On my way to becoming the best Briana I can be
我会说一点点 but I wish I could speak more.
我会说一点点 but I wish I could speak more.

我会说一点点 but I wish I could speak more.

As of today, I’ve been living in China for 181 days, and for some reason, I’m not as fluent in Mandarin as a native speaker. I was hoping that as soon as I crossed the border, I would be struck, maybe by lightning, or a dragon from an ancient Chinese fable, and suddenly I’d be able to have conversations and direct taxi drivers, or at the VERY LEAST be able to order food for myself in a restaurant, but I had no such luck.

There’s nothing more special than being able to speak to someone in their language. Communication connects us, and I think it’s one of the reasons I love language so much. I consider myself a baby polyglot; I can speak* six languages (to varying extents) , and I love being able to put them to use.

I started learning my first (second) language at an early age. As a child growing up in South Florida, I took Spanish in elemetary school and continued as I progressed in grades. During my first year of college, I took a semester of Mandarin, and I added Czech my junior year when I studied abroad. I started to learn Turkish because my boyfriend was Turkish, and I wanted to speak to him in his own language, but he wasn’t a great teacher, and we don’t speak to each other in any languages any more. Now, I’m back to Chinese, and where I’ve been able to catch on easily with other languages, Chinese has been the most difficult language for me to learn.

It’s hard living in a new place and not knowing the language. When I first got here, I was terrified to speak, and a lot of times I still am. I give a lot of embarrassed smiles (that people can’t see because of my mask), and have memorized 对不起我不明白。”对不起” means sorry, but recently, I learned that it’s the kind of sorry you would use when you’ve made a grave mistake, not when you don’t understand what someone’s saying to you. There’s so many little things that feel like tricks, and the joke is constantly on me.

I wish I could speak Mandarin so bad. It would make my life here in China so much easier, but it’s more than that. Knowing Mandarin would allow me to actually get to know people (and the country I live in) better. It would allow me to make friends and memories, and, yes, it doesn’t hurt that it would also allow me to make absolutely sure the dish that I order is going to be vegetarian when it comes out of the kitchen. Unfrotunately, I can’t learn with a snap of my fingers like I would like to, but I’m here, I’m working hard, and eventually it’ll pay off.

*My test for if I can speak a language is if I can say enough to impress a native speaker, and as a Black person, that is unfortunately very easy because people have little to no expectations. sigh. However, by these same standards…I do know Chinese.

4 Comments

  1. I also would like to learn Chinese (Mandarin), partly because an ex-colleague of mine went to work for another company and then was seconded to China for 6 months. She took lessons before she went and then whilst she was there she started to pick up a bit more – just to make life easier.
    Like you, I was brought up from a young age to respect the languages of other countries that we visited and always taught how to say please, thank you, hello and goodbye. It’s just polite to try and speak a little bit however simple to show some respect for the people you encounter.

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