The first time the notion of learning Chinese even entered my head I was sitting inside my high school auditorium listening to an afternoon presentation. It was 8th grade, and the heads of each academic department were giving their hokey, uninspiring but principal-mandated pitch for why we should be excited for high school. One speech finally grabbed my attention: on a projector, the Chinese instructor laid out the ten most spoken languages, starting from ten and making us guess all the way up to number one—Mandarin. From that moment, I was hooked.
I know, learning a language just because it has the most speakers is a fairly arbitrary reason for choosing a lifelong study. Then again, I think that’s a stronger reason than why my friend decided to study Icelandic (“Because it’s Icelandic”).
Though I may have learned next to nothing of Chinese in high school, my experience with college-level Chinese has proven to be the exact opposite. If you haven’t abandoned ship and changed languages by the second year, you are officially sadomasochistic. Or that’s the only way I could justify to friends the amount of hours I spent on Chinese homework. Never I have been more challenged, more humbled, and more clinically insane than my two short years of intensive, six-credit (more like ten credit) Chinese class.
Every time I tell a story about my Chinese professor, I have to preface it with “And first, let me tell you that we all had Stockholm syndrome by the third day.” No one outside of Chinese class can understand the endearment process that goes on within the classroom setting.
But let me attempt to explain.
Like any fantastic teacher, our professor set extremely high expectations and met our effort with equal exertion on her part. Sundays in her office were not recommended—they were mandatory. If you were two minutes late to class, she had one of your classmates calling you from outside the classroom. She brought Chinese treats frequently, and lightly slapped your hand if you didn’t finish all of your homework.
One day in the middle of the semester—a day in which all of us sat bleary-eyed with shoulders drooped from the burden of endless weeks of Chinese class—our professor rushed in, flustered by what she had heard from another Chinese professor. The other professor had assigned ALL of the workbook sections to her students, whereas our professor had skipped one or two. She was not giving us enough homework she discovered, as if the very thought was more frightening than watching Paranormal Activity by yourself at night in a very large, dark house.
We were simply amazed. Not enough homework? Our fatigue informed us that was impossible, but once a notion like that has entered a Chinese professor’s mind, it sticks like a warm tongue to a frosty gate.
There are so many more stories I could tell you about my professor, but I suppose all worth telling will be told in due time. I am incredibly lucky that I had such an instructor. Learning Chinese (or any other insanely difficult language for that matter) requires dedication and persistence, and having an instructor who knows how to motivate you makes all the difference in the world.
Learning Chinese is also an incredibly humbling experience. If you thought you were right, you were wrong. If you thought you were wrong and were wrong, you’re still incredibly wrong. If a Chinese professor tells you during the first week that she/he understands that you have other classes besides Chinese, don’t fall into this trap. Once you’ve decided to take Chinese, your life is officially nothing but Chinese, your ball and chain are your Chinese textbooks (the textbooks are referred to as your “girlfriend” or “boyfriend” by the professor), I used to make a joke that I was never more than five feet from my textbooks at any given moment. (I think that qualifies as gallows humor.)
You will gain incredibly embarrassing memories from Chinese class. You will make lots of mistakes, undoubtedly more than your perfectionist or semi-perfectionist self can comfortably deal with. But in the end, it’s worth it. Having grasped a very rudimentary knowledge of the Chinese language, I am ready to take on China.
