Year of the Dragon

Of course I expected that sitting down and trying to learn how to write Chinese characters would be hard. Of course I know that it’s not like Italian and Portuguese where you sort of fake your way through the whole thing and it all works out. I knew those things, which is why this may be my most unoriginal statement of all time, but let me just say it again, guys: Chinese is really friggin’ hard.

It seems silly to complain about how hard the language is when I haven’t even taken my first Chinese lesson. But again, I’m not talking about constructing sentences or carrying out complex conversations here. This marks my first whole week in Beijing, and I am not exaggerating when I say I have not been able to memorize the name of the subway stop next to where I’m staying. And it’s not for lack of trying. When I am on the train, there’s is a helpful, sweet voice in English with a perfect American accent that repeats whatever the Chinese announcer is saying. When she says the name of my station, I repeat it after her, so it’ll stick. I say it out loud, ignoring the weirded-out stares of everyone around me: Jintaixizhao. JEEN THAI SHEE JAO. Jeen thai shee jao. 

And the minute I get off the train, I have once again forgotten the name of the station, except for the fact that it starts with the letter J. (As in, I actually had to google it to write this post!). This is the case with the name of every neighborhood I visit, every street, everything. When I’m trying to find my way around, another monumental task on itself, I look up and read the name of the street, and by the time my eyes travel down to the map in my hand, I have forgotten what I just read already. Really. This is not a figure of speech. 

If being incapable of memorizing the simplest of things didn’t have me questioning my intelligence enough on a regular basis, the fact that some basic hand gestures don’t match up is not helping me either. Did you know that holding up six fingers does not mean the number six? Nope. If you want to say six, you better be ready to close your hand and extend your thumb and pinky out to the sides like some sort of market-bargaining superstar. Here’s a picture so you can see what the rest of the numbers are like:

So every time I’m wildly nodding my head up and down (and smiling as much as possible in order to make up with niceness for my annoying communicational impairments) I am left wondering whether that even means yes at all. Freaking out, I get home and google the answer because knowing how to say “yes” and “no” seems pretty important. And I get the following disheartening result:

There are no words that mean “yes” or “no” in Chinese. There are, however, words that roughly compare to English words for “yes” and “no”. The closest word to “yes” in Chinese is shi the verb that means to be. Thus, if someone asks if such and such a condition is true, the answer could be, quite simply shi, “it is”. Another word that fits for general purposes is dui ”true”, which can also be used to affirm any question posed. However, beyond this, the easiest way to say “yes” in Chinese is just by using the appropriate verb for the sentence. For example, if asked ni yao chi wufan ma ”do you want to eat lunch”, the best response may be yao ”want”; or even by answering the entire question in the affirmative.