Lost in pronunciation

For the past few days it's been getting slightly (but not uncomfortably) colder, and today the skies were really gray and it was drizzling a bit. It's fine with me, as long as it means there are no mosquitoes!

But besides that, I went to my Chinese class today. I had a small oral test, which I think I did really well on (only a few mistakes in pronouncing the tones!)

No, but really, I think my Chinese is improving. The problem with most foreigners, or should I say Westerners, for learning Chinese is the tones. Because we don't have any. So we either end up speaking a kind of pidgin Chinese which uses the sounds of Chinese with the tonalities of our language or we end up making up tones for the words we don't understand (very dangerous because you may be swearing at the person without even knowing it) or, most often, we just spit out a bunch of monotonous sounds that we think mean something but sound like gibberish to a Chinese speaker.

In that respect, I'm kind of envious of the Vietnamese kid in my class. I mean, he doesn't pronounce perfectly, but his tones are spot on (coming from a country where they have seven tones, they better be). When tones are pronounced correctly, the Chinese language seems to come to life, and you can add real feeling to your voice.

I've been working on relearning some basic words because, frankly, in France I didn't really learn to pronounce Chinese correctly. Mispronunciation (or lack of pronunciation) leads to the above mentioned gibberish, which leads to a situation where you are not understood, which leads to a plateau in learning.

I guess I went through the phase where I would make up tones when I didn't know which tone to use. And I'm still at that stage. Despite the risk of inadvertently insulting your neighbor (the most common one is if you say "I have a cold" incorrectly you could say "I have sex with cats"), I think it's actually better to say the wrong tone then use no tone at all. Because if you mention to someone that you smell see a movie, they can probably figure out that what you actually mean is that you want to see a movie (smell and want are similar sounds with different tones).

To get slightly (but not too) philosophical, Goethe said that when you learn a new language, you acquire a new personality (I know, I'm paraphrasing). And I think it's true. When I learned Japanese, I would say stuff that I wouldn't say in English or French. Now, hopefully I will give birth to a new, Chinese speaking Adrien.

OK. That sounded weird. Goodnight.