Appendix

(1) The Shanghai Worker's Dictionary. I'm just finishing compiling a long vocabulary list of words and terms I learned while working at MoCA. It's mindboggling to think of all the things not on the list - things I learned but didn't realize I learned. But for whatever it's worth, it is another skeleton outline of this summer, and is available by request.

(2) Though my Chinese is by no means perfect, I have made a college career out of studying it. Maybe it will even become part of my real-life career. But unsurprisingly it was a trial-and-error process, and I made terrible and hilarious mistakes along the way, and it was part of the fun. But like most people, I sometimes wish my now-self could have given my then-self a few pointers. Of course, someone probably did tell me everything I could have told me and I either didn’t listen or couldn’t understand at the time. But for whatever it's worth, these are the things I wish I would have known while starting Chinese:

1. People will tell you “Chinese is a lifelong language; you’re never done studying Chinese. Unless you are rich and plan on simply taking Chinese classes for the next eighty years, this is not true. You will come to a point where you stop studying, and what you have inside your head is what you get going out into the real world. If you still haven’t learned your tones properly or don’t know how to really analyze characters, everything will crystallize and you’re stuck with what you have (and don’t have). I’ve seen this with many foreigners living abroad – they stopped studying in order to start living, assuming their accent would just disappear. But especially in Chinese, the basics are essential.

All this is to say: make the first two years of learning the most studious of all your years of studying. Yale does a good job of forcing this idea, and we spent almost the entire first semester simply learning how to pronounce Chinese tones. At the time I thought it was an absurd overkill, but now I wish we would have spent a year. Clear and precise pronunciation is something you can’t retrieve later – it crystallizes. Make sure when it does you’re on the right side of the tracks.

2. Don’t forget what you’ve learned. It might seems simple, but don’t take this lightly. I was good friends with a brilliant Korean student while studying at Princeton in Beijing, and I asked him while we were sightseeing one day how on earth he could read all of the signs. It was incredible – he recognized almost every character on the historic site signs, and we were both just second-year students. He laughed and said, “The problem with most Chinese students is that they forget. You’ve seen all of these characters before, you just need to work on not forgetting.”

Sure enough, he was right – when he pointed out where we had learned each character, I slowly remembered repeating them mindlessly in class or glimpsing them while sifting through my vocabulary lists late at night. Constant and vigilant review isn’t something I was ever particularly good at, but it’s the key to becoming an outstanding mid- to high-level speaker. Don’t forget to review, and don’t forget to not forget.

3. Get a Chinese girlfriend. I used to think that this was a joke, but whether it’s a friend or girlfriend having someone you can speak with often and trust is important. It allows you to use the language practically and associate Chinese with things you care about. Getting involved with clubs that make you use Chinese (I’m thinking particularly of the newspaper I helped write for while at ICLP) can also help make the Chinese you learn significant and therefore more memorable.

4. Decide what kind of Chinese you want to learn. Whether it’s colloquial or formal or written or verbal, knowing what kind you’re trying to achieve can speed things up more than you’d think.

5. Learn to understand characters. Though most people ignore their teachers, learning stroke orders and how to analyze radicals in characters has given me an advantage ever since my first semester of Chinese.

6. Learning Chinese, you need to not only speak, but also think in a different way. This goes for almost all languages, but the sooner you can think in Chinese (an not just translate from English), the sooner you’ll start feeling fluent in the language.

7. Forget what your teachers told you that Chinese was. You will probably have to adapt your Chinese to the many brands and ways of speaking. Depending on your age, place, etc., the “proper” way is not always what your teacher taught you. My friend Peregrine went to work in the villages of Yunan and, sure enough, her Mandarin was not doing it for her. Even coming from learning “Beijing Mandarin” to “Taiwanese Mandarin” was a bit of a leap. Don’t take it for granted.

8. Take a language pledge or two. They’re really important in the first few years to beginning to think in another language.

9. Be fearless. My Chinese self is much different than my normal self, and it’s become that way because I’m much more successful learning Chinese as an extremely exaggerated, extroverted person. Though it might not be a part of your everyday personality, having a fearless Chinese persona will help your Chinese. Learning Chiense is about expanding your comfort zone, and this is only one of the ways to do it.

10. Know the difference between becoming Chinese and becoming a foreigner in China. It’s not necessary (and actually often not desirable) to try and actually become Chinese. You can add your own flavor to the culture instead.

11. You’re in it for the long haul. If you give up before you’ve spent three to four years (and if you’re like most every Yalie I’ve met), you are going to feel lame.

12. Don’t kid yourself. You are not special for being a Chinese-speaking foreigner, they’re everywhere. If this is why you are starting Chinese, or if you think that Chinese alone is somehow going to magically land you a career, please reconsider.

In the end, most of these boil down to “work hard and learn a lot”. And in some ways there isn’t anything I could have told myself a few years ago that would have helped; learning it on one’s own is most of the fun, and I'm nostalgic enough to say I wouldn't want to change the way I've learned it. But if nothing else, keeping these reflections in mind will make the “ah-ha!” factor of language learning just a little bit bigger.