The words I never thought I would be saying, “我不会说中文“ which directly translates to “I can’t speak Chinese”. The national language in Hong Kong is Cantonese, which if I had planned 6 years ago, I could have started learning it since high school. Unfortunately, I did not, which led me to begin learning Mandarin Chinese in my sophomore year of high school. Since the beginning of my language-learning journey, I’ve struggled more with my pronunciation instead of memorization, given that Chinese is a tonal language in which pronunciation is key to what you are trying to communicate. After a two-year break, I am now at Level 4 learning about advanced sentence structures and grammatical rules. I am currently taking Chinese classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:30 am to 12:20 pm every week. My Chinese teacher in Hong Kong has a different teaching style than I am used to, but it has been working well during my time here.
My current Chinese teacher is heavy on the workload so we can learn at a better rate. We have a presentation every other week based on what we have been learning, along with listening quizzes every week we don’t have a presentation, based on the vocabulary we have learned that week. Already more than halfway into the semester, we have done 2 listening quizzes, and 2 presentations as well as our midterm. I have been able to improve my listening to get a lot of understanding of what people are saying but an area in which I still need growth is differentiating the tone and writing it in pinyin. For our listening quizzes, we are required to write both the character and pinyin, and 9 times out of 10 I write the character before I can write the pinyin.
My most recent presentation was to present about a love story from our region of the world. Naturally, I was teamed up with two people from Canada and we chose to explain the love story of “The Notebook”. Given I had never watched the American classic, I took this chance to both enjoy and study the movie to be ready to translate the important details for the class. This assignment is based on how in the second chapter we reviewed how to explain the details of attending an opera, what the characters are like, as well as what happens in the plot. My team was able to successfully deliver a presentation on the plot including the sad ending. Below are some of the slides I helped translate and present, the pictures are reference pictures for the point in time of the movie.
My dorm happens to be where a lot of the foreign exchange students live, and on my floor, I have been able to become close with the students from Mainland China. In recent months, being surrounded by a lot of native Mandarin speakers has allowed me to not only practice my pronunciation but also ask them for help should I need any. When it comes to helping me revise my homework questions or helping me study, they are always very helpful and eager to teach me. This has made me enjoy studying Chinese more because of the motivation of being able to talk with them more often in their native language. Of course, in return, they ask me to edit their research papers for logistical errors.
Prior to coming to Hong Kong, I was concerned about not being able to practice my Mandarin at all, but now that I have been here for two and a half months, I am very happy about how far I have come. In Hong Kong, it has been easier to read things like menus or signs since a lot of the characters are the same written but different when pronounced. I have also been able to put my improvement to the test during my trip to Taiwan where the signs were easier to read even though they were in traditional Chinese characters. During this trip, I have also been able to pick up a couple of Cantonese words to order and pay at local restaurants.
