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When instructor Ian Tan was young, he couldn't wait for Chinese classes to end, but now that he's middle-aged, he learns and uses Chinese every day. Why and how did they make the switch?
One of the happiest days of my school life was when I completed my AO level Chinese exam in 1993.
It was a tough 12 years of waiting, from the first grade of elementary school to the last Chinese language test in school.
I absolutely hated learning languages. My family didn't speak Chinese at home and I only read English books.
Thirty years later, my friends are constantly amazed to learn that I have fallen in love with languages and am studying them every day.
“Ian, what happened to you?” they ask in fake horror.
This is how my 180 degree change happened.
china blues
In 2003, ten years after I took my last Chinese language test, I was appointed as a new reporter and came to Shanghai.
My first attempt to buy food on Chinese soil was a disaster. I went into McDonald's thinking it would be easy to order a burger, but the menu was all in Chinese and I couldn't read most of the words. As he ordered, he had to timidly point to the menu picture.
The rest of the trip was equally miserable as I had to interview locals in broken Chinese. I was so embarrassed that I got a badge of shame.
The seed of a desire to improve my Chinese was planted in my mind, but it only started to grow around 2016. At the time, I was working at Razer, a technology company, and had to interact with colleagues from Shanghai.
Once again, Chinese words came out of my mouth awkwardly and my colleagues waited patiently for me to finish my sentence.
I decided enough was enough. It was time to improve my Chinese skills.
learn how to learn
The hardest part about relearning a language is figuring out the right way to do it.
Think about it. I have not been familiar with Chinese my whole life. How can I know what the right way to learn Chinese is? I knew I needed to improve my Chinese vocabulary, but I didn't know how many words I needed to become proficient in the language. 500? 1,000? 10,000?
The answer was found in the HSK (Hanyu Shui Jing), China's standardized test for non-native speakers. There are six levels of HSK, and the highest level requires you to learn 5,000 important words.
I learned about 2,500 words in four years, and it will take me a few more years to complete the entire curriculum.
But improving my vocabulary alone wasn’t enough. I needed to improve my speaking and writing skills, so I enrolled in a Business Chinese course at Nanyang Technological University in 2021.
Find a deeper meaning
That class was the best thing that happened to me in my language journey. Because I had a great teacher, Mr Shi.
He is from China and I was inspired by him because he taught me how to learn languages in a simple yet profound way.
His first class had no business Chinese content at all. Instead, he asked us all to research the history of the words that formed Chinese names and share this with the class. This opened my mind to the deeper meaning behind individual words. My Chinese name is Yinghua Chen. As he studied the word 和 (peace) deeply and learned that this word combines grain 禾 and mouth 口, he realized that this could mean.
“Feeding people well brings peace.”
These insights have deepened my understanding of the wisdom contained in Chinese characters and the cultural values they represent, and have strengthened my connection to my heritage.
Mr. Shi was also impressed that I had to keep making sentences with every new word I learned. This increases my frequency of use and stores the word in my long-term memory.
But the most important lesson he taught me was to try every day and never give up.
Learning leads to love
I have developed a routine to continue practicing Chinese in a number of ways.
I wake up and study the Bible every day in Chinese. I memorize a verse every day to improve my faith and my Chinese vocabulary.
When I use public transportation, I read Chinese books on my phone. When I jog, I listen to self-development podcasts in Chinese. I remind myself to speak Chinese when talking to my family.
Once a month at church, the pastor gives a sermon in Chinese, and I translate into English in real time next to him. This also trained my ability to listen to Chinese speech.
The more I learned and practiced the language, the more I fell in love with it.
For example, I discovered that my Chinese handwriting had incorrect strokes and stroke order. So I rebooted my handwriting by learning pen calligraphy from a book I bought online.
To be honest, as a parent, I have not been successful in getting my children excited about Chinese. Thanks to my wife's coaching, they have done better than me, but they do not love the language and do not use it in everyday conversation.
I speak Chinese and have been sharing my knowledge of Chinese with them, hoping that they will be able to follow my passion.
And these days, whenever my family goes out to a Chinese restaurant for lunch, we always order food in Chinese.
Goodbye to my badge of shame! Now you will have no problem ordering McDonald's in China.
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