Though the looking glass, snarkily

Before I came to China I spent a fair amount of time working on Mandarin. Mandarin, for those unaware, is the common language of modern China, comparable to Hamburg German or Oslo Norwegian. As a state mission to unify China under one linguistic rubrick, for a long time Mandarin never really worked. Sure it was taught in schools but no one outside of Beijing really spoke it. But since the advent of television, (or, more accurately, the economic reforms that led to most eastern Chinese being able to afford televsions) it has swept over the country. Now everyone speaks it.

For an English speaker, there is almost no toe-hold into the language: no common cognates, no phonetic writing, and a grammar so far removed from Indo-European as to appear to lack one. That said, I still put my time in, memorizing characters and phrases, studying up on grammatical constructions. I thought, while in LA, that I was making pretty good progress. Now that I'm here, I feel indescribably lost in a see of indistinguishable tones, gluttal g's and aspirated s's. I'm barely able to order a meal, much less make myself understood. No matter how carefully I articulate my tones, they never come out well enough to satisfy my listener.

What's worse is that in this sea of w's, g's and s's, I can't seem to rememeber anything. If I get the word right, I forget the tone. If I get the tone right, I forget the sounds. I'm reintroducted to people several times and still can't get their names quite right. Foods I eat every day still come out wrong. It's like swimming in an Asian Lethe, linguistically treading water.

Many of these difficulties occur in every language, even ones much closer to one's mother tongue: the indistinguisable stream of syllables, the inability to articulate key sounds, the sensation of memorylessness. The obscurity of Mandarin is more or less incidental, a quantitative difference, not a qualitative one. And so I understand its just a sensation, this wandering in the field, and that with practice things will indeed progress. It's just hard to remember when the woman behind the counter corrects your pronunciation of 'coffee' every single morning.