At the start of this year, I started learning Chinese. That may end up seeming odd, as I am an Indian teenager, not even old enough to go to college or have a job in China. So why am I learning Chinese?
To be honest, I didn’t really have any grand plan when I started learning Chinese. It all started with a little bit of curiosity. I’ve always liked languages. If we had to go somewhere, I would always start learning some phrases from their language, just some basic stuff. That’s how I realized that I have a passion or an interest in learning languages. That was really the first reason. I was curious. Going back a few months to about November is when I actually got interested in Chinese. I started by watching videos on YouTube.
Another reason was that I had an interest in going to Singapore. I don’t know where that interest really came from, but we had thought of going to Singapore as an international trip. Since in Singapore one of the main languages they speak is, you guessed it, Chinese, that became another subconscious reason why I wanted to learn Chinese.
One last reason was that, for a while, my father has been wanting us to learn a language. I also wanted to learn a language properly. I was just learning bits of each language, and I wanted to learn another language properly. First, I thought of learning French. Then I thought of Spanish. Finally, I ended up with Chinese.
In the beginning, I did not take any time to learn grammar. I just saw a video that had a lot of phrases, and since they were also saying them themselves, I copied a few words from them. All I could really remember and pronounce was hello. Then I found a course on Coursera. I did not learn too much from there, but that gave me the kickstart. From Coursera, I learnt about tones, even though I still could not say them properly. I learnt how to introduce myself in Chinese and how to ask someone for their name. But most of my pronunciation was still off. I knew none of the grammar or what each word meant. I just knew the phrases.
When the new year started, I decided, if I do not do it now, I will never do it. My dad talked to one of his friends, who knew a Chinese teacher. We did one class, and I loved it. She used storytelling to teach the language, and that was great. I liked the way she was teaching her classes, so I decided to continue with her.
The classes were more than I was used to. It was three classes per week, and each class was 1.5 hours. This was a foundation course, and it mainly taught the grammar and how to pronounce everything properly. After that, we learnt some phrases, like how to ask how are you, how to respond to it, and some survival Chinese. I would probably need to know a little more Chinese to fully understand what people are saying, but I learnt a lot from the foundation course. Because of the way it was taught, Chinese did not end up being something I wanted to drop just because I had already started it. I was actually having fun while learning it.
After the course ended in January, I continued so that I could learn HSK 1 Chinese. With HSK 1, you can talk to someone in Chinese and have a basic understanding. Obviously, there will be a lot of words that you will not understand, but it is a starting point to learn more.
China is growing really fast as a country, and since Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world, it only makes sense to learn it, especially if I plan to go into business. And that’s my story for learning Mandarin!
That is it for this post. See you all next week.
