Failing Chinese in China

I’m about a month into Chinese lessons and I’m doing poorly. So bad, in fact, that the other day in class when I finally answered a question correctly, classmates in the back row clapped for me. My teacher’s a tough lady and she either will not stop asking me questions out of spite (I lean towards spite) or because she’s baffled that I come to class nearly every day and I still can’t properly form a sentence.

One day – a Tuesday – at the beginning of class she asked me a question. I knew she was asking something about what day it was, so I attempted to answer what the date was until I realized she wanted a day of the week and even then I still kind of was just saying whatever words came to mind: Two, hour, American – they just kept coming out of my mouth, they had nothing to do with the answer, and she wouldn’t let it stop until I was not even saying words anymore, just making noises to fill the silence.

Then she looked at me and said, “You still don’t know how to say Tuesday?”

Another time she was drilling us on vocab words and classmates around me were rattling off dozens of fruits, vegetables and items of clothing. When she asked me to name as many colors as I could I could only remember green and red.

“What about blue?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about yellow.”

“I can’t remember.”

“What about white.”

“I’m not sure.”

And it went on like that until she’d exhausted the entire list of colors we’d learned and confirmed that, in fact, I really did only know green and red.

The tones are particularly hard for me. I’m a victim of phonetic s and still don’t understand why close pronunciation doesn’t count in Mandarin. Someone told me that there’s a very small window of time when you start learning Chinese to get your tones correct before you’re set in your ways, and I think that window is about to close for me.

I’ve even started regressing to remedial French: Instead of saying ‘Zhe’ in class one day, I pointed to myself (totally out of context) and said ‘Je!’ (Again, I think it was a situation where I didn’t really know the answer and words were just coming out of my mouth).

I only have a few more months of “survival” Chinese and then “beginner” Chinese starts (with the added bonus of starting to learn Chinese characters!) We’re not being graded, but if we were I think it’s safe to say I’d have to repeat the course.

I’ve been told not to feel too badly about this by expats and locals alike, as I’ve never studied the language before and I’m still fairly new to the country. I’m also pretty lazy at studying. And when I say pretty lazy, I mean I don’t study at all.