Learning Chinese

When we first came to China people wondered how on earth we would manage without being able to speak Chinese. Well, it's not hard - "point, grunt, wave money" will get us almost anything we want.

But it is frustrating finding ourselves "deaf, dumb and illiterate". And despite the efforts of many "English as a Second Language" teachers, like ourselves, we do not meet many Chinese who can hold a conversation in English in the marketplace for instance.

Last year we picked up a scattering of mis-pronounced words, it was hard to find anyone who would actively help in our language learning and our time was heavily taken up with teaching English rather than learning Chinese.

So it has been delightful since we came to Wuxi to actually have a few Chinese lessons. Our teacher is Shoresun, one of the delightful young ladies who work at our office.

And she doesn't confine our studies to the classroom. She took us out to a restaurants to help us learn some of those tricky food words. (Although sometimes when you know what it is called you still don't know what it is...) And she went with us for a lovely afternoon at Li Hu. It's a delightful park with a lake ("hu") where people like to have their wedding photos taken.

And a great place for art students to get in some practise.

But, back to the learning Chinese.

It is, of course, a tonal language. We have tones in English, but they are mostly used to express our emotions, to indicate a question or the like. We try to copy the sounds we hear - well, it's simple enough: "ma", "ma", "ma", "ma" ... except that those are all supposed to sound different.

"Your tones are all the same!" laughs Shoresun.

It's all in the eyebrows, and chin, I think. If I make my eyebrows go up and down, and push my chin down into my chest, at the right moments, then I can produce some different tones.

And I have stared and stared at those characters - the little squiggly things that are writing - and I can remember some of them. Not just what they say in Chinese (with the tone!) but what they mean in English. I can even draw quite a few of them. Sometimes I recognise some of them in a sign as we travel down the road.

I was feeling quite proud of myself the other day with my little pile of cards that I have "learnt" measured up against the unlearnt ones. But then I remembered how far I still have to go. Imagine, if you will, sitting down to eat a plate of food - well, several platefuls. After ploughing your way through the first one or two you start to feel quite pleased with yourself ... and then you look up and notice that you are trying to eat a whole whale, and you have just been nibbling on the end of one flipper.

Well, yes, I am feeling a little daunted.