Noodle-level survival

On the heels of last week’s article about dealing with foreign languages in the tourism industry, one of my pals noticed that I’ve gone all of 2014 without once sniveling about my Mandarin Chinese studies. I’ve been asked if I’ve finally given up on that gig, and whether or not my enthusiasm has been worn down by the years, the toil, and my very slow progress. 
If the subject were merely one of personal interest, I wouldn’t bother to mention it. But the topic isn’t going away. Many people I know are striving to catch up to the Chinese-speaking market, notably in the hotel, restaurant, transportation, real estate, auto sales, advertising, legal services, and banking industries. That’s not just a Saipan or Guam situation. It’s a global one.

This language thing is really murky. For one thing, it’s impossible to trust anyone‘s “self reported” ability in any language, so potential students who are surveying the landscape don’t have a reliable index of the kind of progress they can expect to make. It’s a shot in the dark.

I’ll tell you what I’ve told my pals about studying Mandarin Chinese, at least at the casual, amateur level at which I’ve engaged it: This is one realm where setting goals might be problematic. You might want to consider jumping into the process without any expectations, with the one goal being to remain in the process without any goals.

I didn’t have any pals who bellied up to Mandarin classes with me. So my peer group, such as it was, consisted of the few other “old people” I met in my classes. I tally four of us from a total of three semesters. Our experience was consistent enough for me to draw some conclusions from it.

We all sensed that our first two semesters were fruitful. But the third didn’t seem to deliver much progress for the effort. This effort consisted of laborious amounts of handwriting. With the fourth semester looming ahead, and more mountains of handwriting towering over us, we had to decide if we were going to hang with the classroom routine or abandon it in favor of independent efforts.

As we contemplated this, we did settle on a basic benchmark for our skill: lunch.

This was a full-circle concept for me. One reason I wanted to study Chinese was because I got totally stymied in a Taiwanese noodle shop one day when I was really hungry. I vowed to prevent such problems in the future. I didn’t aspire to elegance; I merely aspired to some basic, street-level (or noodle-level) survival abilities.

So, lunch was my inspiration. And now lunch was our benchmark. How did we measure up?

Not well, as it turns out. After three semesters we realized that none of us separately, or, for that matter, none of us working together, could competently navigate a basic lunch order at a Chinese restaurant. Sure, we could say a few things, but we were still pretty hopeless.

When a waitress told us that we were pretty good for three days worth of study, and we told her we had studied for three semesters, not three days, she didn’t believe us.

Yikes.

I’m sure the classroom approach has advantages. I’m not criticizing it. But those of us who had far lowlier standards and who just wanted street-level skills had to take our own paths. We had to come up with our own plans.

For me, since lunch was my inspiration, and since lunch became our fateful benchmark, I decided there’s no use messing with destiny. So I made lunch my strategy as well.

I found a few friendly restaurants where the staff didn’t mind helping me. I’d always take a small note pad with me, and every time I had lunch I’d emerge with a new word or maybe an important phrase, something relevant to the ordering process. That’s all I wanted, just one word or phrase per visit. This took no more than a few seconds on any given day.

That’s small progress for small effort but it kept me in the game.

Lunch, of course, isn’t the only way to remain on the field. For example, one of my peers kept a simple journal (in Chinese) in which he’d note several highlights of his daily routine. Once a week he’d meet with a tutor who would review the journal with him.

I might give this technique a shot, since the lunch thing has run its course and I’d like to resume my native diet of bacon cheeseburgers.

Overall, my experience studying Mandarin Chinese, and that of the few peers I dealt with, was this: It’s fun. It’s interesting. It’s difficult. It’s powerful. It’s elusive.

Visit Ed Stephens Jr. at EdStephensJr.com. His column runs every Friday.