In my thriftiness and eagerness to (easily) learn Chinese upon arriving in Beijing I signed up for a beginner’s special at Frontier’s School where learning mandarin is “made easy” or “made fun” or something like this. We had six initial students in the class and strangely enough four of them were just in Beijing for the summer and thought it would be “fun” to study Chinese. I remember the other five students vividly but hardly a word of Chinese. There was the young English man and his French girlfriend. He had just finished a year teaching in Hong Kong and she was joining him for the summer in Beijing. He made is money by teaching English to the kids of the rich, she seemed satisfied (mostly) with her two sizes two small red top. There was the American young man who learned so fast we all hated him except for everyone else in the class. There was the petite Spanish woman who would have made a good friend if the class did not end abruptly. Then there was Steve, an American 15 years my senior who, in me, finally found someone whose Chinese was worse than his. He went home after our first class and told his wife “hey, this new student’s Chinese is even worse than mine!”. And, naturally, I went home and told Yang the same thing. The Frontier’s class lasted six weeks or so. Halfway through they had some new students so they split the class in two, so the “fast” learners could proceed at a quicker pace. Us slow learners (or as I preferred to call is, “deep learners”) repeated the same material. It was me, Steve, and the French woman. New students joined and after one 30 minute private lesson where able to join us as if they had been part of the class all along. Like a “groundhog day” sequel I had visions of never getting out of Beginners’ Chinese, just repeated the same lessons over and over with new students. But then it got into late summer and people wanted to take proper vacations and started to drop out. Finally it was just me and my teacher and then they called and said that without three students they could not hold the class. “No problem”, I said. In English. My next three formal attempts were through work. Strangely enough, each work program used a different language vendor. The first time I joined mid class and attended two nights a week. The hard part was it was at the end of the work day, I was exhausted, and I looked like an idiot in front of co-workers. Then again they looked liked idiots in front of me. After about three weeks, I dropped out and was proud to call myself a “chinese language school dropout”. I then tried again in about six months. Again with work, another language vendor. The aimed to be more professional and an interview was scheduled to determined my Chinese level. There was a young woman (the good cop) who introduced an older woman (the bad cop) who was the language evaluator. The evaluator asked me what my learning objective was. “To listen to some, speak a little”, I said. “Read and write?” the bad cop asked. I laughed. Apparently this was not the right response. The bad cop argued the merits of learning to read and write. I stuck to my learning objective. After a few lines of dialog she looked at the good cop and said “absolute beginner” and the good cop dutifully noted it. I ended up taking the class with a nice enough teacher who indeed tried to get me to learn some characters. Poor woman. Poor patient woman. But after another six weeks of two nights a week I also dropped out of that class. I was learning a little, but not a lot, and I certainly wasn’t learning any characters. Another year, then two passed. I have convinced myself that the only way I will learn Chinese is to take six months off work, enroll in a serious school, and study it eight hours a day. Characters and all. I looked at those around me. Some had learned quicker than I but fell back to the pack if their lives only involved western folks. Some did not even try to learn. But most were better. Some were fluent. Four years and I could order meat in a restaurant but I could not tell them what part of the cow it should come from. But at least I am still better than Steve. And he me, as I am sure he still tells his wife. I’ve done some self study and my latest attempt, via work, is just that. A very popular self learning web site called ChinesePod. This is an eight month program, four lessons on four different topics a week, self guided. So far two weeks in. I’ve learned some new words or should I say I’ve remembered words that I’ve learned once before.
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