Daniel Wolf (centre) with his fellow students on a language-learning trip to a cooking school
Five years ago, after my first year exams at the Beijing Language and Culture University (BCLU), I was sitting in the sunshine outside a campus cafe with a group of fellow students. A Dane in his mid-twenties, an excellent linguist with fluent English, German and French, remarked: “I have been studying for a year now, and I can still barely hold a simple conversation in Chinese.”
That is a common experience. It was certainly mine. Despite long hours in class and the library, bolstered by halting sessions with language coaches, my first encounters with Chinese mystified me. Starting late as I did, at 59, is not an advantage, but nor is it a disqualification. Over my nearly four years of studies, my progress wasn’t noticeably slower than the class average, even though almost all my fellow-students were under 30. No doubt, my short-term memory wasn’t as strong as that of the younger students, but reasonably diligent study can overcome that obstacle. Western students, in particular, all faced roughly the same challenges.
Some were blithely convinced that, as Chinese has no tenses and inflections, it is easy. In Chinese, you can try to bluff your way through in a kind of mangled western dialect, using “pinyin”—the romanised version of Chinese syllables—as the foundation of your delusional confidence. Pinyin tends to generate a sound-palette which bears little resemblance to the music of Chinese but, if you have a good ear, Chinese people may still understand you perfectly well. If you want to get beyond basic chatter, though, you’ll still need to learn the characters: they’re essential for developing an extended vocabulary and sophisticated patterns of expression. They are the soul of the language.
Young westerners come to China in their thousands to learn Mandarin but most, in my observation, do not progress beyond the beginners’ grades, and almost all the rest bail out at the intermediate level. That is not really their fault: learning Chinese requires time, money and a long-term plan. Some come out of curiosity; some are misled by the promotion of Mandarin in the west, which presents the language as something like French or Spanish, implying that, after a few years’ modest effort it can be added to a blossoming CV as a “skill.” Yet, if it is a matter of personal advancement, there is little point in foreigners learning how to stumble through a few sentences in Mandarin. China already has hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young people who speak reasonable English and perfect Mandarin. The foreigner’s Mandarin has to be better than the English of a dedicated Chinese graduate. That is a demanding standard, given that Chinese students have usually taken English courses for over a decade, and English, though tricky, is a lot easier than Chinese. The best western speakers of Chinese, in my experience, tend to have degrees from good universities in America or Europe, and to have then spent about five years continuously living and working in China.
By the beginning of my fourth year of studies, I had arrived at the advanced “E” level of the BLCU’s “Intensive Language College.” My classmates were, with one exception, all Asian: six were Japanese, three Korean, a further three ethnic Chinese from southeast Asia. Asian students have many advantages. Japanese kanji are based on Chinese characters, and therefore the Japanese read Chinese almost as swiftly and accurately as the Chinese do; Koreans also learn characters in childhood and, even though the modern Korean alphabet does not use them, they are still sometimes included in texts and documents, so young Koreans are comfortable with them; ethnic Chinese are usually exposed to some form of Chinese when young, and their familiarity with the culture is a particular help.
Being a westerner, then, is a disadvantage but not an insuperable one. I passed my advanced level exams, which struck me at the time as something of a miracle (although to attain the reading level of my Japanese and Korean classmates, I would probably need another lifetime). I can now, two years on, converse relatively comfortably in Chinese, certainly on everyday subjects and, to a fair extent, on more demanding topics such as politics and history. Chinese people generally understand what I say. Friends tell me that I am still improving, but then the Chinese tend to be polite.
I am still studying, yet for me the point of learning a language is not the virtually unattainable one of complete fluency; it is not even communication in itself, although that is a useful and pleasurable result. The purpose is understanding. As Michael Edwards, a poet and academic who became the first British member of the Académie française, observed: “French is not just another language, it’s another way of understanding the world, a way of being, of sensing emotion…” My years of studying Chinese have made me feel that intensely.
