storyboard

welcome to china

open sesame

do not enter

Language is the holy grail of China. It hangs above the foreigner like a Domocles sword, a permanent cultural death threat, which if not handled correctly, will cut off your lifeline to civilization. The importance and reverence the Chinese show to their mother tongue confer it the status of a meta linguistic Forbidden City - cryptic, imposing and for all purposes inaccessible to the outside world. But like the now renovated and dusted off imperial bastion in Beijing, the Chinese language has become a commodity. It draws masses of eager students from across the world - 25 million worldwide are studying Chinese according to people daily. In their attempts at grasping the maze of signs that is putonghua, language students mimick the dazed tourists who stumble through the labyrinth of temples and reception halls that make up the Gugong. Both are clumsily looking for clues about an entire nation.

And they are not looking in the wrong place. Language functions as a centralized power hub for China?s national identity and not surprisingly, it was off limits to foreigners until the end of the 19th century. With the exception of Jesuits and high foreign dignitaries, non-Chinese were not allowed to learn the language - and Chinese nationals were not allowed to teach it. To the Chinese, mastery of the language was the equivalent of prying open the inner workings of China, a clear and present danger to national security. Security concerns apart, however, the Chinese simply considered foreigners to be dim-witted barbarians, incapable of learning a language as complex as Chinese. This attitude is still alive today. Most Chinese are forever expounding on the intricacy of their own language, and swoon at the sight of a foreigner chatting in Mandarin, convinced that said person must be endowed with a superior intellect.

Remnants of this prejudice linger persistently and speaking perfect Chinese can prove perfectly useless; there are plenty of hapless waiters, drivers, fruit vendors and even police officers who will goggle at you in incomprehension when you address them in their own language. The notion that a non-Chinese is actually speaking in Mandarin fries their brain and they simply cannot process what you are saying - frequently another Chinese will have to take pity and "translate" your Mandarin to his or her dazed fellow citizen.

So yes, Chinese is difficult, but perhaps more because of psychological barriers on the part of both foreigners and Chinese, rather than an inherent insurmountable complexity. Foreigners react to the language like they react to the Forbidden City and the country at large - they deposit their brains somewhere at the airport and subsequently run wild on emotions fed by centuries of mystification about China. But the Chinese language is almost rigorously simple in terms of grammar, much simpler than Russian or German. Mandarin Chinese has no tenses, no plural and singular and no conjugations, hence the no nonsense "weather good" and "me no play today" sentence structure of immigrant Chinese in the rest of the world - these are just literal translations from Mandarin and show the Lego quality of the language. Throw a few pieces together, in the right order, avoid frills and modifications and you have a correct Chinese sentence.

Tones can be a problem at times, but mostly the cadence of a sentence comes naturally when surrounded by a billion people playing tones off you all day long. It's practice, not genius. Pronounciation only really matters in Beijing, where exposure to foreigners has raised expectations on the part of the locals. In places such as Shanghai, perfect putonghua is actually a draw back. Your standardized pronounciation will fall on deaf ears and only lessen your chances of someone understanding you, because, well, everyone speaks Shanghaiese and correct Mandarin only confounds them. Shanghaiese is as different from Mandarin as say Italian from Spanish - if not more. Example: The Shanghaiese version of "Women kan" (We look in Mandarin) sounds to foreign ears like a mix of French and Arabic: Alla kuku.

But this should not be surprising of course; China is huge and if even tiny Italy manages to have incomprehensible dialects, it is only natural that China should be a linguistic melting pot. Culturally, China is held together by the shared Chinese script (characters), which can be read and understood by every (literate) citizen across the country. Chinese characters are an art form, aesthetically and intellectually, but learning them is exceptionally tedious and they are the main reason why so many foreigners living in China remain de facto illiterate. Chinese characters are the linguistic equivalent of Teflon, they don't stick. The learning of characters requires mindless repetition and are mostly devoid of such thrills as deductive logic to pry open meaning. Mindless repetition of course is a character (attention, pun!) trait of Chinese mentality and much en vogue still in the current educational, not to mention, business system. Redundancy permeates the language itself, perhaps a natural consequence of its pared down grammar - words are duplicated (kan kan / to look) and a formal Chinese sentence, let alone a paragraph, can drip with repetitive semantics.

Explicit statement of intended meaning is necessary because of the homonyms and homophones, which litter the language and render Chinese unintelligible even to the Chinese. It seems to affect logic as well. Chinese is embedded in a high context culture, where meaning is derived from the immediate context as much as from words, which makes it very difficult to extract information that is not specific and relevant at the moment in time that you are asking for it. Example - on your way to a destination, casually ask your taxi driver how far another street is from your destination (because you might want to go there later) and the driver will immediately pull over and hyperventilate because he thinks you want to go there now, at once. To him your request is immediately specific and relevant to your current situation.

Faced with high context logic and inscrutable characters, most foreigners will chose illiteracy and bumble along with pinyin, the very smart transliteration system set in place by the communist government after 1949. Pin yin is useful, but it will never replace characters, at least not entirely; it would be like putting a McDonalds into the Forbidden City, or letting tourists into adjacent Zhongnanhai, the real power hub where China's leaders keep busy behind closed doors.