普通话

Ni hao, ni hao ma? Hen hao?

Hi again, my friends. I hope you've been doing well. This one might run a little on the longer side, but we'll see what happens.

I honestly think this might be my first entry on Putonghua, or as we Americans know it: Mandarin Chinese. First and foremost, there's a common misconception that everyone from China speaks "Chinese". This might be true, but we need to be more specific as there are a few dialects. Just as I spoke about it in my previous entry on Creole, you can't label the language(s) of China as just "Chinese". The two big ones are Putonghua (Mandarin) and Cantonese (Guangdong hua).

So the next time you want to ask if someone speaks Chinese, you'd better ask if they speak Mandarin or Cantonese instead.

Now for my thoughts on the language. I fucking love it.

Chinese is spoken all over the place. I just so happen to live in a city with a lot of Asian restaurants, from Chinese ones to Japanese ones run by Chinese people (yes, I know it's weird, but it happens). Have you ever wanted to know what they're saying? If they're saying nice things, or how Americans are greedy, fat bastards? Well if so, this is the language to know.

In all honesty, learning Mandarin (I'm studying Cantonese also) has been a JOY to practice with. Every time my girlfriend and I go to a Chinese restaurant (two in particular), I have to attempt speaking to the servers. The first time I did it, I got the "O_O" look. You know, the one that says, "Hol...y." And from then on, I was on a first name basis with everyone. At the restaurant closest to us, the server actually brought out her iPad and showed me how she was learning English and gave me some tips on how to read Pinyin (the Romanized pronunciation of Mandarin/Cantonese). Not even gonna lie, it HAS gotten me discounts on food. Yes, it's a perk, and if it keeps happening, I'd be a fool to try and stop it. To me, it seems like a token of gratitude for attempting a language as difficult as Mandarin.

That leads right into the seriousness of the matter. Mandarin is NOT easy. It is a tonal language, which means if you say a word with an incorrect tone, despite proper pronunciation, it could make the difference between cursing at someone, or giving them a compliment (Take Chris Tucker in Rush Hour 2).

The characters are pretty much like Japanese, in that you have to KNOW what they mean by looking at them, because there aren't many clues as far as punctuation goes. In addition to knowing what the characters mean, which can number in the thousands, you also need to be able to use the Pinyin system. It uses the Romanized alphabet, and has lines distinguishing which tone you need to use to get the proper pronunciation for whatever word you're trying to say.

Mandarin takes a lot of practice. In this last lesson, I learned how to express desire, learned "your place", "my place", "when", "now", and "later". It's tough. I definitely have to go back and practice the pronunciation. I AM also working on the Pinyin and Character system. I am writing out every phrase to get a good grip on writing in both ways. Of course the Pinyin system is easy because it's pretty phonetic, but the characters are really where it's at, despite their difficulty. Characters can have multiple strokes, which can make it seem more like a picture instead of a word. I'm using a Chinese-English/English-Chinese Webster's Dictionary to help me out. The book's print is pretty small, but I'm making it work. I've found that once you've written a character, it becomes muscle memory very quickly, and you can write them from memory. I've already gotten "ni", "bu", and "wo" without needing the book.

I do have a gripe, and it has nothing to do with the difficulty of the language. Everyone who follows me knows that I love tweeting in foreign languages. My BlackBerry actually has a decent number of international keyboards for me to work with. I tried to tweet in Chinese, but there were THREE keyboards for it, and I had no idea what in the hell I was doing. It was really tricky. That being said, I cannot WAIT to get my iPhone 5, because there is a way to use your finger and "draw" the characters you need to use, which would be fantastic.

I love Mandarin, and you should to.

Constructive comments, questions, and tips are always welcome!

再见,

Your Favorite Polyglot
Twitter: @mistercapoeira