Success! Well…

… sort of. We have been in China for nearly three weeks now, and for the first time today we have managed to get a bill in a restaurant after asking for it in Chinese! I know this does not sound like much of an achievement, but so let me explain.

First of all, our previous attempts at asking for the bill (apparently ‘maiden’ in Mandarin Chinese) have resulted in many things being offered to us by bewildered waitresses – soy sauce, the menu, beer… we’ve only managed to get the message across with detailed charades, pointing to someone else’s cheque, or the restaurant finding someone with a few words of English to help out! So it’s quite a step forward to be understood for once – well, sort of understood. Gary’s linguistic attempts to pay did give the staff the giggles…

So why is this a problem? Normally when we go to any country the first thing we do is to learn a few words and phrases – please, thank you, hello, good bye, yes, no – simple things like this. It’s not much effort, and it’s usually appreciated as a politeness even if the people you speak to can understand English. But things are a little difficult in China, and to be honest we’ve struggled. Really struggled.

I suppose the main problem is there is no such thing as Chinese. There are about a billion different ‘Chinese languages’ – every region has an individual dialect, which may be completely incomprehensible to anyone from another region. And within the regions themselves apparently there is huge variation from place to place. So even a Chinese person will struggle to communicate verbally with the majority of people in China unless they know more than just their local dialect. Now we’re travelling around of course, so we can’t get the feel for words in even one place…

Actually I’m not even sure if the number of dialects is our main problem. Perhaps it is that all of the Chinese dialects are tonal. In other words, they have relatively few words compared to most languages, but the meaning of each is changed by the tone in which it is said. So say the same word in a flat way and it will have a completely different and unrelated meaning to that word said with a rising tone. Or a falling tone. Or a tone that goes high-low-high… This is completely unintuitive to us, as of course in English we use tones for expression – for instance we would usually say a statement flatly, or a question with a rising tone at the end. So whenever we ask a question out here we naturally use the wrong tone (even if we’re trying not to) and no-one has a clue what we’re going on about! Worse – Gary managed to reduce a poor girl in an ice-cream parlour to a severe fit of giggles today by trying to ask where the toilet was. She had to run away to recover. I don’t know what he said, but it probably had nothing to do with finding the gents!

And finally, to top it off, the written word in Chinese is a mass of complicated symbols. So trying to check that you’re on the right train, street, etc is a nightmare, and reading signs that tell you about changes, where to go etc downright impossible. So you could say we’re struggling.

However, we have found amusing ways around our problems. We have managed to work out the numbers one to ten, so at least can give the correct money at a newsagent when buying a drink (usually). Gary is persevering with speaking to people – he’s got a better memory for vocabulary than me! But I have got very good at miming what we want (which usually works better than the linguistics). And, when buying tickets at railways stations I’ve worked out that we actually sort of get what we want if I copy down the symbols for the place names and carriage class along with dates, times and train numbers onto a piece of paper to hand the attendant. I’ve got quite artistic about it! Trust me, we’d have no chance at just speaking to them. We tried once, and failed dismally to get beyond ‘hello’.

Anyway, if any of you have any suggestions as to how to speak at least Mandarin Chinese (the most widely spoken dialect) we’d be really grateful. A few weeks ago I’d have never thought I’d say that I miss being able to understand people as much as I did in Japan! Now Japanese seems easy peasy. And that’s saying something!