become conversational in Mandarin

I’m still not so good at asking people questions in Chinese, but I can answer the basics. I do pretty well in restaurants. I do exceedingly well in bars.

I don’t plan on being in China anytime soon, so it’s not a terribly necessary goal anymore. I just hope I’ll be able to remember enough to impress Chinese people when I go to my favorite bakery in Chicago’s Chinatown.

Oh man, I haven’t done my language tapes in like three weeks. I got a new job, and when I come home I’m just too tired to work on it.

But, the other day I stumbled across Learn Chinese Through Chinese Pop Music, which I’m loving. It’s not helping my conversation, per se, but it does have pinyin versions of a lot of songs that I know, and some that I absolutely love. One of my goals before I left China was to be able to sing a Chinese song at karaoke. That didn’t happen. But now I think when I go back to China I’ll be able to sing Wo Men De Ai with my friends when we go out.

...Which, make no mistake, I am.

This is the second fall I’ve been done with school. It is also the second fall I’ve gone to stores and looked at school supplies and whined, “I wanna go back to school!” (which means it’s also the second fall my mother has reminded me how much I said I couldn’t wait to graduate two years back).

But, this is the first fall I’ve been all gung-ho about learning Chinese. So today I sat down with books and cassettes (I’d be happier with CDs, but beggars can’t be choosers) and pencils, and I read and listened and recited for half an hour. Soon to come: index cards so I can file away all my new vocabulary, and a pretty new box in which to file them.

The nice thing is that if you run your own pretend school, you can also decide class is over after a half hour, when you get frustrated over your seeming inability to pronounce the word for “how are you?” exactly right.

Granted, the best way to actually do immersion learning would be to go back to China.

Not happening anytime soon.

So, I’m doing the next best thing and going to Chinese restaurants a lot. So far I’m not really talking, but I’m listening like mad when the workers talk and trying to pick up what I can.

Yesterday’s adventure was not good. Man alive, I hope they were speaking Cantonese, because I didn’t understand a word (well, one word). It was highly, highly discouraging.

So many people on 43 Things want to be fluent in Mandarin. I don’t have such lofty goals for myself. I’m barely, barely a beginner. I lived in China for about eight months, but have never taken a Chinese lesson in my life. Still, with the help of my trusty Lonely Planet phrasebook, some curiosity, the good luck of running across many English speakers, and many extremely patient friends, I can get by…well, get by-ish. I can do basic things, but I can’t have conversations with anyone that consist of more than “Where are you from? What’s your job?”

Which sucks. I’m hoping to go back to China in a year, and I want to be able to function better, so I’m going to try to keep up with the Mandarin I’ve learned so far, and add to it. Given that there are about two Chinese people in my town, it will be difficult, but as of today I’ve got some new language tapes that will hopefully be as trusty as my LP book.