As a student of the Chinese language, I constantly find myself searching for metaphors to describe the learning process. Metaphors not only serve as a study aid to myself, but also as a way to describe my experience to others. One of the best explanations that I've come up with is that Chinese is a many-layered language. Studying it is like peeling a large onion. The first layer is where you learn to speak all over again. For those of us whose mother tongue is non-tonal, this means having to un-learn most of what we have learned as babies. We have to get our minds around the idea of the four tones. Also, we must teach our tongues the subtle differences between the 'j' and 'zh', 'q' and 'ch', 'x' and 'sh' sounds, and so on. To master these exotic phonetics, we must exaggerate, over-pronounce them at first. Listening to native speakers proves difficult at this early stage, because their speech glides along with such speed that we cannot make out the individual sounds and tones. Trying to learn phonetics from a native speaker is like trying to steal steps from a professional ballroom dancer. But that's another metaphor… Early on you will have to master a Romanization system, one that matches Chinese sounds to familiar written symbols. The choice depends on several factors, like which text book you are using, which one your teacher is familiar with, and also your native tongue. English speakers have a choice of at least four different Romanization systems. The next layer is to string together the sounds and tones to make word-fragments, or syllables. Chinese calls these 'zi', and each one corresponds to a Chinese character. The following step, surprisingly, is not the forming of words. Words are a vague concept in Chinese. A word, called 'ci', is a string of two or more 'zi', but a word's meaning is often ambiguous, and only becomes clear in the context of a phrase or sentence. Therefore, it is more useful to learn common phrases and expressions. This also leads to some interesting discoveries about how the rhythm and tone of words changes depending on how they are combined. At this point, you will usually learn some grammar and basic sentence structures. Compared to most "Western" languages, Chinese grammar seems relatively simple at first. There are no verb conjugations, no noun inflections, no use of noun gender. But this is no time to slack off - you're still busy slicing away at the outer layers.

If you decide to learn to read Chinese - and this is a big if - you find yourself faced with a considerable obstacle. How do you even begin to approach this problem? You must stare at these strange-looking pictures as much as possible. Also, you must learn to recognize the radical of each character - the part of it which identifies its category, like water, person, movement, etc. You have to learn to use a Chinese dictionary. Slowly, your patience begins to pay off, as the characters start to look less and less intimidating. Your brain eventually finds a way to store this new information - after all, you're only using 10% of its full capacity. Using this eyes-only, hands-behind-the-back method, it's possible to learn to recognize hundreds of characters. But to break this limit, you must also begin to draw characters, and use your hands to teach your brain. This is not writing yet, but it's extremely useful for growing your reading vocabulary. With a large enough vocabulary, you may begin to read entire sentences or passages. But here lies another challenge of the Chinese language. The traditional written form is a stream of characters, with no whitespace s to help you segment a sentence into words and phrases. To read fluently, the reader should be able to quickly recognize pronouns, prepositions and measure words, as these are the natural delimiters of the Chinese sentence. The remaining layers are a deeper understanding of grammar, the knowledge of Chinese sayings and proverbs, and when to use them, and of course the ability to write. Anyone who has gotten this close to the core has made an enviable accomplishment. The unique thing about Chinese is that unlike European languages, where speaking, reading and writing are learned more or less in parallel, in Chinese these can be arbitrarily separated. While this doesn't make for an easier language, it allows you to focus on the skills to meet your own goals. You may decide to learn to speak it but not to read it. Or if you don't have the time or desire to write it, you may still reach a respectable reading level. Chinese is not for everyone. If you wish to travel to China and communicate on a basic level, English is quickly becoming your better option. But if you have loftier goals, such as to read original texts, speak with your girlfriend's or boybriend's family in their native tongue, or simply have a love of languages - get your sharpest knife, and start slicing! by Joe Varadi Taipei, October 2002