It's Chinese to Me

A funny thing happened the other morning while Husband was getting ready for work. I was nursing The Baby and playing my favorite game on my phone. My Husband comes over to give us a kiss goodbye and asks, "Are you reading CHINESE????!!!"

I almost died laughing. I was playing Mahjong which in no way constitutes any understanding of Chinese. All you have to do is match tiles that have Chinese "characters" on them.

However, before letting him in on that, I decided to go along with it for a minute. "Yes dear, I am practicing because you know how everything is 'Made in China'? Well, one day when they come to collect their debt, we Americans are gonna be in serious trouble if we don't know some Chinese. So, I'm teaching The Baby too. You know he might want to be a foreign interpreter* in case that doesn't happen."

He actually thought for a minute on this and thought I was serious. Perhaps he doesn't know enough about the Chinese language to know how far-fetched it would be for a Stay-At-Home Mom (with a FIVE Month old baby) to have any hopes of learning Chinese in her spare time.

In case you don't either, I'm going to give you the 5 reasons why I'm not learning Chinese anytime soon:

1.) Their language is based on "characters" with absolutely no rhyme or reason. It is rote memorization at its best. English language? 26 characters. Chinese? 20 or so THOUSAND just to even think you might be able to read a news headline.

2.) The language is not even phonetical. The characters don't add up together to make words. They are the words. So, there is nothing to build on. For example, want to say the word "banana" in English? If you know how the letters sound in most cases, you can sound it out. Want to say ''banana" in Chinese? It's pronounced "xiang jiou" which is written like THIS:

3.) It is "HARD" to learn! How hard is it? Let's just say that the average Chinese 3 year old must be a genius if they can say a few words.(Maybe this is why China is taking over the world?) After 10 years of structured classroom learning, an English-speaking native MAY be able to go into a Chinese library and figure out what a book is about after a few minutes. With a Dictionary. In the Kid's section. Now take the same English-speaking person and give them 10 years of say French or Spanish, they can write a doctoral thesis in that language. Not joking you on this: Chinese Junior High School students have a contest sort of like our American spelling bees. Except their contest is to see who can find a word in the dictionary first. Any language that you have no idea how to even start looking up a word seems pretty "hard" to me.

4.) It is a "tonal language". Here in the States, I use my tone to inflect how I'm feeling. If I yell "Husband!," you would have a hard time figuring out what I meant without the tone and contextual clues. It could mean "Husband, I haven't seen you in forever, come and give me sugar!!!" Or it could mean, "Husband, why in the world did you leave your lasagna plate in the bathroom?" In Chinese, tone inflections make the word mean a WHOLE OTHER WORD. And oftentimes we English speakers can't even hear those tonal differences. So, if you have a boss that you're trying to say, "Nice Day" to, it might come off as "Nice dick" given a slightly different tone. (This is just a hypothetical example, but definitely could happen.)

5.) There is no way you can even TYPE in that ca-razy language. Want to type in Chinese? Good luck. I'm not even going to go into all the details of this. But, you can go to Slate's Article that tells you how the Chinese type.

If you look at history, you will see that when countries or empires take over other countries, the invadees have to learn the invader's language. I just don't see that ever happening in America. We are not smart enough to learn this language!

Back to Mahjong for me. Easy, simple, just the way I like it with the recent lack of sleep. If my son wants to interpret* Chinese, he can learn the language on his own time.