Although I was born and grew up in China, I could not speak any Chinese when I was child. It was due to my family's circumstances, both my parents are Korean and they spoke Korean. Korean was also the language that I have learned since I was a baby. My parents spoke Chinese but it was not as good as Korean and they knew how important Chinese was, especially for someone like me who lived in China. Thus, my parents were decided to send to the Chinese language school. At that time, I just finished third grade's class in Korean language primary school which class was all taught in Korean.Obviously, my Chinese level was way behind the same age Han Chinese kid. Therefore, my parents sent me to a Chinese teacher's home to study Chinese during the school break, before I transferred to Chinese language school. I left home for almost three months, it was not easy for a ten years old child. I remember the first time I stepped into Chinese teacher's home, in my mind, there was full of fear instead of any expectation. Fortunately, the Chinese teacher was a very kind lady who was around 40.My first Chinese class began at first day I moved to teacher's home. Teacher took me to a wall with an Alphabet on it.
"Can you read it?" teacher asked.
"OK... b,p,m,f,d,t,n,l." It was a piece of cake for me. However, those were weird English alphabet sequences that I have never seen before. Teacher told me I was right, but there is a different pronunciation in that kind of alphabet. I took a good look at them, and I found out there was a strange English word under the each of the alphabet. Then teacher told me those were Chinese alphabet and English words were phonetic transcription.
As being a beginner, Chinese was a totally whole new area for me. I started with alphabet. At first, I found it was really hard for me to pronounce Chinese alphabet and made me missed my English teacher as well. It took me a week to remember all of alphabet. However, that was just beginning, the true hardest part was learning Chinese word which looked like magic symbols and I had to study hundreds of them every day. However, after few days study, I noticed that one word could have a different pronunciations, it was like betrayed by someone who was already friends.It is also one of the reason that Chinese is hard to learn. In Chinese, It call the polyphone. It is the word had two or more pronunciations – like twin brother that looks exactly same, but have different name. The only way to distinguish the pronunciations is how the word combined with other words and way to remember the words is to recite them.
After three months study, I was transferred to the different primary school that taught class by Chinese. Perhaps the new teacher had a different accent, I could not understand teacher's speaking and 'What?' in Chinese was mostly the first response when someone talked to me in class. In the first two or three week of class, I found myself like a deaf people, because I could hardly followed class and that made me frustrated. I even wondered if I could finish the semester with my poor Chinese. The true hardest part was writing. When I was writing, I always stopped by the word that I did not know how to write. Luckily, teacher permitted me to use pin-yin in my writing. That was like give a pass card which I could get through all the way of writing. And after one year studying in the Chinese language school, I could literally communicate with my classmates. And when I graduated from primary school, my Chinese was as good as native.
Today, I have been using Chinese almost 15 years, thus it is very comfortable for me to speak and write Chinese. Looking back all the way, I believe that the most important part is accumulation. In fact, learning a new language is a challenge, nevertheless, it was much easier to start learn in young age. Nonetheless, from another point of view, circumstance is also considerable. As for my experience, learning in a Chinese speaking family and Chinese language school was truly helped me to improved my Chinese.
I could really relate to the experience of learning a completely new language. It wasn't as intense for me- for I was lucky enough to stay with my family throughout the process. I could still relate to the part where you said that you communicate with your classmates after a while. There weren't actually anything that I could not relate to. I had a semi-similar experience of having a difficult time understanding a language when I first returned to Korea. I really was hooked into your first paragraph because I, for some stereotypical reason, anticipated that you would have been born in Korea. I really did feel like reading on. However, I think that it might be an even more interesting hook if you explained how the language was completely unusual, considering your name, which sounds fairly Korean. You used past tense throughout, and used past continuous in your last paragraph, which totally makes sense, considering how you are now talking about something that you have been able to do, and can now do as well. I would personally want to know more about the difficulties in the culture that you went through, if you did have any difficulty at all. I loved your writing in general though!
ReplyDelete201501855 Jung Aa Ahn