Robert Flawith
Robert Flawith is a student of the University of Sydney. His experience with Mandarin Chinese began with his first trip to China in 2004. Jumping in at the deep end, he decided to spend a year teaching English in a small city in Anhui, a rural province of China. After a year of immersion and ad-hoc in-country study of Chinese he returned to Australia and his fascination with the language made him begin studying Mandarin at the University of Sydney. He studied advanced linguistic Chinese as well as Chinese for Business and Chinese philosophy.
My experience with Mandarin Chinese began with my first trip to China in 2004. Jumping in at the deep end, I decided to spend a year teaching English in a small city in Anhui, a rural province of China. I arrived in the country barely knowing how to say ‘ni hao’ or count to ten in Chinese, however I found the people so friendly, and the culture so fascinating that this quickly began to change. Alongside a developing interest in contemporary Chinese culture and an appreciation of the country itself, my study of Mandarin Chinese resulted in a growing interest in this highly logical and (from a native English speaker’s perspective) alien language. My first ‘classes’ in Mandarin were simply hanging out and talking with my Chinese friends, and my classroom was the country itself.
I quickly learned the basics: how to order food (very important in China!), how to buy a train ticket, and how to tell my class of 40 plus misbehaving students to be quiet! In fact the first fluent conversation I could have in Chinese involved ordering beer, specifying a brand, asking for a cold one from the fridge and getting it opened and poured into glasses! Perhaps I didn’t have the same education as someone who began learning Chinese in the classroom, but in twelve months I got around just fine. Every new word or sentence that I learn was making travel in China and meeting its people that much more accessible, and this increased my desire to study the language properly.
Spoken Chinese struck me as a very simple language: there are no plurals, no distinction between male and female in personal pronouns with simple sentence. Furthermore, learning Chinese gave me a great insight into a completely different way of looking at and classifying the world.
After a year of immersion and ad-hoc in-country study of Chinese I returned to Australia and my fascination with the language led me to look for a more formal education, so I began studying Mandarin at the University of Sydney. I started my study in the ‘advanced beginners’ class, as my spoken Chinese was passable. However my ability to read and write Chinese was almost non-existent, and really extended to reading a few song lyrics in karaoke bars. Although spoken Chinese may be simple enough to get a grasp of in a year, Chinese characters can only be learned by doing the ‘hard yards’: learning and memorizing hundreds of different combinations of strokes.
After twelve months of study however, I began to feel the need for some more intense immersion in the language to consolidate my learning in the classroom. Perhaps more importantly I was beginning to miss the food, the friendly people and the general madness of China and it became obvious that I had to organise some kind of in-country study. Here’s where the Confucius Institute came in. I, along with six other University of Sydney students, joined the 2006/2007 study tour.
This three month study tour was a great experience. The program was well organised and included accommodation and intensive classes in universities in Hangzhou and Beijing. On the first day at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou we were tested and organised into classes based on ability. The tuition was very effective, with the twin bonus of being run intensively, and in-country, the end result being a massive improvement in my Chinese ability. Additionally, by being held in two different universities we had the opportunity to be exposed to two very different teaching styles and educational philosophies. But more than this was the cultural side of the program. The Confucius Institute study program arranged kung-fu and tai-chi classes for all the students, as well as home stays, cooking classes and courses in traditional Chinese arts and craft. This combined with the experience of living in China again made this a very memorable three months, and by the end of the program I was able to jump from the intermediate level Chinese class to the advanced course.
Participating in this course put me in a great position on my return to University of Sydney, where I studied advanced linguistic Chinese as well as Chinese for Business and Chinese philosophy. Although studying business Chinese may sound boring at first, in my experience it was in this class that I learned some of the most useful vocabulary in contemporary Chinese. In the current climate of unprecedented levels of economic growth in mainland China, coupled with the contemporary Chinese obsession with all things ‘business and trade’, taking a course in Chinese gave the ability finally to read simple Chinese newspaper articles and understand Mandarin news broadcasts. At the end of this semester I was struck by a wonderful bit of luck. I was selected by the University of Sydney to be one of two representatives to attend Premier Wen Jia Bao’s Invited Australian Youth Delegation to China. This entailed a two week trip to visit three cities in China with 50 other Australian university students from around the country, paid for by the Chinese government. This was an opportunity to meet dozens of young Australians like myself who had fallen under the spell of China and Chinese language.
Though I have now graduated and concluded my formal study of Chinese language, you never really stop learning. At the beginning of 2008 I spent a further 2 months in-country travelling through remote Western China and catching up with the many friends I have made on previous visits. Needless to say this trip, which saw me able to have fluent hour-long conversations with Tibetan monks and Chinese restaurant owners, was a far cry from my first days and months in the mainland when I didn’t even know how to use chopsticks properly, let alone say ‘chopsticks’ in Chinese!
I would recommend the study of Chinese to anybody without hesitation. I fell into the language by accident, but I have loved every new phase of my adventure with Mandarin, and look forward to my next chance to expand my understanding of Chinese. The study of Chinese has opened up a world of possibilities for me employment wise, but more than that has given meet a privileged insight into the inner workings of the most dynamic economy on the planet and the world’s rising superpower.