18 Observations About Learning Chinese

Tones, taxi drivers, and the joy of feeling stupid.

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A few days ago, I returned from an extended trip to mainland China. Over the course of the coming months, I hope to write more about the country—including a rumination on its history and an assessment of its respective strengths and weaknesses.

During my stay, I got to know a lot of locals doing interesting and ambitious things. Channeling my inner Tom Friedman, I talked to dozens of cab drivers about their lives. And I also took two weeks of intensive language lessons, spending hours each day trying to improve my command of Mandarin. So, at the suggestion of Luke, Persuasion’s senior editor, I decided to share some observations about what it is like to learn a language as an adult; about the specific challenges involved in learning Chinese; and about some interesting features of the language.

1. It is famously easier to learn a new language when you are little. Young children can learn a language purely through immersion, an ability that quickly atrophies as they age. But I think that the difference between learning a language in your late teens and learning one in, say, your late thirties or early fifties is often overstated. For what it’s worth, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that my ability to make progress on Chinese does not feel markedly or obviously worse than my ability to make progress on other languages did when I learned Italian or French in my late teens and early twenties.

2. One way to think about this is that, once you have passed the stage at which you can do so through mere osmosis, you need four things to learn a language: brain plasticity, the motivation to pick up a new skill, sufficient time to devote to the task, and the ability to study effectively. When people say that it is so much harder to learn a new language as an adult, they are usually thinking about the first of these factors. But while brain plasticity really does start to decline in our early twenties, the best evidence suggests that it does so very slowly. That’s why the real obstacle to learning a language as an adult lies in the difficulty of finding the motivation and the time. I became fluent in other languages, including English, when I spent time living in those countries, chatting with friends, and dealing with quotidian tasks; later in life, it becomes much harder to spend a year or more immersing yourself in a country and a culture. There is a compensating factor, however. Many people, including myself, are able to study more effectively and learn to be more self-disciplined as an adult.

3. When you are learning a language, you are forced to talk with the guileless simplicity of a child. At times when I was struggling to convey some basic idea or concept to my language teachers, I kept thinking of David Sedaris’ inimitable description of how his classmates in a French language class tried to describe Easter:

“It is,” said one [Polish girl], “a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus and . . . oh, shit.” She faltered, and her fellow countryman came to her aid. “He call his self Jesus, and then he be die one day on two . . . morsels of . . . lumber.”

The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm.

“He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father.”

“He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples.”

“He nice, the Jesus.”

“He make the good things, and on the Easter we be sad because somebody makes him dead today.”

Thankfully, I was never called upon to describe Easter in Chinese. But the feeling of trying to express a subtle point, only to see it flattened into self-parody, feels intimately familiar to me.

4. Progress in language learning is rarely linear. The certificate I received from my language school says that I have now reached an upper intermediate level of fluency in Chinese. There were times when that description seemed accurate to me: days on which the words came easily, and I had the confidence to have in-depth conversations with cab drivers or shopkeepers. And then there were the days on which the most basic Chinese words played hide-and-seek on the tip of my tongue. Learning a language is also an exercise in patience, one that teaches you to extend grace to your brain when it refuses to obey your commands.

5. The easiest thing about the Chinese language is the grammar. The language does not have conjugations: changes in how verbs end that are used to indicate tense or mood and make life difficult for learners of Romance languages (yo hablo but tu hablas). Nor does it have declensions: changes in how nouns end to indicate different grammatical cases, which make life difficult for learners of languages such as Latin or German (domus, domi, domum, etc.). Because Chinese doesn’t use verb endings to convey information, learners of the language are even spared the hardest thing about another language whose grammar is otherwise strikingly simple: English. In Chinese, there is no such thing as irregular verbs.¹

6. By and large, this grammatical simplicity makes it pleasingly easy to express basic information like the time at which some action occurred. The future tense is marked by the inclusion of a single word, 会 (hui). Conditionals, which can bedevil those learning English—if you had put more care into studying English grammar, you would have learned how to use a conditional—are expressed through the inclusion of simple word pairs like “if” (如果, rú guǒ) and “then” (就, jiù).

7. The biggest source of difficulty in learning Chinese is simply how similar and unfamiliar Chinese words initially sound to those who are used to European languages. Over 70% of Chinese words consist of two syllables. Most of these syllables, especially in the most commonly used words, are themselves pairs of one consonant and one vowel. There’s ba, ma, la, ta, be, me, le, te, bi, mi, li, ti, and so on. It is at first fiendishly difficult to remember the meaning of each of these syllables, to call upon the right one when you are trying to say something, and to correctly categorize its meaning when you are desperately seeking to understand what some fast-talking shopkeeper or language teacher is saying to you.

8. An additional reason why it is so difficult to recognize these different syllables has to do with Chinese being a tonal language. A syllable like ma doesn’t just have one meaning. Depending on the pitch with which you pronounce the vowel, its meaning changes. If the a is pronounced in a flat, high-pitched way, which to English-speakers sounds a bit like it is being sung, it means “mother” (mā, 妈). If it is pronounced with a rising tone, which sounds a bit like a question, it means “numb” (má, 麻).² If it is pronounced with a tone that dips low before rising high, making it sound a bit like vocal fry, it means “horse” (mǎ, 马). If it is pronounced with a tone that starts high before falling sternly, sounding a little angry to Western ears, it means “to curse” (mà, 骂). And while Chinese is often said to contain four tones, there is also a fifth, neutral variant: If the a is pronounced in a light manner, without much emphasis, it indicates that a sentence should be understood as a question (ma, 吗).³

9. And yet, the difficulty, and perhaps even the importance, of learning tones is, I believe, exaggerated. For the most part, you don’t need to recognize tones to understand Chinese. While it is at first very difficult to get used to the brevity and similarity of many Chinese words, your brain eventually tunes in; and while there are indeed times in which a changed tone really does alter the meaning of a whole sentence, which could theoretically lead to some catastrophic misunderstanding, the likelihood of this happening in practice is rather slim. The context nearly always makes clear whether, for example, you are having dinner with your mother or with a horse. Once you develop an ear for the language, you will also start to get many tones right without making a conscious effort. I myself have put minimal effort into memorizing the tone of each word and yet my teacher estimates that I get about 70% of them right when speaking. The fact that I frequently use the wrong tones undoubtedly sounds stupid or even annoying to native speakers; but I am confident that my hit rate will improve over time, and have so far found that it doesn’t really impede their ability to understand what I’m saying. Part of the reason for this is that Chinese people are actually very used to hearing their interlocutors use the “wrong” tones—not because of idiot foreigners like me but because native speakers from different parts of the country often use different tones for the same words.

10. In my experience, even educated Westerners vastly underestimate the sheer extent of linguistic variety in China. Some assume that people in China speak one language, “Chinese.”⁴ Others realize that a substantial portion of the population speaks a language that is only distantly related, Cantonese. But even that recognition vastly understates the sheer extent of linguistic variety. Many so-called 地方话 (dì fāng huà or “place languages”) are unrelated to either Mandarin or Cantonese. The language which was traditionally spoken in Shanghai, 上海话 (shàng hǎi huà), for example, stems from a separate language family, called Wu. Since this language family is distinct from both Mandarin and Cantonese, it is unintelligible to uninitiated outsiders; Shanghaiese is no closer to either Mandarin or Cantonese than English is to either German or Swedish. The share of Chinese citizens who speak a non-Mandarin language at home is estimated to be about 30 percent, meaning that for 343 million Chinese people—a little more than the entire population of the United States—Mandarin is effectively a foreign language.

11. Even those Chinese people who do speak some Mandarin dialect as their mother tongue have huge linguistic differences from each other. Today’s “Standard Chinese,” called 普通话 (pǔ tōng huà), is loosely based on the Mandarin dialect historically spoken in Beijing. A resident of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, would have grown up speaking a dialect of the same language; but, unsurprisingly considering that about 1,000 miles separate the two cities, he would, compared to a resident of Beijing, likely have a markedly different accent, tend to use different consonants in many common words, employ different words for some important concepts, and even differ in his use of tones. Though both would have grown up speaking some version of Mandarin at home, it might take them significant effort to understand each other’s accent—just as a New Yorker likely grew up speaking the same language as somebody who was raised in Edinburgh, but might struggle to watch Trainspotting without subtitles.

12. Someone once joked that, given the vast differences between the languages actually spoken on the ground in, say, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, the idea of Standard Arabic is a conspiracy designed to waste the time of aspiring CIA agents. Until a few decades ago, one could probably have said the same thing about the idea that there is such a thing as Standard Chinese. But this is slowly changing, with the prevalence of 普通话 (pǔ tōng huà) steadily growing relative to local languages and dialects. Part of the reason for this is organic. All of China’s major cities are now home to huge numbers of internal migrants. If residents of Shanghai want to communicate with their neighbor or a colleague or a delivery man, they can probably no longer use the city’s traditional language. Another part of the reason, of course, has to do with public policy. China may be one of the last states with the ambition to reshape its cultural realities in accordance with some rational plan—what James Scott, in Seeing Like a State, called the high modernist ethos—and the government is understandably intent on increasing the share of its population that can effortlessly communicate with each other. Public schools across the country teach exclusively in 普通话 (pǔ tōng huà), effectively a foreign language to many of the students when they arrive for their first day of first grade. And in many of those schools, students don’t just have to address their teachers in a foreign language; as long as they are on school grounds, they are not even allowed to talk to their friends in their local dialect. Like the idea of Standard Arabic, Standard Chinese may be a fiction; but, if so, it is a rapidly self-fulfilling one.

13. There are some striking ways in which the logic of the Chinese language is different from the logic of European languages. In every European language I can think of, for example, time flows from left to right: yesterday is to the left, tomorrow to the right. In Chinese, time flows from top to bottom. The word for the late morning is 上午 (shàng wǔ, upper noon), and that for the early afternoon 下午 (xià wǔ, lower noon). It would be tempting to imbue such differences of logic with some deeper cultural meaning, positive or negative. An admiring orientalist might venture that Chinese people somehow have a deeper insight into the nature of time. I myself am deeply skeptical of attempts to discover such meaning in conceptual schemes that are ultimately arbitrary. Indeed, it turns out that this particular difference likely has a rather prosaic origin. Many ancient Chinese sundials were mounted on south-facing walls and used a vertical design; early in the day, the shadow line was high up on the dial, only to descend hour by hour as the day wore on.

14. The other difficulty of learning Chinese is, of course, the script. I have zero ambition to learn how to handwrite Chinese characters; as it happens, I can barely write legibly in my own language. But thanks to digital technology, there really isn’t much need to do so anymore. Most Chinese on the mainland now type using pinyin, the Romanized spelling system which I’ve been using to convey the sound of Chinese characters throughout this article. This means that you enter the Latin characters for a word like pu tong hua (without accents), and then choose among the limited set of options (like 普通话 or 普通化) that your laptop or cell phone suggests. So you still need to be able to recognize different characters in order to type—as, of course, you do if you want to read Chinese texts. But while learning to recognize Chinese characters is itself a lot of work, it is vastly easier than learning to handwrite them.⁵

15. Learning Chinese is both easier and harder than I imagined. It is easier in that you can make significant progress towards having a rudimentary sense of the feel and the logic of the language quite quickly. Duolingo, much maligned, is actually a good way to get started on this; if this article has piqued your interest, you could use it to keep yourself entertained in transit or when you need a little break from work—better than spending your time on Twitter or Instagram, anyhow. Learning Chinese is harder than I imagined in that the rapid progress of the early stages eventually gives way to a long plateau, in which you feel that your ability to understand real people or follow a television program basically remains non-existent. For the purposes of getting over this plateau, apps like Duolingo are totally useless; you need to take lessons with native speakers or, ideally, spend time in the country, using the opportunity to chat with as many people as possible.

16. One question I am often asked when I mention that I am learning Chinese is: Why? Won’t AI make learning languages obsolete? The linguistic abilities of AI bots are indeed miraculous; if your primary purpose in learning a language is to read local newspapers, for example, AI can translate any article that takes your fancy with astonishing speed and accuracy. But relying wholly on such translations would not only mean that you’d lack a feel for the Chinese language, or fail to appreciate the importance of particular concepts; it would also entail foregoing the core function of language: to communicate with real people in the real world. And that, for now, remains the one thing with which AI can’t really help.

17. Assisting humans with real-life conversation is as much a hardware problem as it is a software one. You can already record what you want to say and ask your phone to repeat that sentence in a foreign language; likewise, you can record a person’s answer and use your phone to understand what they’re telling you. In a pinch, this is an extremely useful way to ask for directions or order a meal, making travel in remote regions whose language you don’t know much easier than it was in the past. But, for now, this process takes far too long to facilitate real conversation. Perhaps we will eventually have a device analogous to the one imagined many years ago by Douglas Adams: a “babel fish” that sits in your brain, seamlessly translating auditory signals in real time; but given that, for now, it is barely possible to hold a coherent phone conversation while walking around a big city if you are wearing AirPods, I have my doubts that the hardware will be sufficiently mature to facilitate such seamless communication anytime soon.

18. Learning any language is hard; Chinese, at least for those of us who grew up speaking a vastly different language like English, is doubly so. But despite astonishing advances in technology, learning a language remains, for now, the only real way to immerse yourself in a country and a culture. From a purely utilitarian point of view, the returns to language learning may be dwindling; but then, of course, a certain kind of hard-nosed utilitarian might also insist that it is pointless to read a novel or see the Rocky Mountains or perfect your jump shot or visit the Louvre. Perhaps I am, in this respect, irredeemably old-fashioned. But it seems to me that the way to get to know a culture, today no less than a hundred or a thousand years ago, is to learn its language.

This is the first in a series of articles about China, its history, and its culture. If you want to make sure that you get future installments, please make sure that you are a subscriber to this Substack!

1. In English, irregular verbs are words that don’t follow standard rules for indicating tense or mood. “To learn” is a regular verb, as we affix -ed to indicate the simple past tense. “To buy” is an irregular verb, since its simple past tense is “bought” rather than “buyed.”

2. The distinctive flavor profile of many Sichuan dishes, especially those that make liberal use of Sichuan peppercorns, is called 麻辣 (má là), or “tingly-spicy,” in Chinese.

3. An additional difficulty stems from the fact that the exact same syllables, pronounced with the exact same tones, can have completely different meanings in the syllable-pairs that make up most Chinese words. So even if you are sufficiently attuned to tones and sufficiently used to the rapid pace of conversational Chinese to identify that your interlocutor has just said 马 rather than 妈, they may not be talking about horses at all; they might be using 马上 (mǎ shàng) to mean “immediately,” or 马虎 (mǎ hu) to describe someone acting carelessly.

4. Throughout this article, I often use “Chinese” to refer to what in China is known as 普通话 (pǔ tōng huà), the standardized national language based on the Beijing dialect. This is the natural way to refer to the language in English, and I don’t believe in the kind of purism or know-it-all superiority of going out of your way to avoid it. The problem lies not in using “Chinese” to refer to 普通话 (pǔ tōng huà); it lies in being ignorant about how many people within the country don’t natively speak it.

5. Traditionally, Chinese schoolchildren and foreign language learners alike have had to do hours of daily drill exercises to learn the exact stroke arrangement and order of so-called 汉字 (hànzì). Now, the best way to acquire Chinese literacy is through much less painful learning techniques in which you are repeatedly exposed to various characters until you get an intuitive feel for what each of them means, without ever having to laboriously memorize their precise composition.