My other reason for studying Chinese is that I love traveling and since Mandarin Chinese is the most widely spoken language in the world, it is a very useful language to learn for a traveler at heart. I hope to visit many more countries where I will be able to discover the new cultures. Since East Asian culture is so different from my (European) culture, one of my aims is to master Chinese to the level which will allow me to understand that culture fully and not by translation and other people’s interpretation.

 

I have been learning Chinese for four years. I took three levels of Chinese at a university level; each level lasted two semesters. Altogether I followed six semesters of instruction with a total of 4500 minutes of attending classes, and at least 2000 minutes in addition in less formal settings. None of the other languages I have been learning ever took me so long to get to a satisfactory level. With Mandarin, I have to admit, I am very slow and clumsy. This is due to certain obstacles that I have encountered while learning Chinese. I will discuss three of them.

 

First, the most discouraging factor is the presence of the tones. Since my native language (Polish) and other languages that I speak are not tonal languages, the mastery of tones in Chinese is a real problem. So many times I thought I produced a “perfect” sentence and I was happy to say it out loud but then the expression of my listeners’ faces (that of confusion and misunderstanding) quickly made me know that my “perfect” sentence, even though grammatically correct, did not make sense with my poor choice of tones.

 

The Chinese characters are the second obstacle. Even after the third year of studying Chinese, I still have problems writing them. There are frequent times when I forget about a stroke or a component of the character, which either does not make sense or changes the sense of the word. This is very discouraging but at least I know that if I keep on practicing writing the characters, I will get better. Here the only problem is that it is an extremely time-consuming and tedious activity. I wish somebody invents a more interesting and effective way of learning the Chinese characters.

 

The third obstacle is a lack of opportunities to practice Chinese. Unfortunately, most Chinese native speakers I know also speak English. Therefore, each time I try to speak Chinese with them, they immediately switch to English, knowing that it is our lingua franca. This is a little bit discouraging because it gives me less motivation to study hard. Why learn a language that you can only speak to yourself in the shower?

 

Nevertheless, none of those obstacles are big enough to make me discontinue studying Mandarin. I do continue to study it, but at a slower pace.  I really hope that one day I will be able to reach a decent level. Knowing that modern technology is developing at a speedy rate makes me hope for some more help from the Internet or other computer based assistance for language instruction.

 

When considering computer-assisted language learning, I was happy to discover that there are a lot of on-line resources that one can use to practice Chinese.  Myself, I have been using many applications that could be found on the Internet. Some of the links to them could be found on my Chinese Professor’s website http://www.siu.edu/~dfll/Chinese/index.html .

 

Even though I find most of those applications useful and interesting, they are mostly based on drills and memorization. This kind of learning seems unavoidable but at the same time it is not as meaningful as learning in a real context and through social interactions rather than cramming vocabulary. Therefore, I am becoming more and more willing to practice Chinese in virtual worlds, such as Second Life or/and through RPG games and chat.

 

Nevertheless, I experienced that learning a foreign language in a real (or close to real) situation proves to be the most effective. I have visited only one country (Taiwan) where Mandarin Chinese is spoken on regular basis. Even though the trip lasted only ten days, linguistically and culturally, this trip enriched me to a large extent. Day by day I was able to understand more, say more and read more. I wish I could spend more time in such an enriching environment. For this reason, I am seriously considering one month of intensive immersion in China or Taiwan in several years.  I know it will be very helpful.