Learning Chinese is character-building
I moved to Hong Kong in October 2003 to take up a job as the English Language Director at the Asia International Open University. My main job is writing a series of course materials for the mainland Chinese university market. These are in the form of text books and online web classes. In the first six months I was left to my own devices and spent a lot of time producing sample lessons and devising the syllabus. My university paid for me to learn putonghua. I had the unbelievable luxury of 1:1 teaching. I learned the tones first and found that hearing the differences between the four tones was not quite as difficult as I imagined. However, I have huge problems with some of the individual sounds especially /c/ as it is written in pinyin. It is pronounced a bit like /ts/ in tsar or bits. I know where I am supposed to put my tongue to make the sound but it just does not sound right. I think my big mistake was not learning the characters right from the beginning. I only learned the alphabetical pinyin. Now, I can read the pinyin quite well in text books but nothing else is written in this form. I am now studying the characters. I know about 150 so I still have a very long way to go. The other problem is that people in Hong Kong speak guangdonghua (Cantonese) which is completely different from putonghua. I persevere and am helped by a delightful colleague who works in Guangzhou, a big mainland city two hours by train from Hong Kong. Her name is Snow and she comes from Hunan province. She doesn't speak guangdonghua (unlike the majority of people in Guangzhou) and is very happy to help me with my halting attempts at the language. I also work with someone called Ice. I love the western style names they choose. After the first six months my job changed dramatically. My university formed a partnership with a big publishing company in China. Their work ethic was very different and they wanted and still want me to meet incredibly tight deadlines. I am now working in their offices writing from 9.00 - 7.00 every day. No one takes a break except at lunch. Lunch, I have discovered, is a very important part of the day. I am occasionally privileged to be invited out to a Chinese restaurant where they take great delight in testing to the full my culinary adventurism. I hold my own and won them over by eating the pigeon's head ' a great delicacy, with chopsticks and without flinching. Working in a Chinese organisation is very challenging. The people are outwardly very friendly and polite but I never really know what they are thinking of me. I am the only western person in the office and still feel like gweilo, a foreigner, and outsider most of the time. Despite this, it is just an amazing experience. I enjoy working in Hong Kong!
Sent by: Jeremy
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I am a Hongkonger with Cantonese, a dialect of the Southern province of China, as my mother tongue. I myself find much difficulty in learning Mandarin which is rather different in pronunication from Cantonese, though fortunately the written characters and grammar are not much different indeed. I am delighted to learn that foreigners have increasing interest in Chinese Mandarin and I hope with more foreigners able to read and speak Chinese, the world will better understand China and its people thereby removing misconceptions and misunderstandings.
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