Mandarin Lessons

It's week two of Mandarin lessons.  Since we're not flying to China until January at the earliest, I'm keeping myself occupied the next couple of months with language lessons.  I'm having fun in the class, but don't think we can go ahead and cancel the translators for our time in China.  As a native English-speaker, I will say what shouldn't come as a surprise - Chinese is hard!  We've spent the first two classes practicing the pronunciation of Mandarin's 21 consonant and 39 vowel sounds. So many of the sounds sounded exactly the same to my untrained ear.  Eventually we moved on to tones -  five of them.  The same word in Mandarin can have multiple meanings depending upon where you apply the intonation.  If you apply the accent incorrectly on the "a" in ma, you'll end up saying "horse" instead of "mom."  People assume that because I like languages, I must be good at them. The reality is that no matter how hard I try, there's a good chance that when I meet our kids for the first time, I'll introduce myself as "horse"!

Despite the challenges I face while learning Mandarin, I feel it's important to at least try.  Mandarin is my children's first language and even if all I accomplish is learning a couple of phrases, it's a connection to the language they spoke before they came into our family.  China, it's culture and it's language are now forever connected to my family and me.  When I was in school, I was so excited when I could finally take German because it was the language of my ancestors. If we weren't about to become a Chinese-American family, I admit that I would never have decided to sign up for Chinese lessons.  But the same curiosity and yearning for connection that once lead me to learn German now leads me to Chinese.

There's a practical motivation too.  Our kids will learn English eventually.  But even if "eventually" is pretty quick for little kids, there will be a period where my own children and I don't speak the same language.  Can you imagine that?  I have trouble wrapping my brain around that reality, even if other adoptive parents have told me that language barriers with their children were the least of their concerns while in China.  Yet they have also told me that knowing even basic Mandarin can go a long way in facilitating communication.

Of the dozen students in my class, only two of us are learning Mandarin because we'll actually need to use it.  When I explained during introductions on the first day why I wanted to learn Mandarin, my story got a lot of attention.  Then the guy next to me explained that his girlfriend's parents are coming to visit from China for the first time this summer.  They don't speak English and he wants to make a good impression.  I decided the stakes are a lot higher for him!