or how / why you should learn Mandarin. Yes the title is gratuitous, but it will land me higher on google.
How to:
1. Learn Logograms: they aren’t as frightening as you might think. The easiest way to remember them is to make up a bogus story based upon etymology (much like remembering people’s names). The following book suggests just such an approach – though written for Japanese instruction, the book teaches only meanings, not pronounciation. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the method it’s easily ported to Mandarin:
I first read it when studying Japanese many years ago. The author advocates using character radicals to construct personalized meanings for hard to remember words, since the vast majority of Chinese logograms are combinations of three-dozen or so basic symbols. For exampled, I learned 洽谈 (qia4tan2; “hold talks / discussion”) as “flowing (water) contracts and fire.” Obviously, during all negotiations we want our contracts to be flexible, but also to get our way through fiery speech. Or it’s possible to simply do a visual association – when I first learned 高 (gao1, “high; up”) I decided that it looked like an alien sitting in a ufo that was high above the ground. Yes it is stupid, but it works.
2. Speak: tones aren’t so bad (they lie, there are actually at least 6 or 7 ‘tones’ in normal Mandarin, if you consider the idiosyncratic multi-word tone changes); I find the best way is to try to memorize them within each character, and try to divorce yourself from relying on Pinyin notation. That being said, if you speak *fast* enough, no one will really care, since context will usually carry the day. It’s at least a valid method of walking before running.
More importantly, speaking Chinese often will give your face an extensive workout. I find that this is underemphasized in language instruction – allow your mouth to take on unusual shapes. With Chinese, move your tongue back slightly as the starting point, and then find out how to produce the sounds properly.
But why would we want to learn Chinese?
1. To sell fake American antiques to our gullible Chinese overlords after the invasion and subsequent occupation.*
That’s the most compelling reason i can think of. Furthermore, Mandarin is only really spoken by a couple hundred million or so people in Northeast China – a really boring place, thanks to the cultural revolution. Down in the South, where the interesting stuff is they all speak some bumpkin-local-dialect, which bears about as much resemblance as to the mother tongue as French does to German. And even though Chinese is become important in business and academia, most of the people who will be willing to do business / academe with you probably already speak English. Go learn something useful, like mathematics or poetry.
* A more comprehensive analysis of geopolitical realities puts China’s rise ‘past’ the US well beyond 2040, blithely assuming no major roadblocks (of which there are potentially many).
