Part One
Before China, I had absolutely no interest in learning Chinese. Long ago, I was looking to learn a non-European foreign language and my university offered two: Chinese and Arabic. I chose Arabic. Ironically, I am fluent in Chinese today while Arabic remains inscrutable.
Prior to visiting China the first time, my mom asked me if I intended to learn any. My answer was an emphatic no. I was going to be backpacking with a friend, who ostensibly was already fluent, and I figured there should be enough English-speakers in the touristy parts of Xi’an, Beijing, and Shanghai.
Nevertheless, it is hard not to pick up at least a few words when surrounded by the language, and it certainly helps to have a non-native speaker modeling the essentials of basic communication. I seem to recall learning “ma3 ma3 hu1 hu1” (horse horse tiger tiger, i.e. so-so) as my first word in Chinese, then getting the pronouns “ni3” (you), “wo3” (I), “ta1” (he/she/it) on the second day. Afterwards, there wasn’t much conscious effort to get a handle on: good, bad, have, don’t have, want, don’t want, this, that, etc. Considering my traveling companion went around telling every street peddler and beggar that I was a rich man forced me to scramble to spit out a “mei2you3” or “bu2yao4.” I did get my hands on a pair of phrase books during the travels, which exposed me to a fair amount vocabulary and sentence structure. (The Lonely Planet phrase book used such a weird romanization system.) Nevertheless, during the solo portions of my travels, it was extremely difficult to get around. I recall getting a taste for Chinese characters, learning “大” (da4 “big”) from the highway mileage signs between Kunming and Dali and getting North, South, East, and West figured out from the street signs on the grid-like Xi’an.
I had caught the China bug, so even back in the U.S., I put a little effort into Chinese language podcasts (i.e. ChinesePod), but I recall even the Newbie level was too hard for me and I didn’t make any progress on Chinese.
When I moved to China, I would assess my Chinese level as pretty close to zero. I could count to ten and say hello, but had no clue what anyone was saying to me. Since I didn’t have any actual job to occupy my days, I spent quite a few hours a day studying Chinese, typically from a borrowed introductory textbook (Short-term Spoken Chinese) and podcasts (which I began to systematically and obsessively listen to).
My first month in Shenzhen, I went to a particular Lanzhou Pulled Noodle restaurant, which had both the picture menu on the wall and the one page laminated text-only menu. I worked my way down the text-only menu blindly and trusting in the fact that a Muslim restaurant wouldn’t serve me any pig brains. I copied the name of the dish I ordered into a notebook and used my best judgement of what came out to try to decipher the Chinese characters. Though I was quickly able to distinguish 大 (da4 “big”) from 小 (xiao3 “small”) and 牛 (niu2 “cow”) from 羊 (yang2 “sheep”), I recall being utterly flummoxed by 面 (mian2) which had so, so many entries in the dictionary, e.g.: “face, side, surface, aspect, top, classified for …”
I spent a lot of time finding places to hang out in, and having the same basic conversations over and over again. Even understanding only 50% of what was said to me, it was pretty easy to guess that people were asking “what country am I from”, “am I married”, and other questions of that ilk. I’m certain I gave some funny answers when I completely missed the mark.
Alcohol also served a major role in the early learning process, both in trying to flirt with the waitresses at a bar owned by a friend of mine and in drunkenly conversing with clients from Hong Kong in a combination of broken English and broken Mandarin.
As I found odd jobs which required a lot of commuting around the city, podcasts (mostly ChinesePod and ChineseLearnOnline, though I eventually added PopupChinese) became an essential part of the learning experience. I invested the time on my computer to edit the 10+ minute long lessons down to the approx. 30 sec. long content cores and built playlists to shuffle through them. I could “review” 50 lessons in a half hour long bus ride.
Time passed and I kept plugging away on the Chinese, moving on to the next textbook in the series. Within about 6 months, I was confident enough to do a short solo travel (3 days). Within about 9 months, I took a longer solo travel into the backwoods (2 weeks). The following year, I took and passed the Intermediate level HSK (old edition). I don’t recall how much, if any, writing was required for that.