A lifetime ago, I discovered my life’s calling…

Well, it would have, could have, should have been my life’s calling…

Unfortunately, the US government literally blew up my plan!

(And I mean “literally” literally, not as an intensifier for figuratively, as so many do these days.)

How the US literally blew up my life’s dream, causing me to stop studying Mandarin for 25 years

I studied government in college and was studying economics in grad school when I met my wife, a physics PhD student from China. I quickly realized studying China – with its rapidly expanding and globalizing economy – would be far more interesting and useful than being the hundred thousandth economist studying Western economies.

I plunged into Mandarin. I was obsessed. I made stacks of flashcards and flipped through them everywhere, tracing characters in my head (or with my finger in the air) while jogging, walking to classes, and even furtively under tables during economics classes.

My vision: combining my three passions and becoming a professor of Chinese political economy.

The summer after meeting my wife, I taught myself first-year Chinese so I could jump straight into 2nd-year the following school year. The following summer, during the Beijing University portion of the joint Stanford-BeiDa intensive 3rd-year Chinese program, I was killing time studying flashcards at The Forbidden City and a large crowd slowly surrounded me. The crowd roared in laugher when I flipped to one particular card… “sexual relations”!

As I completed my PhD, I had fellowships to study the following year at Tsinghua in Beijing (specifically at The Inter-University Program) and The Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing. Then the US blew up China’s embassy in Yugoslavia, and I stared in shock at my television as Chinese students hurled Molotov cocktails at the US Embassy in Beijing – where I had recently helped a fellow Stanford econ PhD student from China skip the line.

I instead took a product development job at a Palo Alto startup.

Bill Clinton’s military had literally blown up my dream.

I got busy with work at startups and studying other interests, like evolutionary biology… where I excitedly discovered a super cool idea (until Prof. Paul Milgrom told me I had rediscovered Cornell economist Robert H. Frank’s Passions Within Reason), then writing two volumes on “Management Secrets of the New England Patriots”.

Over time, I dabbled with Chinese news broadcasts and listened attentively at occasional gatherings with our Chinese friends but pretty much abandoned Chinese.

I lost even more interest this past decade as China has moved in a terrible direction. I haven’t visited China since the 1990s and don’t ever want to visit unless things change. I would love visiting Taiwan but fear for its future.

My brain remembered more Mandarin after 25 years than I expected

I recently got an urge to jump back into Mandarin. I own a bazillion books that have been staring at me from my bookshelves as they collect dust.

I feared I had forgotten everything after 25 years, but I’m thrilled to report that much of what I learned decades ago is still there. It’s just slower and harder to access, as if the parts of my brain I’ve used these past 25 years have walled themselves off from the Mandarin part of my brain. Most likely, the connections weakened over time but are re-strengthening now as I study again.

(It’s more accurate to call it the Mandarin-Spanish part of my brain because whenever I’ve tried to learn or speak Spanish, it has been all mixed up with Chinese. When I traveled for work to Punta Cana earlier this year, my driver didn’t speak English but wanted to chat. I tried speaking my extremely broken high school Spanish, but so much Mandarin was coming out that I fell back to Google Translate, which let us communicate well… albeit slowly.)

As I did with piano for over a year, I’m trying to do something with Mandarin every day – often watching a video while walking on my treadmill at night – and more on weekends. (Watching a vlog while walking fast on the treadmill is effective because my brain is alert and focused.)

Here are the discoveries I’ve made after replacing piano with Mandarin as my weekend/evening hobby:

  • I began studying Chinese for practical reasons. 25 years later, I enjoy reading, learning and thinking in another language/culture for its own sake. I stand to gain zero career benefits and minimal personal benefits. It’s just fun!
  • I felt I had forgotten Mandarin. I hadn’t. It’s coming back. I’m not re-learning how to read/write characters from scratch or how to listen/speak. Much of what I learned long ago felt lost but was actually just buried.
  • After a few weeks of brushing away cobwebs, I’ve recently been watching some content that I largely follow and moves fast, yet my brain isn’t bothering to think in English at all. It’s able to process a rapid flow of Chinese as Chinese while comprehending the meaning

Why Mandarin is hard… It’s really three languages

  • Understanding spoken Chinese is heavily contextual because Mandarin tries to express every idea humans have ever thought in a small set of sounds. Languages like English/Spanish/German/Latin/etc. create long words by stringing together sounds. Chinese words, conversely, are usually just a single sound or two sounds together. This leads to much ambiguity, with many sounds (and sound pairs) having many possible meanings. Compound words are very common. Sometimes, the combined meaning is obvious; sometimes not:
    • 掌声 “zhang3sheng1”: “palm” + “sound” = “applause”
    • 彩车 “cai3che1”: “color” + “car” = “(parade) float” or “bridal car”
    • 彩号 “cai3hao4”: “color” + “horn” = “wounded soldier/casualty”
    • 彩口 “cai3kou3”: “color” + “mouth” = “(soldier’s) wound”
    • 彩屏 “cai3ping2”: “color” + “screen” = “color screen”
    • 彩妆 “cai3zhuang1”: “color” + “adornment” = “makeup”
    • 彩票 “cai3piao4”: “color” + “ticket” = “lottery ticket”
  • Chinese is really three different languages: The written language, the spoken language, and the (many-for-many) mappings between these two languages.
    • A single character can have many meanings, and Mandarin is full of homonyms (sounds that map to multiple characters or words). Consider these two characters, which are pronounced identically:
      • 管(“guan3”) has many meanings:
        • a noun (“tube,” “pipe,” “wind instrument,” “valve,” or a surname)
        • a measure word (something English lacks)
        • a verb (“to manage/run/control/be in charge of/take care of,” “to administer/have jurisdiction over,” “to discipline (children/students),” “to care about/bother about/intervene/be concerned about,” “to provide/guarantee”)
        • a preposition (“from (someone),” and a grammatical marker for a sentence structure with no English equivalent)
        • a conjunction (“no matter (how/what/who/etc.)”)
      • 馆(“guan3”) is pronounced identically and also has a variety of meanings:
        • a noun (“building” or “shop,” used in: “hotel/inn,” “embassy,” “teahouse,” and “museum”)
    • “guan3” is an easy sound to interpret. There are four different ways to say “yi” in Mandarin (actually five, but let’s ignore the neutral tone). But that’s just the beginning of the ambiguity because EACH of those four tones has MANY different characters associated with it (and many of those characters have multiple meanings!):
      • Ignoring tones, there are roughly 228 different characters with the sound “yi”!!!
        • I see 27 different characters for the sound “yi1” in Pleco!
        • There are 47 “yi2” characters!
        • There are 33 more “yi3” characters.
        • And 121 “yi4” characters!!!
      • Even native speakers won’t know or ordinarily use many of these, but knowing there are so many meanings and characters mapped to these four “yi” tones makes clear how essential context and probabilistic inference are for understanding spoken Mandarin… and how hard it can be to understand someone speaking with a regional dialect with non-standard pronunciation. (Decades ago, I took classes with a German who had lived in China and spoke effortlessly but got all his tones wrong. I was simultaneously impressed and infuriatingly frustrated.)
    • Because language involves, seeing, hearing, speaking, and writing – and because there’s only a very loose relationship between written Mandarin and spoken Mandarin – it’s essential to use a variety of learning approaches: books/articles, audio podcasts, videos, talking with native speakers (something I need to do more and hope to with my wife and sister-in-law… but my listening skills are better than my speaking skills).
  • Sometimes I’ve never heard a word before but grasp its meaning from context and the joining of sounds together, like compound words in English. For example, I recently saw “面带” (“mian4 dai4”) and was able to guess its meaning: “to wear (on one’s face)” by knowing “面” means “face” and “带” means “to bring.”
    • Extra context makes inferring the meaning of unknown words easier. For example, figuring out “面带笑容” without ever having seen “面带” is even easier if you know 笑容 means “(a) smiling expression.”
    • What I’m doing in my head trying to understand Chinese really feels like how AI/LLMs are trained by trying to predict the next word, then are able to use that training to generate text.
      • I know I’m learning when I make “stupid” mistakes like thinking of optional words that aren’t present while reading. E.g., I read “请往里走、洗手间在后边” and my brain added an extra “就” before “在” because that is a totally reasonable but optional word to add there. An LLM would similarly have a significant probability of adding that word too.

Studying Mandarin has never been easier!

  • Materials for studying Chinese (and probably any language) are so much better now, especially free materials. The Internet has made learning Mandarin much easier:
    • In the 2000s, I built PowerMandarin.com to let users see a word’s pronunciation and definition by mousing over the word. My website also tracked each user’s vocabulary and generated custom vocabulary lists for each article based which words in the article the user didn’t already know. A number of such websites exist now.
    • In the 2000s, if you wanted to hear a quality Chinese teacher, you had to be a student or hire a private tutor. Now, there are superb Chinese lessons on Youtube and on specialized Mandarin-focused websites & apps.
    • Pleco is great software for studying Chinese. If you study Chinese, just get it! You can easily look up any word in a variety of dictionaries just by touching on the word. It even works on websites viewed using its built-in browser.
    • I especially love videos with Mandarin audio plus subtitles that let me simultaneously see and hear. Watching Chinese while listening to it forces me to try to read faster than I’m comfortable reading. (If I’m familiar with the topic and know the vocabulary, I can listen much faster than I can read.)
      • For reading subtitles, I found my iPhone and my 9.5-inch Gen 6 iPad suboptimal and bought Apple’s cheapest new 11” A16 iPad. I’m loving it. Also, the Apple Pencil is great for reading Chinese documents with Pleco.
    • I haven’t yet tried using AI as a conversational partner, but I’m sure that’s doable now and promises to only get better… until we won’t even know whether we’re conversing with another human being or an AI!
  • Formal and informal Chinese are very different, and the vocabulary used in specific fields and situations is specialized, so you also need variety in the content. Legal documents, funerals, and formal government pronouncements sound totally different from friends chatting in a cafe. You need to learn the vocabulary used in various contexts, so I hope to watch dramas and read novels as well as watch news and read business/tech articles. But I find movies and TV shows harder to follow, partly because they have distracting background noise and because the dialogue is often spoken rapidly and unclearly. This native speaker says even native speakers can’t follow all the dialogue in movies and TV shows.
    • I struggle when there’s background music or multiple conversations happening (as at social gatherings) or when people have strong regional dialects or speak softly. So I especially love content without extraneous distractions and teachers who thoughtfully enunciate clearly, provide quality subtitles, and explain (ideally with additional examples) unusual vocabulary/grammar.
      • Because children’s shows tend to use simpler vocabulary and clear pronunciation, they can be wonderful for staying motivated and hearing language you can understand when you’re earlier in your learning journey.
  • A good number of Chinese characters have multiple pronunciations, each associated with different meanings:
    • A few examples:
      • 着
        • “zhao2” (verb: “to touch/come into contact with,” “suffer/affected by/troubled with,” “ignited/lit,” “to fall asleep,” (as a verb complement) “hit the mark/succeed in”)
        • “zhe” (auxiliary: added to verb/adjective to indicated continued action or state; added to verb to indicate resultant state; between verbs to indicate accompanying action; for emphasis in imperative sentences, and some other hard to explain meanings)
      • 得 has three pronunciations:
        • “dei3” (verb: “to need,” “must/have to,” “certainly will”)
        • “de2” (verb: “to get/obtain/gain,” “equal/result in,” “to fit/suit,” “to be satisfied/complacent,” “to be finished/ready,” and a handful of more meanings that are hard to explain)
        • “de” (auxiliary: after a verb/adjective to express possibility or capability; between verb and complement to express possibility or the result or degree, and a few more such meanings)
      • 长 is both:
        • “zhang3” (adjective: “older/elder/senior,” “eldest/oldest,” “chief/head”; verb: “to grow/develop,” “to form/come into being/begin to grow,” “to acquire/increase/enhance”)
        • “chang2” (noun: “length,” “strength/forte,” a surname; adjective: “long,” “forever/constantly”; verb: “to be good/excellent/proficient at”)
      • 角 is both:
        • “jiao3” (noun: “(animal) horn,” “(musical) horn/bugle,” “water chestnut,” “cape/promontory/headland,” “corner,” “angle”; measure word: “a quarter (of),” “a tenth (of)”)
        • “jue2” (noun: “role/part/character,” “actor/actress”; verb: “to content/wrestle”)
    • When reading Chinese, it’s necessary to read ahead while reading aloud (or in your head) because:
      • A character can have multiple pronunciations and multiple meanings that are distinguishable only by context provided later in the sentence.
      • The pronunciation of a character can change depending on what comes next. For example, if you have two third tones in a row, the first gets pronounced as a second tone.

Resources I find valuable

With thanks to Stephen Yu for his photo shared through Unsplash