Learning and Speaking Chinese

Since my arrival in China back in 2010 I have been slowly trying to learn Chinese, first it is not an easy language to learn and for me I find it so difficult with the tones needed to be so exact when these words are pronounced.

I know lots of words in Chinese; my difficulty is in putting them into the correct order when making sentences. When I am speaking English to Chinese people they always expect me to slow down my speech so they can understand my words easier, unfortunately this is not returned when I am trying to understand their spoken Chinese.

I will be the first to admit that I have become lazy in learning Chinese, relying too much on translation devices. They can be great devices for using quick communication, but not particularly good for learning. One area of Chinese that I do quite well in is writing and reading the characters, so the past few weeks I have spent at least an hour each evening trying to memorize Chinese characters so even if I can’t be understood through speaking I can still communicate. This is fine if I am able to write a question down, problems usually then occur when I receive a written reply, if the reply contains words not in my memory bank of Chinese characters.

At the end of this week, the students at this school have their mid-term exams, so that means I have some unexpected extra free time. As I am travelling back to Jiangxi this weekend to see my family I had hoped for a long weekend, but I have Thursday free and one class to give on Friday morning. I had already bought my train tickets for this weekend before being given the news of this change so went to the local train station yesterday afternoon to see if I could exchange my tickets to earlier trains on Friday.

I had printed my instructions into Chinese to show the assistant at the train station, but he said no, to change a ticket I must go into the centre of the city and change them at Wuchang or Wuhan stations, it was so frustrating, there were sleeping berths available on the earlier trains, but it will be Thursday before I have the time needed to go into Wuhan, by then the available tickets will probably be sold.

In the meantime, I will continue to learn some new characters as well as trying to memorize those I already know, thanks for reading.

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