30-Day Mandarin Challenge
It was one of those lazy afternoon in the office where I was yearning for 5:30pm to come quicker. As any wise, young team of paralegals would do to kill the time, my colleagues and I started browsing the staff directory to work out who was who in and around the office. "Maggie, you speak mandarin?" asked one of my colleagues. "How did you figure that out?" I asked. It turns out the staff directory at work also tells everyone in the office what languages you spoke. I had no idea that what I placed on my CV as 'Intermediate Chinese (Mandarin)" was taken seriously. I think the thing that made me quite ashamed was if during that lazy afternoon, a Chinese Mandarin-speaking client came in and there was no one else to attend to this non-English speaker, I honestly would not be able to hold a conversation at all. It would be in broken Chinese, interlaced with English. So much for ten years of Saturday Chinese school.
It was around this time I decided to embark on a 30-Day Mandarin Challenge, where I would try to re-learn the Mandarin that I had abandoned. Tim Ferris' TED talk really inspired me to take up this Challenge. He spoke of his experience learning Japanese at a tertiary level, how it failed him when he landed in Japan for his exchange and that the most effective way he picked up Japanese was simply by learning the most frequently used words/characters in the Japanese language. This made a lot of sense, because it was these frequently used words that would be utilised in conversation. This method was not only more practical, but also made the task of re-learning Mandarin a tonne easier. So for the 30-Day Mandarin Challenge, I decided to learn ten Mandarin characters a day, totalling three-hundred new words by the end of March.
A chart of the 1000 most used Mandarin characters, courtesy of the Internet
And this worked. I felt as if my Mandarin had improved significantly, and I felt more comfortable using the language. A friend tested me during the 30-Day to see how well the method was working: he asked me what the word for 'fast' was, and what the opposite of that word would be. I intuitively said 'kuai' (fast) and 'man' (slow). I actually could not believe that I was able to do it with such ease. Because I learn/memorise by writing things down, my Chinese Mandarin writing also improved, with my script getting better - even Dad was impressed because he thought I had forgotten everything from the good old days of Saturday school.
Day 27 and Day 28 of the Challenge.
Although the Challenge has come to an end, I am glad that I am still able to use it here whilst living in Phnom Penh. As a city quickly expanding and developing thanks to foreign investment from the rest of Asia (read China), a lot of the locals here speak both Khmer and Mandarin, especially at the various markets in and around town. Knowing and being able to use the language has been great leverage for bargaining with the shop owners, and also asking for exactly what you want. I want to be able to continue to build on what I re-learnt in the Challenge, which essentially kickstarted all that buried knowledge. I am so keen on visiting China after my internship is over, not only to climb the Great Wall but to also use my Mandarin and see how it fares among mainland speakers. And obviously to consume all the soup dumplings I can stomach.