Learning Mandarin Chinese - worth it?

[kuduchi]

Since I am getting a new pipa really soon, I was thinking if I should learn Mandarin Chinese. I once took it for a week a summer camp years ago and now I find that I really love the language. I feel that out of respect for the music that I am learning, it would do me some good to learn some Mandarin. Writing Chinese would not be a problem for me since I already have experience with Japanese. I looooove Hanzi..seriously.

Is there anyone else here learning or know Chinese due to learning an instrument or otherwise?

[edcat7]

It's always worth it learning Mandarin Chinese. My teacher speaks Mandarin and myself Cantonese and we have difficulty in communicating.

Richard Branson (a British billionare) was asked what he would do if he was in his 20's again. He replied go to Shanghai. I would do the same.

Although we all speak English there are hugh cultural differences.

[xindi]

Is there anyone else here learning or know Chinese due to learning an instrument or otherwise?

I wish I had - unfortunately the kind of schooling system I was trapped in, taught me Latin, French and German rather than anything useful lol.

I did work in China (Shanghai, Beijing and the provinces) for a year - so I picked up some Mandarin on a colloquial basis, as well as having a few lessons from a teacher who mostly used sign language for me. I'd rather be in Beijing than Shanghai! The air pollution in Shanghai makes me think it would be impossible to get to the end of a musical sentence in one breath. The 1930's Shanghai culture strikes me as opulent and glorious as the fin de siècle Parisian lifestyle too.

Learning jian pu ... is tricky without any chinese at all. After a while, the symbols become more familiar, but trying to make sense of it without an English primer is difficult. As for learning chinese - go for it! It can only help if you have a tutor eventually...

[edcat7]

I would learn much quicker from my teacher if I could understand him. After practising the same page of music for 3 weeks (and playing it badly) I've finally clicked as to what he means.

Can anyone recommend a cheapish way of learning Mandarin, preferrably on the computer?

[caeman]

There is research backing the idea that learning a second or third language is good for the brain, especially into old age, possibly offsetting memory loss and other age-related conditions.

[xindi]

Sept 15, 2011 15:54:29 GMT caeman said:

There is research backing the idea that learning a second or third language is good for the brain, especially into old age, possibly offsetting memory loss and other age-related conditions.

That's good. I speak 4 languages.

I remember reading about these research findings.

Ironic that I just can't remember where lol

[ziman]

Is there anyone else here learning or know Chinese due to learning an instrument or otherwise?

Well, I know Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hokkien), mainly because I am Chinese. Malaysian Chinese to be exact. Most Malaysian Chinese speak Mandarin and at least one other Chinese language, plus Malay (the official language of Malaysia), plus English.

And whether learning Chinese is worth it or not-- I'd say, go for it! Especially if you have an interest in classical Chinese pieces (古曲), since those pieces are often associated with ancient Chinese historical events and/or literary works and/or philosophical ideals and/or (implicit) political commentary, so knowing Chinese would help your understanding of what each song expresses.

I don't know pipa pieces much (I play the xiao, both solo and in duet with guqin)... but here's a quick example using the classical xiao/guqin piece Yang Guan San Die (陽關三叠), also known as the Song of Wei Cheng (渭城曲).

That song is associated with a famous farewell poem by the Tang Dynasty poet Wang Wei (王維), titled "Sending off Mr. Yuan on his journey to an official post in An Xi" (送元二使安西). The poem goes:

渭城朝雨浥輕塵
客舍青青柳色新
勸君更盡一杯酒
西出陽關無故人

Translation:

The morning rain has lightly brushed the sands of Wei City;
Our green-tiled lodging-houses are verdant as the willow-shoots of spring.
Drink thou another cup of wine, my friend!
For beyond the west, beyond the gates of Yang Guan,

never again will you meet another old acquaintance.

The piece Yang Guan San Die can actually be sung to the poem as well, albeit with additional lyrics. Here's an example of it performed this way:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QVHeqLbp30

With an understanding of Chinese, you could gain more insight into the meanings of many classical pieces, thus helping you to perform them more expressively.

[Blue]

If you can either speak Hakka and Hokkien, you would certainly have no problem communicating in Hsinchu (especially foothill areas) and Tainan respectively. If you don't know how to speak Hokkien in Tainan, you'll be screwed. There's also a Hokkien speaking Church in the Sunset District of San Francisco consisting of people from Taiwan, Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia. Heard that 98% of the ethnic Chinese who lived for generations in the Philippines speak Hokkien.

There's only a few universities in the United States that teach Hokkien. One's Harvard, the other is Berkeley. I took one semester of Hokkien, but realized the frustrations of learning it in an artificial environment.

An-ne kong: woa si Tiu sin-se. Ziman: li si Ma-lai-se-a lang, si bo? E Tang-lam-a. Chin hoa hi ka li sek sai. Li thia u bo?

[edcat7]

The face (actually sound) of London's Chinatown has changed over the forty-odd years that I've been going to. My dad is Hakka and Hakka was widely spoken. Then Cantonese and now the Fujian dialect from China.

Over the two years that I've been with my music teacher, his English has improved considerably.

[Blue]

Meanwhile all the announcements in High Speed Rail, conventional rail, and metro systems in Taiwan are given in Mandarin, Hokkien, Hakka, and English. It's always fun seeing children trying to mimic all four announcement languages each time we approach a station.

[ziman]

Tiu sin-se li ho. Wa thia tiuk Hok-kien wa jin ya huan hi a! Thong kim wa di bhi kok tak chek, jin ya gu bo gong Hok-kien wa liao.

I must say your sentence made me scratch my head for a while because:

1. Hokkien in Malaysia is spoken but almost never written, and when it's written it's always in Chinese characters and never in roman script. (Is it often written in roman script in Taiwan? And if yes, is there a systematic way of romanizing Hokkien there?)

2. There are two kinds of Hokkien in Malaysia, the Northern Malaysian Hokkien (also known as Penang Hokkien as there's a high concentration of speakers in the island state of Penang (檳城) ), and the Southern Malaysian Hokkien, which is identical to Singaporean Hokkien. The two are close enough to permit routine communication but there are some differences in pronunciation and word use. For instance 吃飯 would be "chiak peng" in the South but it is "chiak pui" in the North (this particular difference leads Southerners to joke that Northerners eat farts.)

I speak the Northern type, whereas the Southern type is closer to Taiwanese Hokkien (nearly identical except for colloquial word use patterns). Oh, and both types of Hokkien in Malaysia have absorbed a few colloquial loanwords from Malay, for instance "肥皂" = "sa-bun" and "石頭" = "ba-tu"

[Blue]

郡中鴃舌鳥語全不可曉如劉呼澇陳呼澹莊呼曾張呼丟余與吳待御兩姓吳呼作襖黃則無音厄影切更為難省

Some weird unicode transcription problems, but anyway

In this place, the language is as birdcall – totally unintelligible! For example: for the surname Liú, they say ‘Lâu’; for Chén, ‘Tân’; Zhuāng, ‘Chng’; and Zhāng is ‘Tioⁿ’. My deputy’s surname Wú becomes ‘Ngô’. My surname Huáng does not even have a proper vowel: it is ‘Ng’ here! It is difficult to make sense of this.

[Blue]

People in Taiwan say chiah beng when it is time to eat, but they ask "li chiah-pa boe" to confirm if you have eaten yet. Japanese colonization resulted in tomato to be called "tho-matoh" in Taiwnese Hokkien and phang for "bread." The major form of romanization used in Taiwan is the Presbyterian Church Romanization (since Presbyterian missionaries wanted to make the bible avaliable in Hokkien). My parents never spoken to me in Hokkien so I never got to learn it as a child. I started noticing it when I first went to Taiwan because Hokkien was and still is the de-facto language of the open-air markets even though the KMT government was trying to suppress this "dialect" at the time. I already said that I took a semster's course in it, but my knowledge of the language is still very horrible.

Part of the challenge is that there are seven or eight tones compared to 4 tones in Mandarin. There's even a dedicated cursing tone in Hokkien, but of course that was forbidden in our course. One of the tones happens to be exactly one octave higher than the other (one classic example is si-koe or watermelon. Si is one octave higher than koe. And then there are special tones where the syllable sounds like half a beat rather than one-beat. The main point is that if you were to sing a song in Taiwanese, you wouldn't have to worry about the tones because the musical notes effectively dictate it!

As for Cantonese, hearing a newscaster saying it in the local station in San Francisco KTSF is like hearing musical notes going all the way up and down!