我們的中文不好 (Wǒmen de zhōngwén bù hǎo)

Translation: Our Mandarin is not good.

First, a little music:

(For those of you who couldn’t understand the unsubtitled dialogue before the song starts, basically, the food vendor is calling out “Hey American” to the white dude, who says he’s not an American but a Brit. The Brit then tries to say that he wants some dumplings, but the vendor thinks he’s saying he wants to sleep, because the word for dumplings (shuǐ jiǎo) and the word for sleep (shuì jiào) differ only in their tones. It’s not the cleverest dialogue in the word, but I don’t have high standards, so I laughed out loud.)

We first came across this because Serge’s Mandarin tutor also tutors one of the bandmembers.  Serge’s tutor says the song got a lot of play last summer, and the band got a lot of media attention, but because they didn’t have an album ready at the time, they weren’t able to capitalize on their breakaway hit.  Now they’re basically just famous amongst all of us Mandarin-as-a-Foreign-Language students because the video gets played in all of our classes.

So, yeah, our Mandarin is as yet not so good either. I’ve had to fall back on Taiwanese a lot, so much so that Asha has taken to mocking me for it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpIcTaT6dmQ&list=UUV1UwMrpJQmHuETR7Lo14BA&index=5&feature=plcp

Rough translation:

Asha:  Speak Taiwanese.  I don’t understand. SPEAK TAIWANESE! I DON’T UNDERSTAND!

Serge: What about Mandarin?

Asha: I don’t understand Mandarin. Speak Taiwanese. I don’t understand!

Asha claims she is just imitating me on the phone.  I like to think I’m not quite that rude, however.

Anyway, we’re all working on our Mandarin.  The kids are just acquiring it slowly and naturally by being in a primarily Mandarin-speaking environment at their preschool.  Serge has a private tutor that he meets with 3 hours a week, plus he watches Dora the Explorer and the occasional Korean-dubbed-into-Mandarin soap opera on TV.  I, on the other hand, have been compulsively trying lots of different methods: taking a class at a university, studying with four different private tutors (including one in the U.S. via Skype), listening to various Mandarin podcasts, doing language exchange with a Taiwanese friend, trying to get the kids to talk to me, and watching Dora and soaps on TV.

What’s been unexpectedly fun about this whole language project is doing it as a family — either learning together or just watching each other learn. Serge will learn something from his tutor or pick up a useful phrase from a conversation he witnessed and then tell me about it and vice versa. He and I have also had a bunch of tutoring sessions together, which have been surprisingly fun. And, of course, we’ll watch those Korean soaps together and try to figure out why that woman waking up in the hospital is so shocked at the sight of the woman sleeping in the adjacent bed (our guess: they had somehow switched bodies, a la Freaky Friday).

As for the kids, they’re still not speaking much Mandarin, at least not to us, but occasionally we’ll get glimpses of what they’ve acquired. At dinner sometimes, Serge will bring out his flashcards from his tutor, and the kids love telling us what the words are (although they were stumped by the one showing an iron, since they’ve never seen one in real life and don’t even know the English word for it).  Occasionally, we’ll try to actually  speak to them in Mandarin (e.g.: “Have you had enough to eat?”, a very important question in Taiwan), and they just might respond in Mandarin. Sometimes even when we’re speaking English, Asha will respond to one of us in Mandarin, or she’ll speak a mix of English and Mandarin in the same sentence. Mateo’s more reticent with the Mandarin, but he supposedly understands everything his teachers say, and when he does speak, he speaks more correctly than Asha does. (Sometimes it seems that Mateo feels compelled to speak just so that he can correct Asha’s grammar.) However, they both still definitely prefer English when they’re with us — if I try to go beyond “Do you want to eat this?” and the like in Mandarin, both of them will more often than not respond with “Speak English!” (On the other hand, maybe that’s just because they can’t bear to listen to my horrible Mandarin.)

I’m hoping that in the next few months I can make faster progress so that one day the kids will deign to speak Mandarin with me. So far, my listening comprehension is a lot better than my speaking ability, but my comprehension isn’t even that great — I still regularly struggle to understand what store clerks are saying to me once we get beyond how much I need to pay and whether I need a bag. (And now, some of the clerks in my neighborhood know me as Taiwanese-Speaking Lady anyway — one of them recently told me, after I’d tried to make my request in what I thought was perfectly serviceable Mandarin, that I should just speak to him in Taiwanese. Alas.)

I’d thought Mandarin would be pretty easy for me since I (mostly) understand Taiwanese (sort of like how learning French is a lot easier if you already know Spanish), and I’m sure I’m picking up Mandarin much faster than I would if I didn’t know Taiwanese already, but I’ve still got a ways to go. I’d be thrilled if I could at least get to the point where I understand what people are saying, minus a complex word or two, without having to think about it. Which is how Taiwanese is for me — I’m not great at speaking it, but I can at least automatically, without concentrating on it, understand what people say in everyday conversations. And even when there are random words that I don’t know, I can easily pinpoint that word and ask what it means. If I get to that point with Mandarin, I’ll feel like I can really use the language.

Anyway, this whole project has caused me to think a lot about language learning, but I’ll save those thoughts for another post.