Learning Mandarin

Pai Mai is training the main character Uma Thurman in Kill Bill 2.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEjI0A9iMow

When I see Uma Thurman, I can't help but think about my early days in Chinese school.

My Chinese school had central A/C, but starting out was painful, boring, and repetitive.

My first Chinese teacher was a former radio news reporter in Taiwan, so her Mandarin Chinese was pitch perfect.

Everyday weekday after "English" school was 3 hours of "Chinese school."  For the first six months I didn't write a single character.  We reviewed the Taiwan phonetic table known as Zhuyin Fuhao and practiced pronouncing every permutation.  Here's a table:



Multiply this by 4 and you can pronounce any character in Chinese!  Although the list is intimidating, English fills up an entire book!

The first set of words I wrote was my Chinese name, 陳俊祥。 If a single stroke was off, you had to re-write a page worth of your name, or around 150 times!!

The first character I learned besides my name was "好。" The radical for girl and boy are smooshed together to make 好， and it makes perfect sense because that's how you greet people.  The conversation oddly turned to why procreating children is good.

Every character was written in these neat little white boxes like this.



One mistake and you had to rewrite a character in another column 14 times.

I got plenty of hand cramps like Pai Mai's training.

I wrote sentences in 1 year

I wrote paragraphs in 3 years.

I wrote essays 5 years.

Before entering college I knew HOW to study Chinese, but I didn't know WHY.

Then I knew why.

During the last day of my language class, my college Chinese teacher gave us this advice:

"Right now you are all at the peak of your Chinese ability.  For most of you will slope downward gradually and forget.  But if you want to maintain what you have I only have one word:  Read.  There is no shortcut.  No trick.  Just read as much as you can."

Something within me still wants to learn this beautiful ancient language. Although I can carry a basic conversation, I'm still too far from an educated Chinese person.

After 17 years, my hands still cramp.