And any other reason why (not)

Most of my posts in the Why I don't learn Chinese series have been about the peculiar difficulties of the language, or about the peculiar difficulties of learning it (what we might call the environmental obstacles we find in China today), or about my personal difficulties in language learning. I've also touched on a political dimension to my abstinence - that I am resistant to the Chinese government's attempt to promote the learning of Mandarin as a central element of its global 'soft power' offensive and as a domestic propaganda ploy to bolster the chauvinistic conviction that China is the best bloody country in the world. To be honest, though, my resistance to the language is probably provoked even more powerfully by the self-righteousness one so commonly encounters amongst foreigners who have put in the hard hours of study to become reasonably proficient in it (and presumably feel affronted, feel their self-image of their own wisdom and worthiness called into question, when the indolence of others such as myself demonstrates that it is perfectly possible to get by in Chinese without such laborious study - and indeed that it is increasingly easy in a city like Beijing today to get by without any Chinese at all). All of these points I have touched upon in the previous 20-odd posts in this series.

As I mentioned in this comment thread last year, I am somewhat regretful that I have made so little progress with Mandarin (I'm jesting when I occasionally say that I have been making a conscious attempt to unlearn it; although that is in fact a pretty fair description of the direction my Chinese ability has taken over the last 7 or 8 years!). One of my main interests in this series has been to cast around for possible solutions to the mental block that I suffer with the language, for possible inspirations that might motivate me to start studying in earnest. It may be worth repeating one of my comments from that thread in full:

The thing that gets my goat is that so many people get on a high horse about this, and tell you that you ought to learn Mandarin - even that you must. 

But they rarely offer any cogent reason for this. It's an unconsidered assumption. 

If they do start offering 'reasons', I usually find them non-compelling or not appropriate to my situation - if not completely bogus. 

So, this series is - at least partly - about examining those possible reasons to learn the language... and attempting to dismiss them.

For my final post in this series, I thought I'd run through some of the most oft-cited reasons for learning Mandarin, to underline why I have rejected them during the decade that I have lived in China.

It's necessary for 'survival'

No, it isn't - not in the major cities, anyway. And this is a dramatic transformation that I've witnessed during my time in China. When I first visited in the early '90s, very little English was spoken anywhere, even in the major cities. When I first moved to Beijing in the early '00s, fairly little English was spoken here, even in foreigner-targeted bars and restaurants. But now.... almost all staff in bars and restaurants - even those that don't particularly target foreigners - speak some English, often quite good English. Almost all reasonably well-educated white collar workers speak some English. Surprisingly large numbers of ordinary people - shopkeepers, taxi drivers, etc. - are starting to speak at least a little bit of English. China is rapidly moving towards the situation that prevails in most of Europe, where English is an almost universal second language - at least amongst the middle class (and almost everybody will be middle-class in another 50 years).

It will help you get a job in China

None of the jobs that I've had here, or even those I've considered applying for, have required any Chinese ability at all. Most of them have, unsurprisingly, relied primarily on my advanced skills in the English language. Of course, there are a few specialised jobs where some degree of Chinese will be necessary - but those are not the kind of jobs that would ever be of any interest to me. It is certainly helpful - though rarely essential - to develop a modest conversational ability in order to be able to relate socially to your Chinese co-workers; but that has never really applied to me, since I've never had an office-based job. (And the experience of many of my foreign friends and acquaintances here suggests that taking a job in a primarily Chinese-speaking workplace is the best way to learn the language - even if you start off with little or nothing.) Things may be changing now, as the overabundance of foreigners here - foreigners who've put in some time learning Mandarin, at that - is encouraging many employers to use Mandarin skills to differentiate between job applicants, even though these are not fundamentally necessary for the job. But back in the early Noughties when I came here, Mandarin skills had no relevance to your employability whatsoever.

It will help you get a job overseas

Again, I tend to think this is an exaggerated or misguided assumption. There are not that many opportunities for 'doing business with China'; and most of those that there are will - rightly - favour Chinese citizens with good foreign language skills... and/or recognise the imperative of utilizing good translators/interpreters to facilitate communication. Certainly, the experience of most of my friends who've returned overseas - after spending many years here, and developing good levels of Mandarin - has been that they've struggled to find any kind of China-related job at all, let alone one that required them to use their Mandarin. The only exception I can think of is a woman friend who has recently become a beginner's level Mandarin teacher. Anyway, when I leave here, I want to draw a line under my China experience - and never have anything to do with the country again.

It helps you learn about the culture

Yes, there are certain aspects of Chinese history and culture that can be revealed through the idioms and so on of the national language, but... you can discover many of these by reading about the language, without actually having to develop the ability to use it. I worry that there's a huge opportunity cost in studying the language to a high level, that it actually detracts from your ability to engage with the culture in other ways - ways that to me seem more important and useful. As I said in this comment, there are many more ways to learn about the life and culture of a people - observation, reading, interaction with other observers, interaction with locals in other languages - which may in fact be inhibited by an overriding emphasis on trying to interact with people in their own language.

It's a sign of respect

Yes, it is often taken that way by the Chinese. But I feel that the essence of 'respect' is sincerity of feeling, rather than the outward forms that attempt to express that feeling; and moreover that 'respect' must be given freely - as soon as the Chinese start expecting or demanding that you learn their language to demonstrate respect for their culture, they are disempowering the gesture, rendering it no longer a genuine expression of respect but a token act of obeisance, the contemporary version of a kow-tow. In any case, this notion that you need to develop significant Mandarin skills in order to show an appropriate level of respect comes mainly from government propaganda (and/or those foreign 'language nazis' who have managed to achieve such skills and want to consider themselves to be somehow morally superior to those of us who haven't); most ordinary Chinese do not expect that you will be able to speak their language at all, and are tremendously impressed and flattered if you can manage a few basic conversational courtesies like 'Please' and 'Thank you' and 'Delighted to meet you'. Choosing to learn another people's language may be an indication of your respect for them, but it is not the sole nor an indispensable means of doing so. Choosing not to learn the language should not be seen as innately disrespectful. You should try to learn a language because it is intrinsically satisfying or useful to you, not merely because it is in some nebulous way 'expected' of you.

So, all the of the reasons commonly touted as making the learning of Mandarin imperative I have found to be unsatisfactory, unconvincing. As I concluded that comment I quoted above.... Yes, [this series] is wilfully contrarian, and more than a little bit tongue-in-cheek. People shouldn't suppose that I haven't learned any Mandarin, or that I am ardently advocating against others doing so.

But I do feel that if you are going to, you ought to be very clear about your reasons for doing so. 

And I'm not simply justifying an eccentric personal choice, but considering the global context - attempting to resist this tide of 'moral pressure' and CCP-backed propaganda that everyone ought to learn Mandarin.

Accidents of history

Although in my intermittent series on this topic I have mainly analysed practical reasons why I have not bothered to learn much Chinese, I suspect that fundamentally what has most discouraged me from making such efforts were issues of timing and circumstance. If the history of my engagement with China had been slightly different, perhaps I would have put in the hundreds - thousands! - of hours necessary to become fairly good at Chinese, but as it is.....

These are some of the factors that I think have led me down the path of abstinence.

I have lived exclusively in Beijing, and I arrived here in the early Noughties.

As the capital, and the upcoming Olympic host city, Beijing developed at dizzying speed during those years. When I first touched down here, very few people - not even staff in hotels, bars, and so on - spoke any English. But within a few years there had been a remarkable change: now almost everyone in a service job has at least a modicum of English, and it's becoming more and more common to find even regular folks, small shopkeepers and such, who have at least a smattering. The need to speak Chinese for daily survival was fairly low here; and, more importantly, it was rapidly diminishing.

I had been here before.

Having first visited China 7 or 8 years earlier, when just about NO-ONE spoke any English, I had experienced a very stressful and challenging language environment - a situation that forced you to learn some Chinese. Even in 2001, the impetus to learn the language in Beijing was much, much less. I think it was the force of that contrast that robbed me of the necessary motivation to study.

And that had been in the south.

I'd spent most of that trip in the south central province of Hubei, and so the little bit of Chinese I'd picked up was coloured by regional idiosyncrasies. When I tried to use it in Beijing, people laughed at my "funny accent" - it was very discouraging.

And then I'd gone back to Hong Kong.

That is an especially blunt reminder of how linguistically varied China is. Cantonese is a very different language, and, back then at any rate, Mandarin Chinese seemed to be more alien to most people down there than English. After spending three months struggling to learn a language, it is a brutal rebuff to be reminded that in large parts of the country it will do you no good at all.

I was flat broke.

Lessons cost money. More importantly, they cost time. It's next-to-impossible to study Chinese effectively unless you have a lot of spare time to devote to it. Most of my friends who've achieved a good level in the language started off their time in China with a spell of full-time study. And they were able to do this because they'd come here with some money in their pockets; many of them were only just out of university, and were still getting a little financial help from their parents. I came here without a penny to my name (quite literally), and had to work every hour god sent for the first few years to try to re-establish some financial stability for myself. Language study didn't get a look-in. And, by the time I'd built up a bit of a financial safety net and was starting to enjoy a bit more free time... I had learned to get by without Chinese.

And then I started blogging!
Yes, yes - if I'd spent a fraction of the time that I've devoted to these blogs over the last six years to studying Chinese instead, I might be getting quite good by now, at least in a basic conversational way (reading and writing was always going to be beyond me). But you know what? Blogging is more fun.

It's holding them back [Why I don't learn Chinese - 20]

Previously in this intermittent - and wilfully provocative - series of mine I have concentrated on the aesthetic shortcomings of the Chinese language (sorry - but, to my ear, the sounds of Chinese are extraordinarily ugly) or its surprisingly limited practical utility, or on the purely personal circumstances that militate against me putting in the hard hours of study on it (I'm old, I'm lazy, my brain is tired of learning languages). However, there is also a political element to my aversion to the language. I get fed up with Chinese chauvinism about their language, with their delusional conviction that it is already a major world language and may one day displace English, French, and Spanish as a pre-eminent global lingua franca; I am even more irked by the government's relentless emphasis on promoting the learning of Mandarin as a central element of their 'soft power' offensive to increase Chinese influence around the world; and I am positively nauseated by the way that so many foreign Mandarin students here in China naively play along with this agenda (sucking up to the Chinese Communist Party amplifies their megalomania, you ninnies!).

But even more than I believe that the Chinese language isn't any good for foreigners, I believe it isn't any good for the Chinese either. There are many fundamental deficiencies in this language that, I think, have been stifling Chinese progress for centuries, and are becoming a critical problem for the nation in this new century of giddyingly fast change. And so, perhaps the strongest reason for opposing the study of Mandarin by foreigners is that it bolsters a sense of satisfaction, of complacency in the Chinese about their language, and makes it less likely that they will ever start to contemplate the kind of radical language reform that I believe they urgently need. [What shape that reform might take I'll try to address briefly in a footnote.]

Here are some of the reasons why I say this.

How the Chinese language stunts the development of China

It restricts communication with the rest of the world

Mandarin Chinese is almost uniquely difficult for most other nationalities to learn (the most difficult language to learn, according to the US government's Foreign Service Institute). Therefore, despite the huge worldwide fad for Mandarin learning over the past decade, it is highly unlikely that more than a relative handful of foreigners will ever achieve a high level of fluency in Mandarin. This wouldn't matter so much if the gap between Mandarin and other languages, especially the European languages, were not so wide that it is also extraordinarily difficult for the Chinese to become highly proficient in any other language. I have spent most of my ten years in China working with very bright and highly-educated Chinese who have devoted a big part of their lives to English study and, in most cases, have spent a substantial amount of time overseas in English-speaking countries: all of them still have severely flawed spoken English, and hardly any of them can write English to save their life. And this is probably the top 1% of the top 1% I'm talking about here. The majority of Chinese who slog through years of compulsory English study in middle school and high school and university fail to achieve any worthwhile functional proficiency in it at all.

It restricts learning about the rest of the world

Mandarin is terrible at representing the phonetics of other languages. Hence, the attempt to transliterate foreign names into Chinese characters results in them being mangled beyond all recognition. Chinese  textbooks rarely if ever print foreign names in their original language/alphabet, or use the international phonetic alphabet as a guide to pronunciation, which leaves the study of foreign history, science, and culture hamstrung: Chinese students don't really know any of the names of the famous foreigners they read about. And so, even if their English has reached quite a high level, most Chinese are severely limited in what they can converse with foreigners about. This basic (and relatively easily solvable) problem is compounded many times over by the generally poor quality of foreign language learning in China over many years (resulting from a lack of funds to recruit native speaker teachers or provide overseas textbooks; and from a nationalistic arrogance that convinces them they don't need this kind of help, they can be completely self-sufficient in the teaching of foreign languages!), and by the miserable rates of pay offered to academic writers in general and to translators in particular. Very few people in China are able to read foreign books in their original language; and many of the Mandarin editions they have to rely on instead are utter travesties.

It restricts the ability to adapt to the modern world

Because of the character writing system, Chinese is hobbled when it comes to new word formation. The generation of novel characters is pretty much impossible, or rather, treated as impermissible (there are way too many of them already, after all). So, new words can only be created by the novel combination of pairs or triplets of existing characters. The possibilities for this are limited - well, certainly finite; whereas the scope for innovation in vocabulary is almost completely open-ended in alphabet-based languages. The intended meaning of the new combination is often not unambiguously evident from its component parts. And you don't get extra clues as to the etymology, grammatical function and so on of such a new word from its morphology alone, as you do in most other languages. Thus, in this Information Age, Mandarin is struggling to keep up with the demand for new vocabulary to describe the rapid changes we are experiencing in technology and society; more and more often, it is simply having to borrow words from English.

It limits the time available for the study of other subjects

Mandarin isn't just hard for foreigners to learn, it's hard for the Chinese to learn as well. I haven't been able to dig up authoritative figures on this (and there'll be quite a bit of variation at different levels of schooling, and between different parts of the country), but anecdotal accounts from the many students I've worked with suggest that learning their native language - particularly the grinding slog of memorising thousands of characters - eats up a massively disproportionate amount of class time, particularly in primary school, but to some extent on into the middle school and high school years as well.

It limits the capacity for thought

This is probably the most controversial assertion I have to make here (and I don't want to get sidetracked into a discussion of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis). I merely observe that the very limited grammar of Mandarin does seem to result in a lack of specificity on many occasions. And I have encountered quite a few scholarly asides to the effect that Mandarin seems ill-equipped for the tight framing of laws or for the more abstract realms of philosophy (the Chinese philosophical tradition almost completely ignores logic - and that's rather too apposite a metaphor for the way the country seems to run today!). In my own extensive experience of editing Chinese-English translations (in the spheres of academia, business, and general news), I have lost count of the number of times when I have come across an irresolvable ambiguity in the copy the translator has given me and then, on referring back to the translator and explaining very carefully the two or more possible meanings that are suggested by their English, have been told that it is impossible to distinguish between those meanings in the original Chinese.

I don't know quite how bad this problem really is, but it's certainly an issue - and one that's no doubt been exacerbated over the past half-century or so by the wilfully vapid political rhetoric of the Communist Party, although there it's more a question of the language attaining an elaborate meaninglessness (I've had A LOT of exposure to this over the last few days). Many Chinese seem to operate in a permanent fog of 'fuzzy logic' (no, that's dignifying it undeservedly; it's not a useful flexibility in regard to category distinctions that I'm talking about, much less a more general sort of open-mindedness, but just incomplete comprehension): they are frequently uncertain what anyone has said to them, but they rarely challenge or ask for clarification - they just accept this uncertainty and muddle along with it. Some might argue that this is potentially an admirable characteristic, a Daoist sort of laidback philosophy of going with the flow. I fear, however, that this frequent lack of clarity about things is perhaps one of the roots of the very attenuated quality of debate and analytical thought that I have experienced in China (and I'm often dealing with senior academics who contribute to government think tanks). I admit it's hard for a non-Chinese speaker to tell, though; is it the language itself that's at fault, or just the way that it is used? I can't say; but, in closing, I would mention that several of my Chinese friends who have achieved the greatest fluency in English tell me that they have come to prefer it to Mandarin as a medium of expression.

Footnote

So, there we have it. Mandarin Chinese is a liability to the Chinese nation, something that is severely impeding its progress towards becoming a fully modernised country and a major world power. In linguistic terms it is a bizarre throwback to an ancient era, an evolutionary dead-end which - but for China's long history of comparative isolationism - would probably have died out or undergone radical changes many centuries ago.

What are the alternatives? Well, over a couple of hundred years or so I imagine that global communications via the Internet will lead us towards a single world language. That language will probably be predominantly English (I say this without any element of national pride; it's just an historical accident that English has achieved a position of unchallengeable eminence as the world's No. 1 language; and the Internet is only likely to entrench that advantage, rather than undermine it). Chinese, and most other national/regional languages, will naturally wither into almost total disuse.

However, that's still a long way away. And I might be overestimating the extent to which 'local' languages will be rendered redundant by a dominant global language. A century or so from now, pretty much the whole world will be speaking "English" (though it is likely to have absorbed elements from many other languages as well, perhaps to the point where it is barely recognisable as a descendant of the language we speak today), but native languages may yet survive; perhaps we'll all be bilingual.

So - what hope for Mandarin Chinese, for the next century or two, and perhaps beyond? Well, most of my misgivings about the language arise from its writing system. It is chiefly that which makes it so incompatible with other languages, so restricted in its ability to grow and change, and so damned hard to learn (for Chinese and foreigners alike). Adopting an alphabetic system of writing would be enormously liberating for the language. It would certainly allow for more freedom in word creation. It would make the language vastly easier to read and write, and thus much easier to learn. It might even, over time, allow for the evolution of a more sophisticated grammar. I suspect it might possibly even facilitate a gradual abandonment of the tones (another particular bugbear of foreign Mandarin learners; although I have observed that many Chinese make mistakes with them as well), as the more flexible writing system provides for greater differentiation in the phonetic representation of sounds - and may thus find ways of distinguishing pronunciations other than the tonal system (thereby, perhaps, also opening the way for an expansion of the vocabulary, by, for example, incorporating more regional dialect into standard Mandarin).

It would be sad to see the disappearance of the character system, which of course has a long and rich history and undoubted aesthetic appeal. However, it's just not practical for a modern language in the modern world. I honestly believe the Chinese are going to have to learn to let it go. (Scholars will, I'm sure, preserve the knowledge of characters; and calligraphy may continue to be a popular art hobby, even if the meaning of the symbols has faded from popular knowledge - which in many cases it already has, anyway).

Oh, the paradox! [Why I don't learn Chinese - 19]

I actually made a bit of an effort to scrape the rust off my Chinese recently, the first time I've really bothered in 7 or 8 years.

And curiously enough, it happened while I was out of the country (and on the brink of quitting the damn place for good!).

It may just have been a case of being on holiday, having time on my hands. But I have time on my hands NOW, and I am finding it difficult to continue to apply myself to Chinese studies here.

I have a 'teach yourself' type self-study book given to me by a friend years ago, some time before I even moved to China. I have several times tried to work my way through it, but I've never got to the end. In fact, I think I've only once got much more than half-way. Time and again I break down about a quarter of the way into it.

Perhaps it's just not a very good book. Though I think it is; I've dipped into several other similar textbooks, and this one appears to be the pick of the crop.

Perhaps it's just that my motivation is stymied whenever I'm in China, and I am being constantly reminded of how little day-to-day utility there is in trying to speak the language (not to mention being constantly irritated by foreigners here tiresomely showing off the little bit of Chinese they know, when there's no real need for it).

And then again, perhaps it's just a matter of habit: I've never bothered to study Chinese while living here, but I have studied it intermittently in the UK. However, I am usually quite good at taking conscious control of my habits and modifying them. If I can give up drinking (such a central part of my life!), surely I ought to be able to cultivate a regular study-and-practise habit with learning a language.

I think it's primarily a matter of reaching a practical threshold of language competence with which you're comfortable. I've always been curious about whether I might be able to learn a little more Chinese, and whether this might markedly change my experience of the country; and, after a couple of months or more away, I was starting to fret about perhaps having forgotten all the Chinese I ever knew. So, I started dabbling with a bit of self-study again. But I reached that point about 4 or 5 chapters in (as I have so often in the past) where it just started seeming unreasonably difficult - and I couldn't find sufficient motivation to continue. The reason why it gets hard at this point is that the first 4 chapters are basically the Chinese I know. And the reason why this is all the Chinese I know is that this is all the Chinese I've ever seemed to need to know, for basic survival. And that, for whatever reasons (that might be another post or two on its own), is all the Chinese I've ever wanted to know.

The cone of silence

I believe I've mentioned in passing, though I haven't previously given it its own post in the notorious Why I don't learn Chinese series, that one of the things I most enjoy about not knowing much Chinese is not being bothered by other people's conversations all the time. In any country in the world, a great part of the conversation surrounding you in public places is crude, dumb, unfunny, and objectionably ill-informed or bigoted. I suffered from this sensation of almost continual annoyance particularly acutely during the years that I lived in South London, just before moving to China a decade ago. And it felt absolutely blissful to escape from it, to enter an environment where I was spared having the soul-crushing inanities of everyday conversation obtrude themselves into my consciousness all the time.

The curious thing is I've found myself similarly insulated from the background babble now that I'm back in the UK. Part of this might be that there are a lot of foreigners around (in the centre of Oxford, tourists and language students probably outnumber the locals two or three to one at this time of year), and so a lot of the chatter I overhear is still in incomprehensible foreign languages. And part of it may be that I am detuned from the English of British native speakers, grown unfamiliar with the thicker regional accents, and never been familiar with more recent slang terms and styles of speech and pop culture references: much of the 'English' I'm hearing sounds like a foreign language to me now.

But I suspect the main reason is this. When you know that the language surrounding you is going to be opaque to your understanding, you stop paying attention to it. The key to not overhearing the conversations of everyone around you is not to listen - but that is a very difficult knack to acquire. Now that I've done so, I hope I don't lose it again.

Who was it said, "I'm not an eavesdropper; I just have an Attention Surplus Disorder"? Ah yes, it was the compulsive epigrammatist Robert Brault.

My Fantasy Girlfriend - sexy biker chick (mannequin)

I'm not getting out enough lately. And, odd as this may seem, when I'm not encountering any (even remotely) potential real-life girlfriends, my libido - indolent at the best of times - pretty well shuts down completely: I don't even find myself reminiscing and fantasising about lost loves and unattainable beauties any more.

However, I had a neat idea for this month's 'Fantasy Girlfriend' post: the one female figure to catch my eye in the past month or two has been the rather svelte (and red-haired!) shop-window dummy in the sex shop just down the road.  For the past few weeks, she's been all studs and leather - tight-fitting jacket, very tight-fitting skirt, and a leather cap. Quite an appealing look, I find.

But... I wanted to get a picture for you; and that proved a gumption test too far (A little throwaway motorcycling allusion for you there!).  The sun reflecting on the shop window made it impossible to get a decent shot of her from outside (I began to suspect that they'd treated the glass in some way, to confound the cheapskates like me who wanted to try to derive some pleasure from their merchandise without actually making a purchase).  And I was, of course, much too shy to go inside the shop and ask if I could take a picture (or to snap and run!!).

In any case, she has recently been re-costumed: she's much more demurely - or, at any rate, more conventionally - attired now in a skimpy cocktail dress. The allure has waned.

But I shall always have fond memories of her biker chick period.

[I couldn't help but be reminded of the occasion of the most profound sexual embarrassment I have suffered in China (other than in bed, of course...).  I once found myself taking a cab in the far south-west of Beijing, an area where few laowai ever ventured, and where the drivers were even more aggressive/psychotic than we are used to in the city centre. My driver for this trip was unduly excited about having a foreigner in his passenger seat, and became extremely talkative. I played along at first, because he seemed quite a jolly fellow. But he soon became relentlessly inquisitorial about my love life: did I have a girlfriend? what kind of girls did I like? I wasn't gay, was I? so, what kind of girls did I like? did I like Chinese girls? which part of China did I think produced the best girls?... and on and on and on. I made the mistake of trying to terminate the conversation by mentioning that I had recently started going out with an American girl.

He shook his head sadly. He felt obliged to demonstrate to me why this was a misguided choice. He rummaged under his dash for something, pulled out a very well-thumbed pack of playing cards with nude pictures of Chinese girls on them. He proceeded to show me most of the deck, commenting in detail on each girl's assets, and challenging me to guess where she was from; and then laboriously explaining to me how I should have been able to tell.  ("Such a long neck! Probably a Manchu girl. Oh, she has tits!  Must be from the north." etc., etc., etc.)  And he was still driving through heavy traffic the while, although looking almost exclusively at me or his mucky playing cards.

It was on this day that I determined not merely to give up any further attempt to study Chinese, but to assiduously endeavour to unlearn the little that I then knew.]

It really is incredibly hard to learn [Why I don't learn Chinese - 16]

I was sent a link recently to this excellent essay (written more than 20 years ago, it would seem), Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard, by David Moser, an academic Sinologist and long-time Beijing resident. It is a pretty exhaustive account of why Chinese is such a uniquely difficult language to learn (for non-East Asians, particularly; but, in fact, for everyone, even the Chinese themselves).

In this occasional series, I mostly confine myself to a more personal response to the challenge of learning Chinese - pondering my particular learning handicaps, my lack of emotional engagement with the language, my doubts about its practical utility (even for someone living in China - and certainly for anyone living anywhere else!), and so on. I haven't often attempted to address the qualities of the language itself that make it so dauntingly difficult to learn. I suppose I don't really need to; Moser has had the last word on that. [His bibliography includes a link to an article by another eminent Sinologist, Victor Mair, on the near-impossibility of using a Chinese dictionary.]

Moser warns us:

"Those who undertake to study the language for any other reason than the sheer joy of it will always be frustrated by the abysmal ratio of effort to effect. [My emphasis] Those who are actually attracted to the language precisely because of its daunting complexity and difficulty will never be disappointed."

So, you see, it's not just me.

Of course, Moser may have modified his view somewhat in the interim - now that he has, I'm sure, attained a much higher level of mastery in the language than back when he was a struggling graduate student. And he was clearly being at least slightly tongue-in-cheek when he observed a few lines later in the essay:

"Those who can still remember their original goals will wisely abandon the attempt then and there, since nothing could be worth all that tedious struggle. Those who merely say, 'I've come this far - I can't stop now' will have some chance of succeeding, since they have the kind of mindless doggedness and lack of sensible overall perspective that it takes."

Nevertheless, beneath the overlay of humorous exaggeration, I think his argument is basically earnest and accurate. Chinese is, for all sorts of reasons, much, much harder to learn than almost any other language. Only dedicated translators and academics can realistically expect to ever achieve a reasonably high level of functioning in it. And, in order to do that, they must be prepared to give up many hundreds - nay, probably many, many thousands - of hours of soul-crushing effort to study and practice.

If mastering Chinese is not to be one of the central aims of your life, is it worth bothering with it at all?

Well, that's what this series of mine is about. I haven't yet found any convincing argument that it is worth bothering with - but  I remain open to suggestions on the point.

I am a classicist [Why I Don't Learn Chinese - 15]

I studied Latin and Ancient Greek at school and university - to a very high level.

They are reputedly hard languages: very different scheme of grammar from English, and an alien script for Greek. In terms of the workload, at any rate, they constitute almost certainly the most demanding Arts subject* at Oxford... and one of the most physically demanding sets of exams in the world (11 or 12 three-hour papers in a little over a week, for both the mid-point and final classification in the undergraduate degree; it was commonly said that only the entrance test for the Japanese Civil Service was more gruelling).

In short, I think my brain is full; or more properly - since I have, to be honest, forgotten nearly all of the Latin and Greek I used to know - worn out by that exceptional language-learning effort in my younger days.

Even more to the point, Latin and Greek are dead languages. Nobody speaks them any more, and, in learning them, little or no attention is paid to speaking them aloud or attempting to use them as a medium of daily communication. (Some folks have experimented with 'communicative method' teaching, attempting to develop skills in these languages by adopting the same language teaching methodologies used for modern languages. That approach, though, was pretty much unheard of in my day, and is still, I think, a bit of an eccentric minority interest.)

And I was quite happy with that. I learned these languages with a focus on the literature. I was thrilled about the prospect of being able to read great authors like Horace and Homer and Tacitus and Thucydides in their original language. It seemed a much more worthwhile objective than being able to mount a fumbling conversation with a shopkeeper on a summer holiday in France - which was about all the modern linguists at my school ever seemed to achieve.

I liked French, and pursued that to quite a high level too. I did a supplementary literature-based exam in it (on Voltaire's Candide) when I was 15, and continued studying in my own time during my 6th Form days - reading quite big chunks of Balzac, Maupassant, and Zola (more, probably, than most of the French specialists among my contemporaries), and trying to force myself to watch my favourite French films without referring to the English subtitles. Trouble was, my focus was solely on the literature. I never went to France for a holiday as a kid; and when I finally visited for the first time as an undergraduate, I found myself embarrassingly tongue-tied. I had liked to think I could maybe have discussed Flaubert or Baudelaire with someone, but in practice I could scarcely buy a baguette.

I'm afraid my interest in Chinese is much the same. I'd love to be able to read Chinese, particularly some of the classical literature: the Analects of Confucius and the great poets of the Tang and Song dynasties. But that damned writing system is just too much of a barrier to entry. I know I haven't got a hope in hell of cracking it, coming to the study in my weary middle years, and when I have so many other interests and distractions in my life.

You don't really need the language to buy a baguette - or a mantou.

[* I suppose Chinese is probably even harder. But in my undergraduate days, nobody really paid it much attention. I'd guess there were probably only a few dozen people in the whole of the UK studying it back then.]

A refusal of commitment [Why I don’t learn Chinese – 14]

As I’ve observed before, Asian languages – especially those with a tonal system, and most especially Mandarin Chinese – are extraordinarily difficult for most ‘Westerners’ to master (at least, compared to French or Spanish, the most popular second language choices for English speakers).

Every laowai I know who’s attained a good level in their Mandarin… a) studied the language back home (usually as a major at university, and sometimes even back in high school); b) studied full-time for at least six months when they first came; c) continued with lessons intermittently over a number of years; and d) shacked up with a Chinese partner.

All in all, a very heavy commitment of time, money, and effort.

Many of these folks then left China, unlikely ever to use their Mandarin again.

Refusing to make that investment in the language reassures me I’m not going to be here forever.

It doesn't travel well

Or, Why I don't learn Chinese [13]  (A long overdue revival of one of my favourite series on here!)

The Chinese are apt to boast of their language being the most widely spoken in the world.

After all, they say, there are 1.4 billion of us - what other language comes close to having that many speakers?

Well, in fact, of course, not even Chinese - putonghua, the official standardized form of the language, commonly known in the West as 'Mandarin' - comes close to having that many speakers.  China's 55 recognised ethnic minorities (and various unrecognised minorities) each have their own - mostly quite unrelated - languages, and they account for some 10 percent of the population here.  Even within the 'Chinese' languages spoken by the majority Han population, there are at least six major families of languages in addition to Mandarin, all pretty much mutually unintelligible.  

The highest estimates for numbers of people who speak some Mandarin here are not much over 1 billion, and often as low as 700 or 800 million.  And, in many cases, that's not going to be much more than a smattering - spoken garbled and grudgingly by people who regard it as a second language.  And even amongst that large part of the Chinese population who are categorised as first-language Mandarin speakers (rather than speakers of Shanghainese [part of the Wu group of languages] and Cantonese [part of the Yue group] and so on) there are many accents/dialects that are barely intelligible to 'standard' Mandarin speakers: the people of Sichuan, for example, turn the tone system completely on its head!

People who speak a form of Mandarin that foreign students of the language might just about recognise, and speak it as their everyday language, are mainly confined to the handful of provinces in the northeast of the country, and number perhaps only a few hundred million.  (Many foreign students find that even the accent and dialect of Beijing - which is supposed to be the foundation of standard Mandarin - is a bit of a challenge, and prefer to study further north-east, in Harbin or Shenyang, where the Mandarin they use is 'purer'.)

But, yes, even so, Mandarin does certainly boast the largest number of native speakers - by far - of any language in the world.

But the vast majority of them live in China.  Until recently, the overseas Chinese diaspora were predominantly Cantonese or Hakka speakers. More Mandarin-speaking mainlanders are joining the exodus these days, but.... outside of a dense-packed overseas Chinese community, where are you going to hear Chinese spoken?

Is it an official language in any other country of the world?  I think not. Malaysia would be the likeliest candidate, I would think - but NO; English, yes; Chinese, no.  Ah, Singapore.  But that's about it.

Is it an internationally used language in any field of business or academe?  Apart from its inevitable recognition as one of the official languages of the United Nations.... I think not.

Mandarin Chinese, basically, is only spoken by Chinese people to other Chinese people - and almost exclusively within China.  (And even here, they are starting to accept that they've got to learn to use English to communicate with the outside world.)

In an article (originally published in Language Today in Dec. 1997), The World's 10 Most Influential Languages, a Swiss linguistics enthusiast called George H. J. Weber made the argument that - based on a matrix of factors including the "socio-literary prestige" attaching to a language (another area where I suspect Chinese scored nul points) and the global standing of the countries that used it - English was by far the world's leading language.  Admittedly, that was quite a long time ago now; but, as of 2008, Weber was confident that demographic shifts and so on had not had any significant impact on the basis of his ranking.  Chinese came in at No. 6 - almost entirely due to its sheer volume of speaker population.  English prevailed in the top spot - far, far ahead of French and Spanish in second and third places - primarily because it is spoken, to a significant degree, in well over 100 countries around the world.  Chinese is never going to be able to match that.

I do find it difficult (impossible!) to justify making the effort to learn a language that only enables you to talk to the people of one country - even if there are an awful lot of them!  Arabic or Spanish would be my top choices for another language.  Or maybe Russian.  (I already have a smattering of French and German.)

Inappropriate laughter

Yet another reason why I don't learn Chinese....

Well, I just noticed it had been nearly eleven months since I last had an entry in this series, and I wouldn't want my readers to go thinking that I'd started secretly taking Mandarin lessons.

Another of the reasons why I've struggled to find any motivation to study the language here seriously (and this is something, I know, that has dissuaded many other foreigners from the attempt too, or at least made their efforts seem much, much harder) is that China is one of the most discouraging environments in the world for trying to learn the local language. I've mentioned before a certain unhelpfulness that seems to be unfortunately characteristic of the Chinese in dealing with foreigners who are attempting to speak their language - that they will make no allowance for your linguistic defects, either in attempting to understand you or in attempting to make their own speech simpler for you to understand. (Exceptions prove the rule: I heard tell once of a Beijing rock musician who cut a swathe through the ranks of young female Mandarin students here - largely by virtue of the fact that he could flatter their language ability by managing to understand them and by making himself understandable to them.)

The related point I wanted to make today is that the Chinese people are not, in general, very encouraging towards the bumbling foreigner's efforts to speak their language. Whether it is the taxi driver hectoring you to repeat your destination to him six times until you get the tones right, or the storekeeper staring at you blankly because you clumsily said 'sell' rather than 'buy' (same sound, different tone!), or a class of university students giggling uncontrollably at your attempt to wish them a Happy New Year..... yes, it's just very, very, very discouraging. Obtuse incomprehension or open derision everywhere you go.

I have on a number of occasions explained this (as nicely as I can) to groups of students when they've asked me why I don't study Chinese. I have pointed out that Chinese people very commonly laugh at foreigners whenever they try to speak Chinese. ("Oh no, we're sure that isn't true.") I've explained how dispiriting this is for someone who's doing their best to learn, struggling with a language that is especially alien and difficult for them. ("Oh yes, we can see that.") And I've explained that laughing at people like this is in fact considered very rude in 'Western' culture. ("Oh yes, we understand that. How terrible!") And then I've told them that if I try to speak some Chinese for them, they must promise not to laugh. ("Oh, of course. We would never do something like that.")

Then I trot out one of the few phrases or sentences I can say reasonably well. And they all laugh at me.

Every single time.

I fear I'm just not musical enough

Yet another reason why I don't learn Chinese....

Sorry, I don't get the tone thing at all. I guess I just have a tin ear.

Perhaps if I'd started younger, I might have had a chance. An item in the UK's Daily Telegraph last week reported a recent scientific study which seems to suggest that learning a tonal language in childhood may help you to develop perfect pitch.

Hmm - I confess to a certain scepticism on this. The Torygraph story is too slight to be of much value, and I can't see why it is 'news' now, since the original study appears to have been done back in 2004! Aha! I've just discovered this article in the New Scientist, which is evidently what prompted the Torygraph hack into action; but even this is dredging back into the past researches of Dr Diana Deutsch, not turning up anything new. I found rather more interesting (oh, how Google sucks you in!!) this piece from Scientific American which suggests that there may be a genetic predisposition to developing/using/learning a tonal language. You see, that feels like my problem: I've out-evolved the tones!

Your 'Chinese self' is a moron

Another reason why I don't learn Chinese....

There's a funny and perceptive piece by Kaiser Kuo in his Ich Bin Ein Beijinger column in The Beijinger magazine this month (online here) in which he notes that even people who appear to have reached quite a good level of fluency in Chinese are, in reality, still very limited in the grammar and vocabulary at their disposal and the range of situations they can comfortably operate in. Hence, you can find yourself coming across as a child or an idiot when you try to engage in Mandarin conversation with a native speaker. This is something else that discourages me from making much of an effort with the language. I know I'm never going to be able to function in it with genuine fluency (but I have the bumbling basics to be able to order food or buy train tickets; and that's all I feel I need).

Now, I suspect there's a certain amount of false modesty in this article. I've met Kaiser a few times, and his Chinese seems pretty damned good to me (after all, he's been here, on and off, for something like 25 years now; and he's sung in a Chinese rock band, for heaven's sake!). Then again, perhaps he has a bit of an inferiority complex, because overseas Chinese tend to be held to higher standards: the local Chinese tend to assume initially that anyone who looks Chinese must be a native speaker, and, even when they discover that this is not the case, they seem to believe that all ethnic Chinese have an innate capacity to learn and excel in Mandarin. The people who always complain to me most about how difficult they find it to learn Mandarin (and/or to use their Mandarin effectively in day-to-day situations) are foreign-born Chinese - even though they are, in almost all cases, at least starting off with the advantage of having spoken the language a bit with their grandparents when they were kids.

Kaiser's point, I think, is that really high-level fluency - the sort of fluency we aspire to, the sort of fluency that would allow us to communicate as freely as we do in our native tongue, the sort of fluency that would allow us to fully convey our personality and our sense of humour - is, if not quite impossible to achieve, then at least extremely rare. Most people who think they're 'fluent' (and are indeed impressively so in many situations) still suffer from certain deficiencies which impede completely natural, unselfconscious communication.

A further amusing observation which Mr K calls to our attention is this: since most foreigners get to practice their Mandarin primarily with their wives/girlfriends* or with taxi drivers, their 'Chinese persona' tends to be coloured by these models - to veer wildly between Carrie Bradshaw and Jake La Motta.

* Although I feel that the gender imbalance in the expat population has narrowed in the last few years, there are probably still considerably more men than women. And, for a variety of reasons, foreign guys do - mostly - seem to dig Chinese chicks.... whereas Chinese men are less universally admired.

Only the snow can begin to explain

I was put in mind of this piece - perhaps my favourite of all Cummings's work - by yesterday's poetic exchanges on The Barstool with one of my translator buddies. I generally disparage the lack of flexibility or precision that seems to afflict the Chinese language as a result of its limited grammar and vocabulary, and in particular the impenetrable ambiguities that can often arise through the same word/character being able to serve as noun and verb (or adjective), and sometimes indeed as different words with quite dissimilar meanings. However, in poetry at least, this blurring of grammatical boundaries can sometimes work a certain charm. Such playful reinvention of grammar was Cummings's trademark, and nowhere was it more thoroughgoing or more successful than here, I think. A lovely, lovely piece. I especially like "and down they forgot as up they grew" and "more by more they dream their sleep".

anyone lived in a pretty how town

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did.

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

E.E. Cummings (1894-1962)

Keeping my seethe to myself

Yet another reason why I don't learn Chinese.....

The other day I had to pay a visit to my local branch of the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China to pay my monthly phone bill.

Trying to accomplish anything in a Chinese bank can be an exhausting gumption test, particularly in a small neighbourhood branch where no-one speaks any English. But my little branch has been getting a lot better over the past year or so. They've taken on quite a few new staff - mostly girls - who do seem friendly and helpful, and even fairly brisk and efficient. And just lately, they have appointed a middle-aged lady as a supervisor (and she does speak a little bit of English), and she seems to have got all the service points working much more efficiently.

Well, all but one. Dumb-as-a-Post is still there. He's a surly young man of about thirty, and, I think, the only member of staff who's been there ever since I moved here about 4 years ago. He is just unbelievably sour, slow-moving, obtuse, and obstructive - a real old school China service professional!

I hadn't seen him in there for a while, and was hoping he might have left. But yesterday, he was back - and his was the only window that was free. I was so dreading the encounter that I considered joining one of the other lines (none of them had more than one or two people in them, but some transactions in Chinese banks can take a very long time indeed). Instead, I decided to face up to my nemesis.

I think he must have smelled my fear. I passed him a scrap of paper with my number on it and told him I wanted to pay my telephone fee. This is what I always do. For the past 18 months or so, nobody has given me any shit about this. One of the nice young girls has keyed the number into the computer, printed off my bill, taken my money and given me my change with a minimum of fuss - and even, of late, with a breezy smile. Dumb-as-a-Post is looking at me with a mixture of contempt and incomprehension. He decides - as he usually does - that I really ought to fill out a 'request slip' detailing the nature of my transaction, in full, in Chinese. Lately, the other staff seem to have been quite happy to dispense with this otiose piece of paper entirely. If they do feel that it is somehow a 'necessary procedure', they will be quite happy to fill out the chit for me, using the information from the bill printout - it only takes 15 seconds. It should be pretty obvious to anyone, I would have thought, that, since I can hardly speak two words of Chinese, it is highly unlikely that I can read or write even one word. But Dumb-as-a-Post doesn't get this concept; he keeps waving the shitty little form in my face. And, unfortunately, the angelic supervisor lady is not around just at the moment.

I don't think it's just me. I think there's a reason why there's never much of a line at Dumb-as-a-Post's window. The other clerks were all looking at him as if he were a complete dickhead. So were some of the other customers. Soon, one of them came to my aid and filled out the form for me.

I mentioned this incident to a laowai friend that evening, and he said, "Don't you think you'd be able to deal better with situations like this if you spoke a bit more Chinese?"

"No," I replied quite emphatically. "First of all, if I'd shown any sign of being able to cope with things myself, that nice chap in the next line wouldn't have come over to help me. And second, I probably would have just called the clerk a dickhead in a language he could understand, and that probably wouldn't have helped."

We all suffer these vexing incidents from time to time. We all go through spells when we are particularly vulnerable to them, particularly low on patience and forebearance. We all - no matter how saintly and pacific our temperaments (and mine's not very) - experience the occasional bout of 'China rage'. And when this happens, and you get tempted to vent a bit, it's really much better to do it in an incomprehensible foreign language (although best to avoid the F-word, since almost everyone understands that these days!). Succumbing to the urge to swear at people in Chinese would be a very, very bad thing. And some of my foreign friends who speak good Chinese get themselves into bother because of this occasionally. I'd rather not expose myself to that risk, thank you. Ignorance of Chinese can be a kind of protective insulation. (Also, of course, you don't really know when they're insulting you..... except that you can usually deduce it from body language and so on; and I do in fact know most of the choicer swear words. Nevertheless, on balance, I maintain that not being able to swear at people in their own language does help to avoid unpleasantness sometimes.)

Interpreters everywhere

Yet another reason why I don't learn Chinese......

Most of my Chinese friends speak decent English. Most of my foreign friends speak at least a little bit of Chinese. The only two girls I've dated seriously here, though foreign, spoke very good Chinese. There's almost never any shortage of people on hand to translate for me; and thus there's zero pressure on me to learn Chinese myself.

And it's really rather nice to be able to devolve the wrangling-with-the-locals stuff to someone else. Partly, I suppose, it's a kind of laziness or cowardice - not wanting to get involved in the hassle that this so often entails. But also, I think, there's something more positive in it, something strangely buoyant and liberating - relinquishing some measure of your own control and autonomy, placing absolute trust in someone else to conduct a transaction for you.

Spanish

And a further reason why I don't learn Chinese.....

Spanish.

An attractive language. A sexy language. A language with a rich and diverse literature, both contemporary and historic. Spoken by more people, in more countries.

If I were going to make the effort to overcome the sense that my brain is too old and tired to learn another language, then I think Spanish - not Chinese - would be the worthiest candidate for my attention.

Arabic would be a very close second.

My brain is full

Another reason why I don't learn Chinese.

I have alluded before to the curse of the 'language Nazis', the people who are so self-righteous about the suffering they've put themselves through to 'master' Chinese that they are bitterly contemptuous of those of us who prefer not to bother - sometimes they will use the dread word "monolingual" as a term of disparagement. That particularly gets my goat.

I attained a high level of proficiency in Classical Latin and Greek, and also in French (at school I read substantial chunks of Voltaire, Zola, Flaubert and De Maupassant in the original). I have also, at various times, acquired (but then rapidly lost again!) at least a smattering of Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Modern Greek...... and Fijian. I can even speak a little Mandarin Chinese. Just a little.

I am not "monolingual" - I just happen not to find Chinese either attractive or useful, and thus can't muster any motivation to study it.

And it is much harder to learn new languages in middle age than it was when I was a young man. I wonder if the language centres of the brain may perhaps have a finite capacity..... and mine, I feel, are these days pretty much maxed out with English. I certainly know a few people here whose attempts to learn Chinese have produced little obvious result other than a slight deterioration in their English (my buddy The Chairman is a notorious example of this - although he's not the only one). I don't want that to happen to me.

Opportunity cost

Another reason why I don't learn Chinese......

It's just such a time-consuming undertaking that I can't see any value flowing from it that justifies the expense. Most of the reasons for learning the language I usually hear trotted out by people are, I think, entirely bogus or misguided.

I had a particularly obnoxious Australian woman berating me the other night on this point (my curmudgeonly drinking buddy, Big Frank, always maintains that the use of the word 'obnoxious' alongside 'Australian' is redundant, and I am often tempted to agree). She suggested that learning Chinese was somehow useful for learning about the history and culture of the country.

How??? Is there, in fact, anything worthwhile written about the history and culture of the country in Chinese? Even if there were, how many foreign students of Chinese actually attain a high enough reading level in the language to be able to read textbooks like this?

There is a lot written about Chinese history and culture in English. I am interested in these subjects. I read everything I can find about them. I wouldn't have time to do this if I were devoting 3 or 4 hours a day to trying to develop a rudimentary proficiency in the language. Trying to learn Chinese is, I feel, a waste of time.

Because it doesn't get you anywhere... (Why I don't learn Chinese [3])

I met a chap last night who has come to Beijing for a one-week holiday. And he's going to spend it on an intensive Mandarin course. I was flabbergasted! This is not my idea of fun. This is not anyone's idea of fun.

He knows what he's getting himself into. He studied Chinese some years ago (at University, maybe; I'm not quite sure - it was a fleeting party conversation), but it has withered from disuse. He now finds himself living and working in Vietnam - with a Chinese driver and maid who speak no English. So, he'd like to be able to communicate a little better with them. That makes sense. He complains he feels frustrated that although, in theory, he has a great opportunity to keep his Chinese skills in good shape by having daily conversational practice with his domestic staff, in fact he gets bogged down at the level of issuing basic instructions, and can't understand too much of anything they say to him in return. That sounds familiar. And he's not very confident that one week of mind-breaking study is really going to get him over that hump. Indeed not - but I suppose it's brave of him to try.

I was reminded by this little exchange of some of the reasons why, for most people, the attempt to learn Chinese is such a miserable experience - but these should be the substance of a further post.

My point here was meant to be this: Mandarin Chinese - far more than most other languages I have encountered - seems to produce these 'ceilings' of functionality that it can be extremely difficult to break through. To some extent this phenomenon is no doubt engendered by the characteristics of the language. However, I think it is probably rather more the result of the nature of the language environment in China; and in particular, of the fact the Chinese - for whatever reason or combination of reasons - appear to be uniquely obtuse (or mischievous or malevolent??) in dealing with non-native speakers: they rarely if ever make any allowance for your level of Mandarin.

Often (though this is less of a problem in the big cities today than it was a decade ago; I expect it is still quite common in the countryside) they will be baffled, disbelieving that you are attempting to speak their language, and will simply fail to make any attempt to process what you are saying. But then, if they do recognise that you speak some Mandarin, they seem to assume that you speak it well, and will enthusiastically launch into an animated conversation. They won't slow down their speed of speech for you. They won't do anything to soften their accent. They won't simplify their vocabulary. They won't try to think of alternate ways of expressing something. They won't attempt intelligent guesses to rectify your mispronunciations and grammatical slips.

With some of them, it almost seems to be a perverse kind of game: whatever your level of Mandarin is, your Chinese interlocutor will take a wicked delight in finding it and then demonstrating to you that he or she still has a higher level they can speak at. I have seen many good Mandarin speakers almost weep with frustration at this on occasion.

This naivety - or bloodymindedness - about dealing with imperfect speakers of their language goes hand in hand with a certain national penchant for unhelpfulness. Time and again I have seen laowai friends with a really good Mandarin level get involved in protracted arguments over giving directions to a taxi driver, buying a railway ticket, or trying to get a cold beer from a streetside stall. And I am afraid that I have reached the conclusion that - at least in simple, everyday encounters of this kind - the one thing you really do not want is to become involved in a conversation.

In situations like this, my functional level of Mandarin is just about as good as any of my friends'. In some ways it is better. I simply ask for what I want - in the barest, most fractured terms. Then I repeat myself. And, if necessary, I repeat myself again, with a really determined look on my face. And - 9 times out of 10 - people realise that there is no fun to be had with me, and they give me what I want fairly promptly.

But if you get into a conversation - oh, god help you!