This summer I will study Mandarin Chinese for three years. That sounds like a lot, but it’s not that much. Especially when you see the more than modest results of a cartoon series, an Instagram video or a Mandopop song. However, during this time I experienced this Boom of interest in a language which, until not so long ago, was considered at best an eccentricity and rarity in the West.
Just look at what we call this in our countries, the language with the largest number of native speakers in the world (nearly 940 million people) and the pioneering language of much of Asia. If something is “Chinese” to us, it is because it is gibberish, gibberish; and if they “speak to us in Chinese” it is because we cannot understand absolutely anything we hear. Added to this are the numerous Prejudice and contempt which usually accompany our consideration of Chineseness, its often diverse habits, its ubiquitous migration and the most famous episodes of the monumental but also terrible history of the so-called “Central Empire”.
But times are changing. “Made in China” is no longer a stigma imported jewelry that was once. On the contrary, much of the technology we use in our daily lives – cell phones, modems, entire computers and so on – comes from the Asian giant’s proud and opaque factories. If we add that China is the second largest country with the most millionaires on the planet, it is understandable that Mandarin Chinese (or Putonghua, “common language”) is, along with English, the language of the world’s rich.
This is reflected in the different backgrounds of my Chinese classmates: From young people who love all things Asian, to fans of anime and K-pop, to older people who want to keep their brains active.past air conditioning parts importers, professionals looking for opportunities abroad and, as is my case, failed projects by polyglots and translators. All are equally confronted with a radically distant linguistic paradigm: a syllabic language with four pronunciation tones, without conjugations or tenses and with a logogrammatic script. It’s not exactly easy, but here we go. Everyone at the pace of their efforts and possibilities.
Although my three years of study have not yet enabled me to speak Mandarin fluently, they have, in contrast, taught me a few things about our language, our beautiful and much-abused Spanish: its laxity and flexibility, its baroque but highly adaptable logic, its 27 letters that explain the universe – compared to the average 3,000 characters it takes to read a newspaper in Mandarin – and its 500 million native speakers who know it at your fingertips bring honorable second place on the planet.
Learning another language is, in a way, having a new mirror in which to look at yourself.
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