Last week when it was raining hard outside, I stayed at home and took a vicarious trip to Beijing in a book by Canadian journalist Jan Wong: A Comrade Lost and Found, A Beijing Story. In 2006 she went for a one-month stay to reconnect with her schoolmates from Beijing University where she studied Mandarin Chinese in 1972. Throughout the trip, she explained the language and the history associated with Beijing, covered some of its ever-changing history, recalled the Cultural Revolution, and discovered the city’s last two decades of economic development and its inhabitants’ new lives. It was interesting to compare her view of the city and its people with my own former life there and what I have heard from friends who either currently live there or have traveled there in recent years. She also compares Beijing with other famous cities in the West, such as Paris and New York, and compares Chinese culture with American and French cultures which I have experienced since I left Beijing. I was born in Beijing, went through my childhood during the Cultural Revolution, and then spent 7 years at Tsinghua University which is near Beijing University. I feel well connected to the people and the places on Wong’s trip, and I am glad to see the latest changes before the Olympic Games in Beijing 2008 which is part of the Beijing life I didn’t experience.
While it rained outside in Salem, I totally immersed myself in the book, traveling with Wong in the city I lived in 23 years ago. I couldn’t put the book down until I finished it early Thursday morning so that I could travel back to Salem in time for my class in the evening.
In my adult Chinese class at the Salem Athenaeum, I had the students practice the four tones of Mandarin which is the basis of the language. Everyone was carefully listening to me speaking the vowels and constants of the Pinyin, as well as the pronunciation of characters, words, and phrases. They mentally mapped these into something familiar to an English speaker, then tried out the sounds one by one, exchanged notes with each other as I helped them make corrections as needed. Without doubt, the challenge is in the tones. We started with single vowels, a, e, i, o, u, ü, then moved on to pronounce individual characters. Finally we put several characters together to form a phrase. Speaking the right tones is crucial. Some words with the same sound, but different tones mean totally different things. As the head of the world language department at a nearby prep school said to me, if you are not careful, you might as well call your mother a horse--ma with the first tone means “mama” while ma with the third tone means “horse”. I put a lot of energy into teaching Pinyin and the four tones to my students. For younger children, they simply imitate what I say and make perfect sound. For adults, I do a lot of practice with my students. Often someone who has a good ear for music masters the pronunciation faster and shares her notes with others to help with their pronunciation.
During the trip to Beijing with Jan Wong, I learned her description of the four distinct tones of Mandarin:
The first tone rings like a note on a bronze bell,
The second rises gently like yeast,
The third swoops like a hawk, and
The fourth clatters like a stone on a marble floor.
As a native Mandarin speaker, I never thought so much about the tones before. It is all natural to me. The description is more interesting to me than helpful, but I hope it makes sense to my students. I can certainly understand the difficulty for a native English speaker to pronounce the right tones since I myself had great difficulty to pronounce French when I lived in Paris during 2007-8. French people corrected my pronunciation all the time and no matter where I was, whether at a pharmacy, a fish shop, or a party at a friend’s family château, and of course in my French language class. To take things easy, I set a goal for myself: I don’t have to be perfect in my French so long as I can make myself understood.
