I’m Singaporean. In theory, I’m bilingual.
In Singapore, many of my daily interactions will be in Chinese. Many people will speak Chinese to me, and I’ll respond back in Chinese. I have to order food in Chinese. I have to talk to my grandparents in Chinese. I can go to China and not be completely lost. I’ve been learning Chinese as part of the Singaporean educational curriculum, for 11 years, since I was 6 years old. I estimate that 80% of my time was spent trying to not fail Chinese (I scraped by).
I’m now in America. Once in a while, whether it be in a restaurant, or to ask for directions, or recommendations for where to shop, someone will walk up to me and ask me something in Chinese, and I’ll get frickin’ terrified.*
I know enough to respond to the first few basic questions. Enough to pretend like I actually speak the language. But once they start spewing out nouns at me, or god forbid, I actually have to use a noun that isn’t “me” or “you”, things can get exciting.
Even commonly used nouns like “bus” and “taxi” aren’t the same for different people. Other nouns have multiple ways of being said – most of which are not in my vocabulary. Proper nouns always catch me by surprise. I have no idea what is the Chinese name for the town I work in, the building I work in, or even the company I work for.
Someone asked me for directions, and I ended up walking them there (it was only about 50 meters away, but still) because I had no clue how to say “walk straight until you get to the carpark, turn right, it’s opposite the Omega store”.
I’ve avoided most of the pain points that English speakers encounter when learning Chinese. Tonality is a piece of cake. Grammar rules are a walk in the park (to the extent that when having a conversation, no one cares as long as you’re correct enough). But the active vocabulary set (and all the proper nouns) makes it so that even having spent 11 painful years learning Chinese (albeit not practicing it intensely), I’m still terrified of having a conversation in Chinese because of the extremely frequent event where a very important word blindsides me.
Chinese is such a terrifying language to learn, that the Singaporean education system actually has a special option for people to opt into an easier Chinese curriculum. And in order to opt into a “higher-level” Chinese course, you have to prove that you’re doing well enough in every other subject, because learning more Chinese is that stressful. (I’ve been told that this system has since been re-vamped, but I’m not completely sure). Every other subject just requires you to do well in said subject to opt into a higher-level course.
Like every other language, it’s almost a given that being completely immersed in Chinese for a few years, with intensive practice, will give you sufficient comfort in verbal interaction. I wasn’t completely immersed in Chinese, but I did spend almost all my time in school, for 11 years, trying to learn it (granted, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed). For most other languages, this should be enough. But not Chinese. I’m still frickin’ terrified of speaking Chinese. And some of my extremely intelligent peers are in the same boat as me.
p.s.
– Almost every point worth discussing has been covered by User-10972846895925816627 or by this article: Page on www.pinyin.info
– By “Chinese”, I mean “Mandarin”. I’m aware of the different dialect groups – my parents, simply due to the environment they were raised in, had to be conversant in Teochew, Hokkien, and Cantonese.
– I’m of the opinion that the written Chinese language was originally made for scholars to take dozens of years to master. While most other languages were “dumbed down” once written material became readily available, merging the written and the spoken word, Chinese became even harder – because now people had to not just learn the sound of a word, but how to read it. And unlike almost every other language, phonetic-ization never happened.
– And I haven’t written a sentence in Chinese for almost a decade, so I won’t comment on the writing/reading aspect, which is orders of magnitude more difficult than the spoken aspect.
* – The main difference being that if someone starts a Chinese conversation with me in America (outside of a Chinese restaurant), they probably don’t know English.