No Alphabet Needed

Part one in a series by Rodney. . .

Prior to moving to China I used to joke with people that I thought learning Chinese would be easy since you don’t have to learn a new alphabet.  (My poor family heard that one more times than they would care to remember.)  Of course, this was tongue in cheek – I knew that learning Chinese would be difficult.  Now, after about seven months of living in China and going to language school, I have a new appreciation for the challenge of learning Chinese.  Since language acquisition will be a major part of our lives for the first few years – and a significant part of our life indefinitely – I want to share some of the challenges we’ve faced and some of the more interesting aspects we’ve discovered.

One of the first challenges you immediately come across when learning Chinese is that reading is no picnic!  While your knowledge of English allows you to pick up clues from a sentence in Spanish or French, there is no such mercy in Chinese.  Don’t believe me? Try this short quiz.

Headline from Spanish News Source

El "Santo grial" del béisbol, vendido por 2,1 millones de dólares

Do you think this article is about:

a. A plane crash near the capitol city

b. The sale of a baseball card

c. The problem population growth in the capitol city

Most likely you could pick out from this headline the Spanish word for baseball and the amount of 21 million dollars.  Besides the fact that paying that sum for a piece of cardboard is ridiculous, you could make some sense of the sentence.

Thy this one from a French News Source:

Les violences entre bouddhistes et musulmans gagnent l’Indonésie

Do you think this article is about:

a. The ridiculous amounts people are willing to pay for old baseball cards

b. A plane crash near the capitol

c. Violence between Buddhists and Muslims in Indonesia

You probably got that one too, didn't you?  You may not know what gagnent means, but there are enough other clues for you to know that there is religious violence in Indonesia.

Here is a sentence in Chinese for you:

我的家常常吃饺子。

Do you think this says:

a. Paying over two million dollars for a piece of cardboard is crazy.

b. My family often eats dumplings.

c. We really miss Mexican food!

Although I do think that baseball card thing is nuts and we really do miss Mexican food, the correct answer is “b.”  And yes, we do often eat dumplings (or what are typically called “potstickers” in the States).

As you can see, the use of characters rather than our Romanized alphabet presents a significant hurdle! But by God’s grace, we press on!