Language

My first eye-opening discovery about Chinese was that spoken and written language are not a tightly linked pair like with other tongues. Chinese is spoken as either Cantonese or Mandarin with multiple dialects and is written in either traditional or simplified characters. It so happens that the vast majority of the Chinese in the mainland China speak Mandarin, while Cantonese is spoken by a much smaller population in the south, including but not limited to Hong Kong. 

When it comes to writing, simplified characters are used by most of the mainland Chinese, while Hong Kong continues to write using the old traditional signs. This may leave an impression that traditional writing and Cantonese represent a language pair, like Mandarin with simplified signs, but this is false. It is a tradition for the better educated Mandarin speakers to also learn traditional writing. In the island of Taiwan, the population of 23 million Chinese speaks Mandarin and writes using traditional Chinese. So essentially, the Hong Kongers and Taiwanese write the same language, but speak different ones! As popularity of Chinese press from the mainland grows, the use of simplified characters becomes wider used in Hong Kong as well, but most residents would still struggle reading simplified Chinese.

My second discovery – maybe fairly obvious to some – was that Chinese had a totally different concept of “words”, if we think of a word as a written and sound representation of a meaning. All Chinese “words” are mono-syllabic. Every character is always represented by one syllable. A meaning may be expressed by several characters, in which case there would be as many syllables as there are characters. This monosyllabic nature gives Chinese that abrupt, clipped sound.

Because of its very creative representation of meaning through remarkably elaborate and sophisticated characters, I expected Chinese to be a very conceptual language. I was very much surprised by how unsophisticatedly structured and logical it can sometimes be. My first class gave me barely 10 words (numbers 1 to 10) and, at the same time, many basic things to say: dates, week days. January in Chinese is “month 1” and December is “month 12”. Monday is “week day 1” and Friday is “week day 5”. Simple, huh?

That straightforward structure may be complicated at a totally new level: the tones. Monday is “sin kei yat”. Sunday is “sin kei yath”. So where’s the difference? Monday’s “yat” means “one” and is pronounced at a higher pitch than Sunday’s “yath”, which, exceptionally, does not mean “seven”, but “sun” or “day”. Hearing that difference in a class is a totally different thing than hearing it in a conversation. Do not be surprised if I show up waiting for a friend on Sunday, when they actually suggested to meet up on Monday! Many a word sound exactly the same to us, but are very far from identical for the locals because of the different tones used. The tones are not only described by pitch, as notes in music, but also by “direction”, or what we recognize as intonation. A tone can be flat high or flat low, but it can also be going up or down. There are a total of 9 tones. Guess what, with all that complexity to regular speech, they do have intonation on top of their tones and they do sing! Sometimes I wonder if the art of song-writing in Chinese dictates writing the poetry and music at the same time so the words would retain the same sense by the time they are put into music!

Many more interesting observations come from the world of consonants. They are very different from what we are used to. Some are simply not: “m” can be really long, represent a syllable (a character and a meaning) of its own and so is, essentially, a vowel! Hong Kongers won’t hear a difference between “n” and “l”, “b” and “p”, “d” and “t”, but will distinguish dozens of different “ts” and “ch”, which sound identical to my ear. Sometimes a consonant gains on a meaning before it is even pronounced! A short illustration: read “bak” and stop just short of pronouncing “k”, barely getting your mouth ready for it. Now to the same with “bat”, again getting ready to pronounce “t” at the end, but not doing it. To our ear, both words just sound as “ba”, but to the Cantonese speakers they are distinctly different, one means “a hundred”, the other – “eight”.

The world of characters is even more fascinating, so I guess I will need to dedicate a separate chapter to it.