hi there steve kaufman here and today
i want to talk about how i learned
mandarin chinese
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now before we get into that if you enjoy
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now how i went about learning mandarin
chinese
first of all let me tell you that i was
23 at the time
and the reason i started learning
mandarin chinese is because i was
working for the canadian government
trade commissioner service and canada
was about to recognize the people's
republic of china they wanted to train
some people in chinese
i was i was lucky enough to be selected
and off i went to hong kong
actually i had a choice of going to the
defense language institute in monterey
but i
decided instead i would rather go to
hong kong which is
a chinese environment although not a
mandarin speaking environment so
i took about a year to get my level up
to what was a
sort of british foreign service exam
translating
newspaper editorials from english to
chinese chinese to english i had to
write a diplomatic note in chinese by
hand and
obviously speak and translate and so
forth took me about a year but the
important thing about being in hong kong
is that it was not a mandarin-speaking
environment
so that you know my total immersion in
chinese
was done without the benefit of being
surrounded by people who speak the
language
so how was i able to do that when i
think back on it now
the main thing and i'll go into detail
as to how i went
about learning you know their characters
and and learning to read and speak
but but the main thing was the
motivation and that's the big story
for me china represented uh you know
this exotic
world civilization culture and and i'll
get into more detail on that
but but i needed to be very much
motivated
because it was a lot of work i had to
learn characters i had to learn the
tones
and i was motivated by my interest in
the culture
today it's much easier to learn
languages
we didn't have access to mp3 files we
had great big clunky
uh open real tape recorders most
uh texts had no uh
you know obviously you didn't have
online dictionaries you didn't have
online anything
today we have link where i learned you
know i started learning russian at age
60 on link i
started learning arabic and persian i'm
still learning them i'm 75
it's just so much easier um the whole
you know the the iphone the the internet
everything has made language learning
easier including link of course but
back then we didn't have that so i
needed very strong motivation
of course today if you have all of the
advantages
of learning with modern technology
and you're motivated then you've got the
best of both worlds and you need to be
motivated
so to me the motivation was that
here was this ancient civilization
unknown to me
uh you know 4 000 years of
history chinese talk about 5 000 years
but
there's 4 000 years in terms of you know
some kind of record of some government
there
and for long periods of history china
was
the most developed country in the world
uh
probably up until you know three four
five hundred years ago
and all of a sudden this this
self-satisfied sophisticated
almost world unto itself center of the
sort of the culture of east asia all of
a sudden
comes into contact with a civilization
western european or not necessarily
western but european civilization
that has benefited from the
uh you know the science the
enlightenment the the industrial
revolution
and and has gun powder now and has other
technical advantages that the chinese
don't have and they're
faced with the fact that they are at a
disadvantage
and so here's this new culture how do
you react to it
when i think of say the qing dynasty
which was actually
a manchurian dynasty
but more or less assimilated into
chinese culture
and then in 1911 you have the the what
they call the nationalist revolution
and all of a sudden it's no longer you
know an imperial state
it's some kind of republic but that
period from 1911
through to 1949 was to me the most
fascinating period
of china when i was learning in hong
kong we had to read the people's daily
and
mouse thoughts and all of that kind of
stuff and it wasn't very interesting
because
a lot of the sort of communist
boilerplate
uh you know ideology and stuff is just a
lot of
repetition of of certain themes that are
kind of reorgan
divorced from reality but the novels of
the 20th century
in china the the struggles as as
intellectuals try
try to come to terms with this new
civilization and how much of the new
civilization should they
you know accept or integrate into their
civilization what can they maintain of
theirs
to me there must have been an amazing uh
you know intellectual struggle
and of course then there were different
you know answers there was a communist
answer there was a
you know who sure was more of a liberal
answer there was more of a fascist
answer there were lots of answers as was
the case in many other countries and i'm
discovering that in
arabic or in persian when you see a 19th
century egypt or 19th century
iran have to deal with this you know
collision now with these
very arrogant westerners who want to
impose their
uh will uh on this very proud
civilization so that to me was was
interesting so if i look at what i did
you know first of all you can see behind
me lots of chinese books
okay and so i did a lot of reading i
started with this
20 lectures in chinese culture and i
must admit that you know reading about
the history of china you know 1500 years
ago
or more recently some of the
declarations
by by uh you know um
sun yat-sen for example the sort of
nationalist revolution and then
you know mao's thought and all of that
reading about it in chinese
was very exhilarating for me i followed
that 20 lectures book up
with and i should say that before i got
into that before i started reading
we had this where i went to school
new asia college in hong kong kowloon
side
it was part of the yale and china
program so there and there's so many
books in the yale and china program
and the starter book for them was
chinese dialogues
which was a series of dialogues spoken
rapid fire or so it seemed to me
and they used their own uh
transliteration system it wasn't opinion
so i became accustomed to words and
sounds for a good
i think two or three months before we
started into
reading and learning the characters once
i had some characters then i could
get into the 20 lectures in chinese
culture although we had no audio for it
which is unfortunate
and also this intermediate reader in uh
chinese modern chinese lots of emphasis
on patterns
and to me the secret to learning chinese
is
don't use a traditional dictionary
because it's very time consuming
and you'll forg in any case any
dictionary once you close the dictionary
you've forgotten what was there
but with the chinese dictionary and i
got lots of them it takes so long to
look a word up it's it's a complete
waste of time
i only dealt with reading material where
there was
a glossary behind each chapter of course
nowadays
that's no longer necessary because you
have online dictionaries and so if
you're reading a link you can look up
words immediately you can save them to a
database
there's so many more things that you can
do now that weren't available
back in those days but so the first
thing is don't use a traditional
dictionary which today you don't need to
do
and the second thing was don't get tied
up in grammatical explanations
because the the grammarians tried to get
in there and create all kinds of terms
and stuff i never looked at any of that
stuff
i dealt strictly with patterns here's
how they say it
and here's how we say it in english
here's how they say it in chinese
and if i do enough reading and
eventually enough listening
i will get used to those patterns in
chinese without
worrying about grammatical explanations
oh i did want to show you you know as i
said
passion is part of it obviously and i
like the the characters and i had these
1000 flash cards with the
what's known as the radical which
determines you know the
sort of the meaning of the character to
some extent was in red and i went
through those i had sort of a
self-styled
space repetition system that i used but
eventually
of course you come to terms with the
tones and it's very difficult to
remember the tones of individual words
so
i listen to a lot of xiangshan and i
have at home i have a lot of cds
of xiangtong i just grabbed a few here
my favorite is hobalin and he wasn't
able to grab one of his
but these shengshou are comedians
it's like a comic dialogue and
they exaggerate the pronunciation as
they're trying to be funny and
and i just found them you know
especially hobalin i just
it was almost like listening to music
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um
that helped me with my tones because you
have to get the tones
inside a phrase of some kind so if i
hear these
tones these these uh phrases bouncing
around in my brain
it helped me even though the uh the
sunshine
comic dialogues contain a lot of
references to historical characters or
to literature and things of that nature
that i
didn't you know had no idea of
uh so i didn't understand that well but
it was the music of those dialogues that
helped me
so that was the other thing that was
very useful for me in learning tones is
to do a lot of listening to that kind of
material
now i have here two boxes
of cds of which i haven't yet had time
to listen to i kind of set them aside
you know home no hmong and i don't know
how many
how many cds and i've got you know
countless uh
sunshine cds and and historical cds and
there's so much stuff and of course
nowadays you don't even have to go i
used to go to when i was traveling into
china
uh you know in 2003 maybe when i went
there to promote my book
uh so i bought all this stuff but now of
course you can go online and you can
find
youtube videos which by the way you can
import into link
with the uh subtitles and that becomes a
lesson
and so there's so many more things that
you can do that i couldn't do
back in those days so just to summarize
and i i would recommend that you check
out the video that i did on
how i learned french and that was of
course the first
call it language that i wanted to learn
to a level of fluency
and compare that to my experience with
learning chinese and you'll see that the
common denominator
is that i i developed a passion for
certain aspects
of chinese civilization of french
civilization
and that's what sort of drove me to
overcome the
obvious difficulties and the
difficulties are not
insurmountable chinese for example has
the advantage that once you have
characters
it's easy to build vocabulary because
they are
in the new words in the way we
understand words are combinations of
different characters
the grammar in chinese is if i compare
to slavic grammar it's very very
straightforward
but you have to learn the characters and
you have to tackle the tones
so with each language there are
difficulties to overcome these
difficulties
you have to basically have a passion
and i'm not going to speak in chinese
today but you could refer
to some of my videos where i have had
discussions in chinese
and yeah i've maintained it i've
maintained it and even though i don't
have much occasion to speak chinese
uh i think i speak chinese better today
than when i wrote my exam exam back in
1969
even though i was able to write then and
today i would have a lot of difficulty
in fact i can't write
by hand in chinese i can write on the
computer but back then i could
but today because i occasionally revisit
chinese and i listen to cds
and content and we have chinese friends
here in vancouver i think i speak better
now than i did back then
so there you have it i'm kind of rushing
through it so i don't i don't want
this video to be too long but that's a
brief uh sort of introduction on
how i learned mandarin chinese thanks
for listening
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