blood cry in chinese ☺️

month three of me learning chinese (im dying).

Photo by Randy Yip on Unsplash

an absolute quirky update 😭

nobody is better at language, because learning is a lifetime event, even when it’s our mother tongue. we can’t be perfectly perfect because sometimes, even in the language our mother taught us and communicated with us ever since we were in the womb, there are still plenty of empty spaces waiting to be filled. language is like a never-ending puzzle. the funny thing is, you don’t even know if you’ve got some huge missing pieces until suddenly, one day, you realise you have absolutely no idea what someone is talking about.

okay, this is actually my second time learning chinese. if you’ve ever wondered what happened to my first attempt, i’ve given up. i’ve totally devastated myself in the game of tones and those thousands of words that sound suspiciously similar. turned out, giving up was probably one of the worst decisions i’ve made in my language-learning life.

i’ve been holding this curiosity in my mind for years, though. like, “what the heck? this language can’t be that hard”. and a couple of months ago, i dared myself to bring back that challenge again. maybe i should dive differently this time, so getting down to the benthic zone wouldn’t cost me my lungs.

to give you some context, i had learned japanese for approximately three years, maybe more. since high school, i took japanese courses, and by the time i enrolled in my first major, japanese literature, i could pretty much read all hiragana, katakana, and kanji.

kanji… even though i nearly died trying to get an A in that subject, it really cost me my peace and my entire free time. i spent my time between classes, my weekends, and pretty much every spare minute i had, locked in somewhere lying on the green grass, sitting in a library, or just at my boarding house, because we needed to put around 5,000 characters into our brains and remember them. the meaning, how to read them, how the reading changed when you put them together with a different character, and all that jazz. yes, 5,000 characters. in one semester.

even though sometimes i forgot how to read a kanji, most of the time i could still remember what it meant. kanji is, after all, a set of characters originally borrowed from chinese, and many of them are based on visual ideas or concepts. if you’ve been exposed to them enough, sometimes you can just look at a character and somehow imagine what it means. the reading, though? that’s a whole different story (most of the time i be more remembered the meaning rather than how it sound).

and now i’m learning chinese.

i think what i’ve learned about myself is that i always have my own pattern when it comes to learning. i can’t just hire someone to teach me or send myself to a course and blindly follow their method if i haven’t figured out how my own brain actually understands things. when i was taking courses, maybe 30% of my learning was following their pattern and the other 70% was just me being a messy scholar and figuring things out in my own weird way.

so, for my chinese learning now, i paid for a subscription to a whole app, bought a template for HSK 1–3, and started building my own system around it. and honestly, i can say that i’m quite impressed with myself because, finally, i think i’ve figured out my learning pattern in chinese.

but of course, there are still so many hardships. if i had to connect my chinese learning experience to my japanese experience, there are probably three things that keep making me question my life.

the first one is the “bunpo”. i’m not actually sure what the proper word for this is in chinese, but the easy way to explain it is grammar and sentence structure.

i’ve heard enough people say that japanese bunpo is more complex than chinese, and that chinese grammar is actually much simpler. i can kind of understand why now that i’ve reached a certain level of chinese.

i think why japanese bunpo is hard because it feels like my brain has to rearrange everything it already knows about how a sentence should work. the word order is different (in chinese as well), the verb usually comes at the end, and then there are these tiny particles like は, が, を, に, and で that somehow completely change the relationship between words. japanese also leaves out a lot of information that english would normally make explicit, so sometimes i can understand every single word in a sentence and still have no idea what the sentence is actually trying to say.

then there are all the different verb forms, levels of politeness, and grammar patterns that seem to mean almost the same thing but have slightly different nuances. what makes it especially difficult is that i can’t always translate japanese directly into english and expect it to make sense. at some point, i have to stop translating word by word and start understanding the sentence as a whole.

chinese, at least for me so far, feels much more straightforward grammatically. it’s mostly the word order that makes my brain stop functioning. my brain is not braining whenever i switch between practising english to chinese and chinese to english. i’ll know exactly what the sentence means when i read it in chinese, and then suddenly, when i have to produce the sentence myself, every word in my brain decides to go on holiday.

the second one is the characters. 😭

i grew up remembering thousands of kanji, including how they sound in japanese and what they mean. then i started learning chinese and realised that, yes, japanese really did take these characters from chinese, but that doesn’t mean my brain is allowed to assume they work the same way.

like, what do you mean this character 好 is “suki” in japanese when it’s used in the sense of liking something, and now i have to remember it as “hǎo” in chinese, meaning good or nice?

excuse me?

i feel like i need to de-learn japanese in order to understand chinese sometimes.

i can look at a basic chinese sentence written in characters and somehow read the whole thing in japanese in my head, because my brain sees the kanji and immediately goes, “oh, i know this!” and then five seconds later i’m completely lost because the sentence isn’t actually japanese. japanese sentences are also usually a mix of kanji and hiragana or katakana, so my brain has spent years learning to recognise those combinations and understand how they work together. now chinese comes along and says, “well, good luck.”

for example, i can see something like:

日本語を勉強します。

my japanese brain immediately goes:

にほんごを べんきょうします。 nihongo o benkyou shimasu.

but if i look at the same characters from a chinese perspective, 日本語 is 日语 (rìyǔ) and 勉強 is 勉强 (miǎnqiǎng), and suddenly i’m sitting there wondering why the characters i spent years learning are now playing a completely different game.

this is probably one of the strangest parts of learning chinese after japanese. the characters look familiar enough to trick my brain into thinking i already know them, but familiar doesn’t mean the same. sometimes the familiarity actually makes things more confusing.

and the last one is… how every word sounds the same or similar.

i wouldn’t even start talking about how one sound can represent more than three different characters with completely different meanings. at this point, i’m pretty confident with my basic chinese when it’s sitting quietly in front of me as text. i can watch slow chinese vlogs around HSK 1–3 level (i slow the video down to 0.75x, obviously 😭) and i can understand quite a bit, especially with subtitles. of course, not perfectly.

but then there’s listening.

i have a chinese-speaking best friend, and lately we spent a couple of weeks out of town in the same villa. if you asked me who my biggest supporter is in this chinese-learning journey, there she is.

she really wants me to study in china for no friggin reason, and she’s been pushing me to take a course at a language centre there. she’s probably the happiest person alive whenever i tell her i’ve decided to jump back into learning chinese.

and guess what she did during our stay and our trip?. in every possible situation, she kept communicating with me in chinese. with a native accent. at native speed. she spent a decade in china when she was younger, so she speaks ridiculously fast, like an actual native speaker.

i mean, look at me. feeling blind and deaf at the same time??

have some mercy, please. 😭

i can understand chinese when it’s written down. i can understand slow chinese when someone is speaking clearly and gives me subtitles. i can even understand the grammar when i’ve spent enough time staring at it until the pieces finally click.

but put me in front of someone speaking naturally and suddenly every word sounds like it has three identical twins.

basically, i need a lot of motivation to pass the test i’m planning to take next year. wherever this takes me, i honestly don’t care. i just want to be fluent in chinese. and maybe this is the most baseless motive and zero-reasoning way to learn something. and i get this weird sense of fulfilment whenever i finally crack the bunpo code and when i suddenly understand why a sentence is structured that way, why this word is here, why that particle is being used, why one thing has to come before another. you know what i mean. 😢

there’s still one thing i really need to practise harder, though: making my ears useful enough to distinguish all those confusing sounds. so, please pray for me ☺️☺️☺️

and i promise next year i’ll sometimes write in chinese, even though no one ever dared to read it.

because who cares. 🤣

ˢᵖᵉᵃᵏᵉᵃˢʸ