I’m learning Mandarin, I think I’m learning Mandarin, I really think so…

There was a point earlier this year when we three went for a walk, my family often humour me by coming for a walk with me on Sundays, but this one was a frosty affair. Rosa was giving clear non verbal signs that she didn’t want to carry on talking about this trip…and if I was reading the tilt of her head right as she stalked off into the distance, she probably didn’t want to come at all.

We had ‘the big talk’ – which was really more of ‘the big listen’ for me and Theo and we got to look at a few deal breakers for Rosa.

The route we had been looking at involved going through Nepal and India which held no particular joy for her and she didn’t want to go on any buses if she was honest…okay, so where did she want to go?

China!

I had my heart firmly set on Nepal, I went there on my own for five weeks when I was 22 and have wanted to go back ever since – I became more of myself in those mountains…could I let go of that…?

We looked up a whole load of videos about Nepal and China that day, and at one point saw one that was labelled ‘worst bus journey in the world’ and sure enough it was in Nepal.

Hmmm…

We watched some Chinese government sponsored tourist videos to try and forget the bus journey and something sparked in me…it was small and I nearly missed it but I caught it and held on.

It grew into a pretty adult point of view after the two weeks cooling off period we had agreed we all needed, and it started out something like…’Rosa wants to go to China, I want to go to Nepal, Theo would like to go to both…Rosa doesn’t want to go on a bus, Nepal is full of ‘terrifying’ bus journeys and China is all about trains’…and then the seed sprouted wings and turned into an emu – it doesn’t fly and it knows it’s way to Australia!

Maybe it was better to have this experience as a family and go to places none of us had been before. I had been to Nepal and India and so would be ‘showing’ Rosa and Theo, revisiting past experiences rather than jointly experiencing everything for the first time together.

I let it sit there during that two weeks, occasionally watching our favourite government tourist video and slowly I found myself feeling inspired.

China! I went into practical mode and found a route in and out and then remembered something…hadn’t Trevor given talks at a Steiner school in China before Covid? I looked it up and there it was, in Chengdu, and wasn’t Chengdu the capital city of the Provence where the pandas lived? (…I have no idea how I knew that!) My excitement grew, and then I discovered that China had stopped issuing Tourist visas during the pandemic and literally hadn’t let anyone into China since. The only way in for foreign nationals was for business, to visit family or to study.

After two days of feeling pretty sunk I looked again…we didn’t have a business or any family close enough to be relevant, but was study a possibility?

I started to look up places that taught Mandarin and my favourite was in the South of China near (ish) to the border and our way out. It also turned out to be in one of the top ten places to visit in China (according to my favourite government video) The city was called Guilin, and nestled on the banks of the river Li. It has some of the most iconic scenery in the world – it is in fact so beautiful that it’s part of the back drop for Kung Fu Panda, and we had fallen in love with it the first time we watched that video.

The hope started to bubble up and I was ready to share my ‘new deal’ when the two weeks were up.

It was quite a lengthy meeting, we revisited each of our reasons for not wanting to, and wanting to, go to particularly places and then we looked at the new possibilities for our route across the world.

Rosa really checked in with me that day, was I really okay to miss the chance to go to Nepal and India? In her asking I knew I was genuinely fine about it …and then she started to get excited.

Not just going to China but studying there…and it turned out we would be in China over the Mid Autumn Festivsl which is the second biggest festival of each year. Could we do it?

I emailed the language institute (CLI) and it was expensive – like properly expensive, but if it was our only way in were we prepared to live on scraps we found in skips and dustbins for the rest of our time away? (No, definitely not, but we would be staying in hostels and sleeping on lots of trains so it might be affordable?!)

We really struggled to find out the minimum time we had to spend studying to qualify for a study visa but in the meantime Rosa was getting invested in the idea. She had gotten an ‘A’ in her Mandarin GCSE at school and whilst she swears she didn’t deserve the grade she clearly knows some of the language and loves the culture passionately…

We had a long back and forth with CLI – a brilliant, professional outfit who know exactly how to teach Mandarin to foreigners – communication was always quick, but the mysteries of the study visa remained…and then the government announced they were giving out tourist visas again!

That was the moment we all decided this might really happen, the moment when I had to face leaving my job, telling my team and my boss, people I loved that I was doing this…really?

For Theo it was the same issue, he had a job and a workplace he loved, and for Rosa it was a gap year…could we, should we, would we?

Clearly we did…and whilst we didn’t need to go to Guilin to study anymore we were now in love with the idea, so we sent another email to the ever patient Tania asking if we could just come for a week and the ‘yes’ came pinging back straight away…

Rosa and I would study Mandarin for a week and Theo would stay in a hotel on the same little street – (which turned out to be a blessing because tea clearly does not stop people getting Covid and the day after we arrived he woke up properly poorly – his hotel was lovely and a safe space to live and be comfortable without giving it to anyone else. We were able to come and go with food and live and reminders to keep taking paracetamol and he has s beautiful air conditioned room with a view of a mountain!)

The journey to Guilin from Chengdu  was quick, we covered a staggering 662 miles in six hours. We were met at the station by a preordered taxi and we were on our way. The scenery was beautiful, the CLI building was lovely, in a quiet area of the city, the students and teachers looked interesting and tomorrow our lessons would begin…

Some people are really good at learning languages, some people can chat away in three or four different ones, switching effortlessly between them.

I am not one of them. I failed my French GCSE and scraped a C in my German, I feel horribly embarrassed and freeze whenever I try and say anything in any foreign language so when I finally arrived here and the romantic notion became stone cold fact, I found myself asking why was I spending a big chunk of my savings on learning Mandarin…?

I think I had been swept along in the initial need for a visa, and then wanting to support Rosa in her wish to reconnect with all things Chinese. But the other reason, my personal reason, was, well, why not frankly! Why can’t I learn a language? I’m not stupid (despite my internal voice regularly telling me otherwise), children do it all the time, I just need to try, right?

If you have ever watched Brooklyn Nine-Nine, then you will understand what I mean, when I say, Nikolaj, Nikolaj, Nikolaj.

It took me over a week to learn how to say ‘zǎo shang hǎo’, which looks relatively easy…but it isn’t.

Z’s are said differently with a bit of a ‘t’ in there but not too much or it will sound like their ‘c’ – it’s kind of like the ‘ZAPP’ in comic strips, but different – ‘ao’ is pronounce ‘ow’ as in ‘how’. I was beginning to get somewhere but I needed to remember that the symbol above the ǎ is an indicator of which of the five tones I need to use… If I said zaó, zaō or zaò then it could mean: finish, chisel, rash, kitchen range, jujube tree, algae, or the chirp of an insect. I was trying to say ‘good morning’ not ‘good bloody kitchen range mate!’

Okay, so then we move on to ‘shang’ – books disagree on whether this has a neutral tone or the second tone (which means you go down on the vowel sound – which, incidentally, I can only do if I waggle my finger in the air like a slightly deranged orchestral conductor). Luckily the ‘sh’ sounds the same as you’d expect but the ‘ang’ remains a mystery – it’s somewhere between hang and hung but it isn’t either and I still just mumble that word (which is pretty obvious when there’s only three words but neutral tones are meant to be quiet anyway, so…).

The last word was the easiest – it rhymes with the first word and uses the same tone – the third tone, which goes down and up on the vowel sound – it’s a bit like growling (I’m sure it isn’t anything like growling but that’s the best I can do).

I started muttering ‘zǎo shang hǎo’ in corridors but usually five minutes after the person I’d been wanting to say it to had passed me on the stairs.

Two weeks in and I’ve found out that everyone just says ‘zǎo’ – not happy!

Zao! So much easier – I became warier after that, what else was I learning they ‘no-one actually says?!’ I  have of course continued going to lessons for my daily dose of ‘not feeling very good about myself’ – the only way through is to do it!! (…or ditch it but I’m not much of a quitter 🙂 and, I really like my teachers. When I decided one day to get my guitar out we had a brilliant lesson. I discovered that in songs you don’t have to remember tones and immediately decided my farewell speech (YES!! Every CLI student has a farewell dinner where they give a speech!!) was going to be a song…a short song.

…and in case you want to come and study Mandarin  the way it works here is that you get two, two-hour lessons a day with three different teachers across the week – I have had a history of Chinese character lessons and story reading lessons as well as my nemesis – Pin Yin lessons.

They are a) a bit tedious and b) really hard – repeating the same sounds in the same words over and over again, but with different tones, trying to hear the difference between a ‘Z ‘and a ‘C’ – an ‘X’ a ‘Q’ and a ‘J’ the weird ‘Zh’ ‘Ch’ and ‘R’ sounds whilst at the same time remembering the difference between all the new vowel combinations …that are very rarely the same as English, oh and the five different tones (bored yet?!)

So why did I decide to stay more than a week? (Zhēn de ma? – Zhēn de!) …because I love the vibe here…Rosa gets to be around people her own age and so do I – the people and teachers are interesting and lovely, and I have loved being in China.

…and deep (deep) down I want to stretch myself and I know that there’s something particular about the way we learn languages in England thats holds a lot of us back. I had a French teacher who could be distracted by asking her how her cats were each lesson and I think the English culture doesn’t help, with its air of mild embarrassment and ingrained fear of making mistakes.

Occasionally, during my childhood, my dad would decide he needed to help me learn something, it never went particularly well, and on this occasion he was trying to teach me French. He asked me to count to ten and we never made it to two because my pronunciation was so terrible, apparently. He spent a very frustrated five minutes, trying to get me to pronounce one right and here I am again, torturing my Mandarin teachers, but they are getting paid for it and I am getting better…

I’m the one being limited, whatever the underlying reasons, and so I am the one who will climb the mountain, slowly and with a few tears and the occasional hot flushed face on the way, but still climbing…

You don’t learn anything without trying, so, I hereby publicly commit to carry on learning, this graceful, picturesque, sing song, language until I can have a conversation with someone in Chinese which doesn’t finish after three stilted sentences.

On my last day here, I may run through the building naked, shouting ‘zǎo shang hǎo!! Im not sure if it will remind me that there are things much more humiliating than having the courage to learn a language or not, but the video footage would be funny 🙂