinesePod. I subscribed to it in iTunes and then made a smart playlist for beginners (they call them newbies: 菜鸟, but it actually translates to “Vegetable Bird”). ChinesePod has a lot of useful phrases and current ‘buzzwords’.
I signed out Pimsleur’s chinese from my local library, so it’s free and I’m not a pirate (arrr! or 二).
I’m taking a night-course at the local university and the instructor is from Taiwan and a great Laoshi (老师). I’m also practicing with the woman at my favorite local Chinese restaurant (who turns out is Vietnamese). We spent the first 3 weeks of class just doing pronunciation (I get so confused by the ‘e’ in he vs. the ‘e’ in ye)
The class teaches just pinyin and speaking, but I’m learning the writing on my own. It may be the engineer in me, but the writing makes sense! And it is actually helping me remember words and phrases (again, perhaps the visualization of an engineer’s mind)
I’ll try out the other suggestions!
May 9th, 2006 at 7:53 pm (#)
Woot! Thanks for the SimpleTicket mention… Let us know if you need help.