By Hazel Fok<\/p>\n
Most college orientation camps are held in Cantonese only. So you can imagine the communication barrier non-local participants face. Romario, an Indian student in CUHK, once told me that his \u201cfather\u201d (a senior student that is supposed to guide freshmen in the camp) had to translate every conversation to him during the camp as all activities and discussions were conducted in Cantonese. He quitted the camp halfway. He didn\u2019t remain in touch with any of his group mates other than his \u201cfather\u201d. And Tomi, who was sitting next to Romario, concluded the story, \u201cHaving a translator is bad. It is like you are watching a show, but you are in the show.\u201d<\/p>\n
As I am a local student, I couldn\u2019t truly understand the feelings of being in such situation. However, from what I have heard of from my non-local friends, the language barrier is real when it comes to immersing in a local community, and I couldn\u2019t help but wonder whether learning Chinese can be the start for breaking such barrier. Therefore, I invited Tomi, the friend who split out the wise words, to talk with me. Tomi is an Indonesian student in CUHK, and he has just finished his fifth course in Chinese, marking the 1.5 anniversary of his journey in learning Putonghua.<\/p>\n
Chinese, heartbreakingly difficult \u201cChinese — both Putonghua and Cantonese — is like the hardest language,\u201d said Tomi, which is in a way true. Chinese deserves its reputation of being heartbreakingly difficult, for it has a complex writing system. Firstly, the writing system isn\u2019t phonetic. In CUHK Putonghua courses, teachers will teach students both pinyin (the romanization of Chinese) and han zi (the doodle-like Chinese characters). The difficulty in learning Chinese lies in the separation of sound and character–the sound won\u2019t give you a clue as to how the character is to be written and vice versa. Secondly, one character has ambiguous meanings and can generate a thousand meanings when combined with other characters. Thirdly, even looking up a word in the dictionary can be hard. Subtle differences such as a stroke or even a dot would mean entirely different characters (and meanings). You needed to master 26 alphabets for English; now you got to know more than 3000 characters to acquire a functional literacy in Chinese. From the above-listed details, you can imagine the difficulties non-locals face when learning Chinese, as well as the struggles for teachers in teaching the language. In fact, the demanding nature of pinyin and hanzi has deprived these Chinese language courses of cultural elements. \u201cIt\u2019s like how you learn Spanish. You just learn about different vocabulary, tenses, and sentence structure,\u201d said Tomi. However, Chinese courses–being part of the university core programmes–are supposed to help promote cultural understanding, especially for non-locals who wasn\u2019t familiar with the city\u2019s culture.<\/p>\n Little by little — Small but delightful changes \u201cOne thing for sure, I can talk to my dorm guard now,\u201d Tomi said. A lot of frontline workers in CUHK are not fluent in English and often experience difficulties in communicating with English-speaking students. \u201cIn the past, I have to ask my roommate who knows how to speak Chinese to pass my messages to the dorm guards,\u201d Tomi said, \u201cOne time, in my first year, my dorm guard challenged me to learn Chinese within my four years of study here. (Q: How did you understand his words?) He talked in Cantonese and gestured it to me. He raised four fingers and did something like pointing his mouth. Now, I sometimes mess around with him [in Putonghua].\u201d <\/p>\n When talking to local students, Tomi usually uses English as \u201clocal students can understand what [he] said [in English]\u201d. But his Chinese comes into use and is even at times life-saving outside school. <\/p>\n \u201cI was shopping with my friend who travelled here for vacation at the Ladies\u2019 Market. I asked in Cantonese \u2018\u5514\u8a72\u5462\u500b\u5e7e\u591a\u9322\uff1f\u2019(Excuse me, how much does this costs?) and I got a \u2018local price\u2019 instead of a \u2018tourist price\u2019. Not bad, not bad\u2026. I also went to Shenzhen with my friend to fix a broken phone screen. Apparently, the phone worked, and we got a normal price — much cheaper than fixing in Hong Kong. And my friend and I could read the menu and order food at the restaurant there.\u201d <\/p>\n Tomi\u2019s Putonghua was the most useful during his trips in Mainland China. \u201cI travelled to Yunnan, Beijing, Xiamen\u2026 (Q: Did you try to speak in Putonghua there?) Of course! No one speaks English!\u201d<\/p>\n I always thought that learning Chinese is important for conversations between non-locals\u2019 and locals. It turns out that the language barrier between locals and non-locals is hard to overcome, as it would take a long time for non-Chinese speakers to master this language. To be honest, it will always be easier to ask a local to speak English rather than a non-local to speak Chinese. But after talking to Tomi, I realize that perhaps having completely fluent communication with locals was not the essential purpose of learning Chinese — at least it is not as important as I thought. For non-locals, learning Chinese matters in the sense that it can broaden one\u2019s experience of living in Hong Kong and deepen one\u2019s connection to the local community. Although the changes can be slow and subtle, a change is a change after all. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Hazel Fok Most college orientation camps are held in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7447,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[254,260],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cusp.hk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7446"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cusp.hk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cusp.hk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cusp.hk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cusp.hk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cusp.hk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7446\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cusp.hk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cusp.hk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cusp.hk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cusp.hk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n\u201cA lot of my friends quitted right after [finishing] the six compulsory credits in Chinese.\u201d said Tomi. Right at the beginning of our interview, as I asked Tomi about his experience in learning Chinese, he jokingly said, \u201cYou have no idea about [non-locals\u2019] Chinese courses huh. You so convenient huh?!\u201d <\/p>\n
\n\u201cWe get to choose either simplified or traditional Chinese in our courses. I have an American friend who is the one and the only person I know that picked traditional Chinese. He regretted it a lot,\u201d said Tomi. Simplified Chinese is easier as its characters involve fewer strokes and less tedious details. However, Hong Kong writes in traditional Chinese. Therefore, learning simplified Chinese means you will still suffer to read in Hong Kong.<\/p>\n
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\nI felt somewhat disappointed after hearing Tomi\u2019s experience in learning Chinese. It seemed like learning Chinese couldn\u2019t remove the substantial language barrier at all. Non-Chinese speaking students still couldn\u2019t join the show, as it would take years before they get to communicate with locals fluently. However, Tomi\u2019s sharings has also shedded some light. <\/p>\n