Speaking Chinese in China: the real deal!
10/22/24 • 17 min
In this episode I’m talking about traveling to China for the first time and using my newly acquired language in the real world. Wherever I travel, I like to be able to speak at least a little bit of the local language and communicate with locals and to make my own arrangements. Being able to speak more than rudimentary Chinese was key to many of my wonderful experiences. Also, I started to gain new insights into a country I had, admittedly, known very little about before starting to learn the language. It was a whole new world opening up to me, understanding the local geography, customs, dialects and participating in the language ‘for real’.
In this episode I’m talking about traveling to China for the first time and using my newly acquired language in the real world. Wherever I travel, I like to be able to speak at least a little bit of the local language and communicate with locals and to make my own arrangements. Being able to speak more than rudimentary Chinese was key to many of my wonderful experiences. Also, I started to gain new insights into a country I had, admittedly, known very little about before starting to learn the language. It was a whole new world opening up to me, understanding the local geography, customs, dialects and participating in the language ‘for real’.
Previous Episode
Researching Chinese
Learning Chinese gave me a new understanding of language acquisition, and a new direction for my research. By going through the process myself, I experienced the mechanisms of language learning subjectively, with my own feelings and experiences. I found topics I wanted to study in more detail, objectively and using robust research methodologies. By pairing my own experiences with my research, I was able to look at learning from a different perspective and certain processes caught my eye. For example, listening to learners who were a little bit better than myself, but far from perfect, I was able to copy their strategies to make their speech sound more ‘fluent’, because their strategies were more restricted and stood out to me immediately. I started to study these strategies in detail, learning a lot of useful expressions as a byproduct of my research, so reinforcing my learning of Chinese. My language learning and research worlds had started to go hand in hand, supporting one another.
Next Episode
Linguistic relativity: thinking differently in Chinese
I’m always amazed by how similar the languages of the world are when I’m learning a new language. Languages are able to express the same concepts, often in strikingly similar ways. The apparent differences in lexicon, grammar, sound and so on, that are so obvious, are often far less stark below the surface.
Yet, those subtle differences between languages are not to be underestimated, because it is here that really interesting things happen, because they can make us think differently about the world and make us have different perceptions across languages. This, it seems happens right from the start of learning another language.
Subtle differences between languages can also lead to a lot of misunderstandings, and I had my fair share of these learning Chinese. How, for example, is it possible to talk to someone for half an hour and totally misunderstand the main premise of the conversation? Listen in to find out!
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