My whole college experience was turned upside down a few weeks ago: besides credits from the actual curriculum, we also have to receive six credits through a chosen activity. That activity can be tutoring, going to events at the local Goethe Institut or taking extra classes. Most people chose the latter. There's a whole bunch of simple classes to choose from: funshopping, casino strategies, first aid classes. But I was stubborn and decided to go for one of the most difficult languages in the world: Mandarin.
I had my first class back in November. My dad had already laughed at me for days before I'd even started this class. 'You're tone deaf, you'll never be able to learn Chinese!'
Thanks for having faith in me, dad...
Tone deaf as I may be, I had no other choice than to follow these classes. After the first class, I was totally in love with Mandarin. I'd learned ten words and how to write their characters. If that was what these classes were going to be like for the next eight weeks, I'd be fine.
I wasn't fine when I came back the next week. I was having more and more trouble understanding my teacher, a tiny Chinese woman with a gigantic accent. She was funny, sweet and racist at the same time. Just a few things she liked to say:
Her Dutch wasn't very good, but she tried everything she could to make the course easier for us. When we had to learn a new character, she told us a story to make it easier to remember the character. For example nü (forgive me for not adding the right tone to the vowel), which means woman.
I had my first class back in November. My dad had already laughed at me for days before I'd even started this class. 'You're tone deaf, you'll never be able to learn Chinese!'
Thanks for having faith in me, dad...
Tone deaf as I may be, I had no other choice than to follow these classes. After the first class, I was totally in love with Mandarin. I'd learned ten words and how to write their characters. If that was what these classes were going to be like for the next eight weeks, I'd be fine.
I wasn't fine when I came back the next week. I was having more and more trouble understanding my teacher, a tiny Chinese woman with a gigantic accent. She was funny, sweet and racist at the same time. Just a few things she liked to say:
- Maybe Chinese people yellow because they drink water from Yellow River?
- China look like chicken
- You Dutch people all have big noses!
Her Dutch wasn't very good, but she tried everything she could to make the course easier for us. When we had to learn a new character, she told us a story to make it easier to remember the character. For example nü (forgive me for not adding the right tone to the vowel), which means woman.
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It lookes like this and our teacher explained: 'Your mother is a woman, right? And she has back and legs, right? That vertical line is back and legs. And horizontal line is arms. The last line, when your mom is pregnant with you, she het ugly and round.'
I'm still not sure if this was the Chinese version of a 'yo momma' joke, but I laughed way too hard. It was the last time in weeks that I would leave during Mandarin class.
Things escalated quickly in week three. We went from saying 'Hello, how are you?' straight to 'I am studying Chinese at the university of Rotterdam'. I could not write it in characters, I could not pronounce it without breaking my tongue and I was seriously confused by the grammar (or lack thereof). It got only worse when I learned to say: 'May I ask where the bathroom is?'.
In Chinese (without most of the tones since I can't type half of them), you say that like this: 'Qing wèn, wishoujian zà i nà r?'. It was total suicide for my Western tongue to pronounce it. When I finally worked up the courage to try, my tonedeafness kicked in. Instead of saying 'May I ask...', I said 'Qìng wĕn', which apparently means 'Kiss me please'...
I came very close to giving up on Mandarin that day.
Three weeks before I had to take my final in Mandarin, things changed. I don't know what happened, but I experienced this magical moment in which everything just clicked. Suddenly I understood everything my teacher said to me in Mandarin.
In the last two weeks I studied the language more thorough than ever before and found myself making up sentences of my own and leaving series of characters in the corners of my notepad.
On the 22nd of January I wrote my test. If you follow me on Twitter, you already know that I scored 100%. When those three digits appeared on my computer screen, I was overwhelmed with joy. I'd worked so hard for this course, but still I couldn't believe I had aced it.
The funny thing is that I made a few mistakes in the multiple choice part. I'd focused on sentences and characters, not on facts such as the number of native Mandarin speakers. I scored 100% because of the bonus question. Remember how I told you I was making up my own chracters? That's what saved me. The bonus question was: write this question down in characters: 'Do you study Chinese at the university in Holland too?
That looks kinda like this:
Looking back on it, I'm a bit sad that the course is over. Maybe, just maybe, I'll take anotehr class sometimes. For the next eight weeks I'll be taking another extra class: Spanish. I can't wait for it to start.
Stay Awesome!
