Alan Hoenig on learning Chinese

On Feb. 9, in this space, I mentioned an interesting book, Chinese Characters: Learn & Remember 2,178 Characters and Their Meanings by Alan Hoenig, Ph.D. Hoenig is a retired City University of New York mathematics professor. I’m impressed with anyone who can learn Chinese, especially at the high level that Hoenig has accomplished, so I asked him to share some insights and tips with Saipan Tribune readers.

Today, then, the professor will give us some wisdom. Me, I’ll sit in the back of the class with the delinquents, rolling dice for cigarette money and making comments of dubious pertinence.

But first, we’ll start with an interesting twist. Hoenig’s road to Chinese actually started out as a path to Russian. He wasn’t satisfied with his progress in Russian, though, so he decided to try Chinese instead. Chinese proved to be a good match.

This introduces a question: In terms of difficulty, how do Russian and Chinese compare?

“Even though Chinese is not an Indo-European language,” Hoenig said, “I would still say that Chinese is easier (than Russian). Its grammar is less opaque. Its famous tonal system takes some getting used to, but learning a word’s tone is no more arduous for an American than remembering the final consonant of a word would be for a Spaniard learning English.”

Not that anyone asked, but, for me, learning the correct tones academically isn’t as difficult as recognizing them when they’re coming at me verbally. I’m something of a difficult case on this note, but I’ve never doubted that it’s worth the struggle.

“The payoff is big, “ Hoenig noted, looking at the upside of learning Chinese. “There are tons of marvelous stories and poems, and you get to speak directly to citizens of the next great superpower. And then, you learn how friendly and playful they can be. Most importantly, you get better service and access to more authentic dishes when you order in Chinese at your favorite Chinese restaurant.”

I can echo that comment on the restaurant note, even at the entry-level tier of the language. I used restaurants as my linguistic drill field when I was trying to go from textbook learning to street-level speaking. The concept was bigger than food, it also involved basic transactional elements such as inquiring about their business hours, paying the bill, asking if there’s a minimum amount required for using a credit card, counting change, requesting that a larger bill is broken into smaller denominations, and so on.

It’s not all a cake walk, to be sure, and Hoenig noted some of the challenges of learning the language: “Two real challenges in Chinese are a wildly different word order and the writing system, whereby a single character represents a single syllable. It’s interesting that there are several parts of speech present in Chinese, but not in English. Moreover, Chinese parts of speech have fluid boundaries. Adjectives can double as verbs, and entire clauses may serve as adjectives.”

As you probably suspect, the written element of Chinese is a big deal. Hoenig offered these insights: “Any student of Chinese knows the importance of the characters of the language—you need to write them, read them, and remember their meanings. All characters are constructed out of a number of components that appear over and over, and often these components are themselves characters. So if you create memory stories linking the component meanings to the character’s meaning, you can `easily’ remember this meaning.”

Hoenig has a knack for creating these stories, which is why I found his book on learning Chinese characters useful.

Any Westerner who can communicate in Chinese is bound to get some memorable reactions, and Hoenig is no exception.

“The incredulous reactions I get when I speak Mandarin makes the effort well worthwhile,” he said. “One time, on a commuter train from Suzhou to Shanghai during the evening rush, we were the only non-Chinese in the car. Some guy across from me spent several minutes mentally brushing off his high school English to painfully ask me where we were from. When I responded in Chinese, his jaw hit the floor. From then till the end of the line, we were the darlings of the car, sharing jokes (and) snacks.”

So, how can students of Chinese get to the point where they, too, can be the darlings of the car?

“The single best way to learn Chinese, apart from formal registration in a course, is constant engagement,” said Hoenig. “Seize every opportunity to speak with a native…Fortunately, no matter where you live, there’s apt to be native Chinese speakers nearby.”

Saipan is truly abundant in this regard, so there’s no shortage of chances to practice and learn.

Hoenig’s books are sold by Amazon.com and can be found by searching for the term “EZChinesey Guides.” In addition to his books on learning Chinese characters he has also written Eating Out in China: A Traveler’s Resource.