Chinese Language Torture

In the past nine years of attempting to learn Chinese, I have finally come to this conclusion: Mandarin Chinese was made to make people feel stupid – particularly me.

The thing about Chinese is that it’s not like English. In fact the only thing it has in common with English is that English is really hard for Chinese speakers to learn. You see, Chinese has these things called tones. What that means is you can say the exact same word but at a different time of day, and it will change from “ask” to “kiss.” Which meant I made my teacher less than excited every time I raised my hand.

With tones you can attempt to say you ate some dried fruit and end up copulating with it. But more likely you’ll confidently try out some new phrase and end up spouting complete gibberish, which will garner a few polite nods and glossy smiles. Like I do every time I go out in public.

Luckily I have two expert helpers: my eight and 11 year old daughters. My wife, who’s Taiwanese, gave up helping me a long time ago, but my daughters are in public school and so they sympathize. They patiently tell me to stop being naughty with fruit and then translate to stupefied neighbors. It’s helped me navigate the supermarket, but I have yet to look seriously at a newspaper.

You see, as hard as speaking Chinese is, it’s as easy as a Texas gun license compared with writing. Chinese don’t have letters; they have lots of pictures that are so badly drawn you really have no idea what they are. A picture of a pig looks like a sea monkey, not the kinds on back of comic books, but the real ones, you know, brine shrimp that look like baby tapeworms. Those pictures are combined with random lines in such a manner so that no human, except my eight-year-old daughter, could ever remember them. Writing them is humanly impossible – with the exception of 1.2 billion people who don’t count because they had Chinese Tiger Moms.

Needless to say, I’m not the best student. Luckily the Taiwanese are nice enough to smile glossily and nod instead of shake their heads. They understand because they are all required to studied English starting in the 3^rd grade, and they know how stupid English spelling iz. Now pass the dried fruit, I’m in the mood.