Mastering a foreign language is so difficult that diplomats and academics spend years doing nothing else. But the business world--or at least my editor--lacks that kind of patience.
"Eaves! You're good with languages, right? I want you to learn Chinese in three days. Yes. Three days. Do whatever it takes. And, yes, there will be a quiz at the end." He seems to find this funny.
Unreasonable, to be sure. But impossible? Maybe not. I manage to wrangle an extra day out of my boss, so I now have four days--or a total of 96 hours--to learn as much Chinese as possible. The plan? Total immersion. I would get a tutor, flashcards, movies, even subliminal learning tapes. My iPod would rotate Chinese vocabulary, my computer would run language software and I'd do my shopping in Chinatown. I would even ban our Mandarin-speaking intern from addressing me in English.
On the bright side, I do actually have a good ear for languages--I speak French and Spanish and studied Arabic for several years. On the other hand, Mandarin bears no resemblance to any language I've ever studied. I can't muscle my way in, feeling for familiar words and phrases.
First stop: My local bookstore, which carries 13 audio-learning packages, including Speak in a Week!, Mandarin Chinese in 60 Minutes, 15-Minute Chinese and, for those whose schedule demands an even shorter period, Now You're Talking Mandarin Chinese in No Time. There's also Learn in Your Car Mandarin Chinese and In-Flight Chinese, which says on the box that it "covers everything you need, and nothing more"--apparently for customers worried they might learn too much. It's tough to choose between "no time" and "instant," but I settle on Instant Immersion.
Early in the morning on my first day, I boot up my computer and install Rosetta Stone, a popular brand of language software. It says it teaches "the same way you learned your first language," which means that it uses only the foreign tongue. The program flashes images while saying words and spelling them in pinyin, the Roman-alphabet version of Chinese. Then I have to remember the words and match them to the images myself. Unable to recall the syllables, which sound completely random to my ear, I get all the answers wrong.
I calculate that it took me the first six or so years of my life to acquire fluent English, with constant exposure to the language. At this rate, if I used Rosetta Stone all day, every day, I could speak Chinese like a 6-year-old by 2014.
On the subway ride downtown, I listen to Instant Immersion. With the exception of "mama" and "baba," no sound reminds me of anything. It's like an aural assault of jarring sounds, and so far I feel discouraged.
At 9 a.m., I start my first private session at Berlitz, the 130-year-old language school. Berlitz is a serious place. It would never make insane promises about three-day Chinese. Nor, probably, would they ever accept assignments from a possibly deranged editor. Indeed, the professionals at Berlitz were highly reluctant to let me cram their five-day Immerse and Converse course into three, but I telephone frequently, begging and pleading, and eventually they relent.
My first teacher of the day, Duncan, spends three hours just working on my pronunciation, and in particular tones, the great bugaboo of Chinese-learning. The situation is this: Chinese is a tonal language and the various tones are sort of like musical notes, with each one radically altering meaning. Any vowel can be pronounced as a single note; or falling from a higher note to a lower note; or falling and then rising; or rising from a lower note to a higher note; or without any tone at all. So "ma" pronounced the various different ways means different things. One is "mom," and one is "horse." Get the intonation wrong and you're calling your mother a horse, or worse.
Consonants are no picnic either. For instance, a sentence that to my untrained ear sounds like "shuh shuh shuh," is in fact made up of three distinct words. The third word, "piece of paper," is pronounced "zhjr." As far as I can tell. In the third tone.
My afternoon teacher, Mr. Huang, refuses to speak English to me, which I think is great. I'm a big believer in immersion. That's mainly because I'm lazy and immersion doesn't require memorizing verb tables or long lists of vocabulary. It's all about passive absorption.
We begin conversing. Or at least, we begin exchanging sentences like "Is this a pen?" ("Z he shi yuanzhubi ma?") and "Yes, this is a pen." (S hi, zhe shi yuanzhubi.") It's hard to imagine using these sentences in a real-life context, unless I am dealing with a blind man. Later we move on to more useful phrases like "Is the large chair red?"--"No, the large chair is gray." Major progress! At 2:30, I am elated. But at about 3 p.m., my mind shuts down, refusing to accept further information.
Nevertheless, I soldier on. At home, I pop one of Chinese movies I've rented, Beijing Bicycle, into the DVD player. I try not to look at the subtitles. The plot goes something like this: A guy has a bicycle. It gets stolen by a second guy and a third guy buys it on the black market. The first guy steals it back. But then the third guy steals it back from him. They keep stealing the bicycle back and forth for the rest of the movie, sometimes pausing to beat each other up. I'm not picking up much Mandarin, but I feel like I might be gaining profound insights into Chinese culture.
Immersion may be a passive way to learn, but there are even lazier ways, and I am determined to try them. I ordered a compact-disc set from a company called InnerTalk, which is designed to teach Chinese subliminally. The company specializes not in language but in self-affirmation messages, and its titles include tracks designed to help listeners quit smoking, lose weight, even grow larger breasts. If InnerTalk's tapes can accomplish all that, teaching me one of the hardest languages in the world should be a snap. The copy on the packaging explains: "Hidden affirmations enter your mind without conscious interference such as doubt, fear and so forth."
Due to the unique science behind the method, I can't actually hear the Chinese being spoken on my disc. I hear wave sounds and whispered mutterings in the background, which may be Chinese, or messages of self-affirmation, or perhaps messages of self-affirmation in Chinese. You're supposed to listen to the disc in the background or while you sleep, so I put it on before I go to bed.
I wake up the next morning dreaming that I'm drowning in the surf. But later in the day, Duncan at Berlitz tells me that I'm making good progress. Could it be the InnerTalk?
In class with Mr. Huang on day two, we practice sentences like "Japan is a small country." Several times I make him laugh, but I have no idea why. Something I say about the relative size of our coffee cups cracks him up.
Berlitz isn't teaching me characters, so in the interest of learning a few, I take a tour of Manhattan's Chinatown with Yao Zhang, a text book author and founder of the Yao Mandarin School. He takes me around the neighborhood, using signs and menus to teach characters. A few of them make intuitive sense. The number one consists of one horizontal line, two is composed of two lines, and three of three lines. The tree character looks tree-like; two trees means "small forest," and three trees means "big forest." You need to know around 3,000 characters to be considered literate. I now know six.
On the evening of day two, I try a sample track from a company called Earworms. It sets the language you are trying to learn to a background of soft, twangy pop music--the principle being that sometimes you just can't get a jingle out of your head, so you might not be able to get the Chinese out of your head either. On the track I listen to, a man and a woman repeatedly order coffee-- ka-fe--in Chinese and English. All this does is make me jones for a coffee.
By day three, I'm exhausted and my working Chinese consists of little more than being able to differentiate between gray and red furniture. So I try a different approach. I take a break from Berlitz and head back to Chinatown to shop for groceries. Through the magic of globalization, the New Kam Man supermarket places all manner of Asian ingredients at my instant disposal, and I walk out with gingko nuts, several types of dried fungus and even a bag of fortune cookies--which are not, to my disappointment, Chinese, per se. It turns out that they were invented in California, possibly in a Japanese restaurant. But they do contain mini Chinese vocabulary lessons. The first one I munch on contains the word for "market," shi chang, which would be useful, if only I knew how to say "where is the." While shopping, I listen for snippets of Chinese, but am baffled. Later I learn that most people in Manhattan's Chinatown speak Cantonese or Fujianese, both substantially different from Mandarin.
Undaunted, I invite friends over and whip up a feast: crisp stir-fried shrimp, willow chicken in black bean sauce, eight-treasure vegetarian assemblage and tossed noodles with ginger and scallions. As we are sitting down to eat, I realize that I have forgotten to make rice--not only the quintessential staple of the entire cuisine, but symbolic of "blessings in life" according to my cookbook. Also, my eight-treasure assemblage only has seven treasures, since I ditched the foul-tasting gingko nuts at the last minute. This apparently deprives the dish of its metaphorical allusion to Buddhism, which says that life has eight treasures. Clearly I'm not internalizing the culture.
After my last Berlitz lesson, I'm ready for the quiz. I call our Mandarin-speaking intern, Cheryl, to see if she can understand me. I try a phrase that might actually be useful in my professional life.
" Ke yi fang wen ni ma?" I ask, concentrating furiously on the tones.
Cheryl hesitates.
I take a deep breath and try again.
" Ke yi fang wen ni ma?"
Cheryl pauses. I can almost hear her ears straining. But then she translates back into English for me, "May I interview you?"
Success!
Unbelievably, she even says I have picked up a Beijing accent, but this compliment might have more to do with her job prospects than my language skills. Still, apparently she understands what I'm saying, and I cling to this strand of hope. Then she gently deflates my ego. "It's difficult to get the tones unless you're born there."
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