The Polish Mandarin

Illustrations by Joseph

I’m half Polish, three generations removed from my great grandparents’ immigration to the United States, so naturally I decided I needed to learn to speak……Mandarin. Yes, it would make logical sense for someone of my ancestry to learn Polish. It would be a completely understandable, though erroneous, assumption that my coming from a large Polish family where I can recall hearing this language spoken would leave me at least somewhat conversant in it. I’m not. I was taught a few words here and there, but the Polish speaking adults in my family felt it was more important for me to learn English. So only the adults would converse in Polish, and usually when they didn’t want the kids to know what they were talking about. Sadly, the language died along with all of my older Polish relatives, and with them the motivation to learn the tongue of my ancestors.

An online article by Niall McCarthy of the World Economic Forum takes a look at the statistics kept by the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) on the average amount of study time required by a native English speaker to learn another language. Ranked by categories (one through five), Mandarin falls into Category Five, requiring an average of 88 weeks to learn. So why am I determined to learn the most challenging language, and one that has nothing to do with my heritage? If you read my earlier blog piece, Under the Influence, you know that a certain young man of Taiwanese descent came to my door one day and the figurative door to Asia opened for me.  

Suddenly, there was Joseph from Taiwan speaking Mandarin, and my daughter (who’s in on this too!) and I had the motivation we needed to learn that language. We knew it would be hard, but we were up for the challenge. Both of us have always wanted to be fluent in more than one language. We could do this. Right?

There isn’t just one Chinese language. Instead there is a bewildering array of variations on a theme, including Taiwanese, Wu, and Cantonese. Mandarin is spoken by roughly 70% of all Chinese. It’s the official language of Taiwan and one of the languages in which Joseph and his parents are conversant, so it made sense to learn it. But coming from a Western, English speaking perspective, a tonal language like Mandarin seemed completely intimidating and unattainable.

That was before I bumped into YangYang Cheng, developer of Yoyo Chinese.  She is a lovely young woman who is passionate about teaching people to speak her native tongue. “Chinese in Plain English” is the tagline for Yoyo Chinese, and Ms. Cheng accomplishes this by using English words and intonation I am already familiar with to teach me how to master Mandarin. Armed with a familiar reference point and encouragement from Ms. Cheng that made me feel capable, I wandered into the wide world of the Mandarin language.

Mandarin can appear challenging for quite a few reasons, but my experience so far has come down to three. These are, 1) pronouncing Mandarin vowels and consonants correctly, 2) learning how to physically produce these unfamiliar sounds by moving my mouth in unfamiliar ways, and 3) applying the correct tones to each syllable in order to give the proper meaning to each word.

In the beginning, I found Mandarin vowels tricky. In the English word “you”, the predominant sound that the ‘ou’ vowel combination produces is the long ‘u’ sound. Mandarin makes the long ‘o’ the main sound in that vowel combination. So I have to remember that the Mandarin word “you” sounds like “yo”. This is when I employ all kinds of crazy memory devices. In this case, I remember the famous line that Sylvester Stallone utters to his wife in the movie Rocky II, “Yo, Adrian! I did it!”

Some Mandarin consonants also left me baffled because they sounded completely different from the way they are pronounced in English. For example, ‘r’ has more of a ‘j’ sound that is almost, but not quite, a ‘z’. The word “rén”, which means “person” in Mandarin, sounds more like the English word “Jen”, a girl’s name, and not like “wren”, a small bird. I spent an entire day subvocalizing this one sound over and over, listening repeatedly to a recording of a native Mandarin speaker pronouncing it, and I’ve finally mastered it. Joseph and his parents understand me when I pronounce it, so that’s a good sign. At least they haven’t yet said to me, “Oh no! You don’t want to say that!” Weeeeell, actually they have. But that wasn’t because I pronounced my “r” incorrectly.

Another thing I initially got stuck on and had to overcome is Mandarin diphthongs like ‘zh’ that don’t exist at all in English. The ‘zh’ diphthong is actually pronounced like the hard English consonant ‘j’. For example, the Mandarin word for middle, “zhōng”, sounds like the English word “gong” with the initial ‘g’ sound being replaced by that hard ‘j’ sound. Jong! It stymied me in the beginning when I’d see a word begin with this diphthong, but now I’m on to that tricky little consonant combination.

Approaching Mandarin with a preconceived English phonetic system that’s been in use since birth will get one into all sorts of pronunciation predicaments. It can be challenging to override the rules of one’s native tongue, but I decided that setting aside English rules and learning those of Mandarin would be the method most likely to leave me fist pumping the air while yelling a triumphant, “Yes!” Or wait. What is “yes” in Mandarin? Right. Look that one up on Yoyo Chinese again.   

Just as there are unfamiliar letters and pronunciations in Mandarin, the physical formation of these sounds were unfamiliar to me at first. Quite a few Mandarin words are formed in areas of the mouth or by using oral musculature not typically used by English speakers. A lot of English words, and most certainly American English words, can be formed in the front of the mouth, with very little emphasis coming from anywhere else. If you doubt this, read the rest of this paragraph out loud and concentrate on how many English words you form in the front half of your mouth without having to over tax the muscles you use to form your words. You can probably even do a pretty good ventriloquist impersonation if you really apply yourself.

Compare this to the Mandarin way of forming the word “huì”. This word means “can”, as in “having the ability to do something” (“I can speak Chinese” or “wǒ huì shūo zhōng wén”). It’s pronounced by saying the English letter ‘h’ with the word “way” following it. Huh-way. Now start the ‘h’ sound way in the back of your mouth, like you’re going to spit, and make sure your mouth is hollowed out by pulling your tongue to the floor of your mouth. Push the ‘h’ sound forcefully out of your mouth by expelling a burst of air and tack the”‘way” onto it as you go, feeling the musculature around your mouth tighten up as you form this portion of the word. There you go!

And now, this Polish Mandarin is going to sign off and wander into the next Mandarin lesson. Because learning Mandarin is really about consistency and practice, as it is with so many other things. Is it challenging? Yes. But less so than I imagined it to be, and it becomes more familiar with each day that I practice. Besides, it’s immensely fun to see the look on people’s faces when this Westerner speaks and an East Asian language comes out. So far, those looks of astonishment have been for that reason and not because I inadvertently cursed in Mandarin. Although I have already done that, dropping the Mandarin equivalent of the “F” bomb on Joseph’s mom while she was teaching me how to say an alternative form of “thank you”. And that’s because I got the tone wrong.

But I’ll save that story for next time.