Week 10 - Putonghua

Beijing is bursting with spring as we make our way through the blossoming streets to our hostel to the north of the station. The cool breeze warms in the sun on a bright and cloudless day that repeats itself for the full week of our stay in the north capital.

" 'Bei' is 'north' - 'jing' is 'capital'. 'Dong' is 'east' - 'nan' is 'south' and 'xi' is 'west'. You can remember by Dongjing or Tokyo - east capital, Nanjing - south capital and Xian - west capital. Very simple..." Thus starts five days of intensive drilling on Chinese tones and pinyin pronunciation and my first real appreciation for the fascinating nature of putonghua, the 'common language'.

This is a language of thousands of one syllable words, each with four tones rendering unrelated different meanings. These are strung together to weave longer words the meanings of which are abstracted from the originals with a beautiful soft logic.

Put dong (east) with xi (west) and you get 'dongxi' - meaning things. When looking for things we move our head from side to side, from east to west. Long (second tone) is dragon. Xia (first tone) is shrimp. So - 'longxia' is lobster. Dragons are big and powerful with many good qualities. Project these good qualities onto a shrimp and it transforms it into a lobster. You know it makes sense...

So by learning two or three words you are actually learning four, five or more new words and quickly building vocabulary. However, unless the tone of every word is pronounced precisely, that vocabulary is useless. You find yourself uttering unadulterated gibberish, drawing quizzical looks or blank stares as reward for the effort of committing hundreds of these little alien sounds to memory.

Thirty hours of 'zh ch sh r z c s....' and 400 new words later and I'm starting to realize how long, hard and fascinating this journey into Mandarin is going to be. But perhaps the main battle is won. After years of closed minded dogged resistance to my better half's language, I surprised myself by looking forward to class, eagerly writing up notes and actually enjoying the effort of memorizing vocab. Perhaps our week amongst the blossoms of the north capital will mark my gradual emergence from the shadows into the bright light of Asia...

- Posted by Dave using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Beijing, China