Sarah's travelling blog

When I was here over Chinese New Year on my own, I thought that that would be the hardest time and when other students came and things got back into a routine, things would be easier, but that wasn’t the case at all.  Although I was alone a lot over the New Year, I was never actually lonely.  Once other students started coming back, I started feeling incredibly lonely, and it was not a nice feeling!  There’s a very big difference between being alone and being lonely, and it seems that it’s lonelier to be around people with whom communication is almost impossible than it is just to be alone.

 I think I thought it would be easier to pick up Chinese than it actually is.  I have known people move to London unable to speak English and fairly soon be able to have a conversation, and I thought it would be the same for me.  What I hadn’t accounted for was that these people were European and therefore there were some connections between their language and English.  I can’t speak much French, but I can follow a conversation between French people, and I’m pretty sure if I moved to France I’d be able to pick up French quite quickly.   There are no connections between Chinese and English so you have no reference points at all, there’s nothing for your ear to latch onto.  All you hear is a wash of sound with an occasional word that you understand.   

I am still making an effort to learn some Chinese, and I have a book which I’m slowly working through, but it’s not the best book in the world; lessons entitled ‘Mr. Green sends a fax’ are neither inspiring nor particularly relevant to life in Chen Jia Gou!  If someone asks me something simple, and speaks V.E.R.Y. slowly, I can usually formulate an answer.  I can ask people simple questions, but I usually find it hard to follow the reply, so I’ll be none the wiser for having asked in the first place.  Following a conversation between Chinese people is impossible.  That’s not really surprising; I had very high level EFL students who found it hard to follow what native speakers were saying, but it’s very isolating when you’re the only non-Chinese person around.  Like, really isolating!

You have no idea why everyone’s laughing, although apparently it’s hilarious.  You never understand what’s going on, which might account for the fact that you often look lost and bewildered.  You might know that they’re talking about how Westerners eat with knives and forks rather than the far more sophisticated chopsticks, but you can’t say anything about it (like how eating pizza with chopsticks just isn’t going to work.  I’m not making it up!  I saw people trying!).  Or, you know you’re the subject of the conversation, but you have no idea what is being said, and you can’t ask because you won’t understand the reply.  And in a general sense, you don’t know what the ground rules are.  You don’t know how things work or how people tick. 

I’m not a particularly outgoing, chatty person in my own language, and I find I have to make a huge effort to speak in Chinese.  Sometimes it’s easier just to say nothing and let the conversation float over my head.  Sometimes it feels like Chinese is like a very prickly, thorny communicative wall between myself and everyone around me.   When I was in Guangzhou I met a very colourful, and rather smelly, Spanish man who has lived in China for years.  He said it took him five years before he could hold a decent conversation in Mandarin.  An Israeli girl I met here who has lived in China for two and a half years told me it took her six months to feel comfortable with basic Mandarin.  And she studied Chinese at university!  So it’s not something I can expect to learn quickly, or easily!