Learning Mandarin

I was listening to a debate on Radio Five Live this morning (Radio Four devotees please forgive), in which they were arguing for Foreign Languages to be made compulsory from ages 7-14. I like that; and neither am I so Asian-focussed to think that it is crucial that children be taught Mandarin or Japanese. There were occasional listeners suggesting that Far East languages would be useful for children as this is where the future of commerce will be. I have always considered that a fairly spurious reason for learning a foreign language. After all, how many current five year olds, honestly, will be doing business in Beijing or Tokyo in twenty years' time?

One thing caught me up, however, which was the reference to the Chinese alphabet. According to the Five Live presenter, the alphabet is what makes learning Mandarin so difficult. I concur whole-heartedly that written Chinese is very tough to conquer, but it is a misconception that the Chinese written system is, in fact, an alphabet. Wikepedia points out that "an alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language". Written Chinese is not (largely) based on phonemes, rather on semantics - or meaning. Any given character gives very little clue as to its pronunciation, rather it hints at what the meaning would be. This is, in fact, very efficient in terms of strokes required to write the 'word'. Consider 'elephant' in English, comes out as 名 象 in Chinese. However, it is not efficient in terms of learning although ultimately this system saves time when writing.

The Chinese, do have an alternate system for writing with an alphabet - called pinyin - which makes initial learning much easier for the Westerner. What this means is that names and place names have a much deeper mearning in Chinese than they do for pronunciation and alphabet-obssessed 'foreigners'. Beijing, for example, to us English-speakers is just a series of alien sounds. To the Chinese 北京 (pronounced Bei Jing), means North capital. New words sometimes appear more interesting than the English versions: 'Computer' 电脑 (Dian Nao) means electric brain.

Ultimately, for me, this is the soundest argument for teaching languages at a young age. It brings children in contact with an alternate mindset and way of expressing the world, thus enlarging the imagination, encouraging lateral thinking and bringing more creativity to bear in the use of English and throughout the curriculum.

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