Chinese

As you have probably already guessed, the people in Taiwan speak Chinese. More specifically, Mandarin Chinese is most widely spoken, and it is also the official language.
Some people, especially in the Southern parts of Taiwan, have Taiwanese as their mother tongue. This is a dialect of Chinese, but the differences are really big and it's impossible to understand for someone who only knows a different dialect. Fortunately, here in Taipei one can get around perfectly with Mandarin only (well, fortunately...). 

In other parts of the world, Chinese mostly has the reputation of being an impossible language to learn. The sounds themselves are unlike anything else and on top of that, each sound is pronounced in one of 4 different tones, which further distinguish the meaning. The popular example in every language class is the syllable Ma. Based on the tone, it can mean: Mother, Horse, To swear as well as some other stuff. 

What really makes Chinese appear scary, is the writing system. Basically put, there is a unique character (or a combination of characters) for every word. The characters contain hints as to what the pronunciation and meaning could be, but one has to have a lot of experience with the language to use the hints. When one approaches an unknown character, it is almost impossible to tell the meaning or the pronunciation correctly. It is said that to read a newspaper, one has to know about 1500 – 2000 characters. 

I guess that should be enough to persuade just about anybody that this language really is impossible to learn. But in reality, it’s not that bad. I started learning Chinese 2 years ago, before my trip to Hong Kong – just with books and courses on the internet. I had many Chinese speaking friends in HK, so I tried to talk to them in Chinese as much as possible. One big advantage of this language is the grammar, which is really simple – the words never change, no declinations or weird cases. Hence, the moment you know 10 words, you can already start building sentences. Of course, nobody understood what I was saying at first, but it got better over time. As for writing the characters, the first few dozens take forever to learn, but it gets easier later, as each character is made up of more components (radicals), and there’s not that many of those. In one year, I got to the point where I was capable of smaller conversations on limited topics and of generally getting around in regular everyday situations. I did almost nothing the next year, so I got here with the 1 year of informal studies under my belt.  

Since I’ve made a commitment to myself to become fluent during my time here, I try to speak Chinese at every opportunity. Often times, there’s no other choice anyways. Some conversations are easy – buying a bus ticket, or fried noodles, or asking for directions – that’s a routine already. Some are a bit more complicated – like when we were discussing the broken lock in my dormitory with the staff. Still, we worked it out (with a lot of body language and hand gestures), I even learned how to say “lock”, “broken” and “to fix”. It is not always that easy though. Several days later, I went to buy a blanket and sheets for the bed. The shop had all kinds of kinds and sizes for bunch of different blankets and mattresses.. and they were all sealed in plastic, so impossible to look at. The fact that I don’t know how to say any of those things in Chinese didn’t help.

The conversation went like this:

Me: Hello, what is this?
Shopkeeper: This is ...
Me: Is this used with the thing you put on the bed?
Shopkeeper: No, this is
Me: No, I don’t want this. Do you have the thing you use with the thing you put on the bed?
Shopkeeper: Yeah, over there. (pointing at a pillow)
Me: No, I don’t want a pillow. I want the thing that is similar to this thing around the pillow (pointing at the pillow case), but bigger.
Shopkeeper: Ah, yes. (hands me a blanket)
Me: No, no. I don’t want a blanket. 
Shopkeeper hands me a pillow case:
Me: I want something that is almost like this, but bigger.
Shopkeeper points at something, explains that this is something to wrap the mattress in.
Me: Yes, I want this, but for this thing here (pointing at the blanket)
Shopkeeper gets a confused look on her face.

After about 20 minutes, I bought two items. They turned out to be a case for the mattress (apparently), which is too small for the mattress, and a large, thin blanket. I wasn’t trying to buy either of those things. Slight frustration about Mandarin kicked in.

On a side note, one thing I love here. I was given a name in Chinese – it goes like this: 
楊伯瑞. I don’t use my normal name here – ever. I write this on all the documents, this is what they have in the school system and in the bank. My student ID card is in Chinese only and of course, the only name written on there is楊伯瑞.

When I go back home next summer, I will try to get a student discount with that card in Prague somewhere. Really looking forward to that!