I'm learning Mandarin. Yeah, I know... Why?

I'm learning Chinese. More specifically, I'm learning Mandarin, which is the most widely used Chinese language.

I am a secondary school English and Spanish teacher. I love literature and language, communication and creativity. I Speak English as my mother tongue, and Spanish and French as second languages (Spanish considerably better than French!) To my eternal regret, I never learned the second official language of my country, Ireland, because I was raised and educated in England*. And people can usually understand that. They have no problem with my speaking Spanish, and understanding French, and I suspect that nobody would be too surprised if I took it into my head to learn Italian or German...

But Mandarin...

People are confused by this choice.

The honest answer is pretty uninspiring: It was free.

Yep, I'm learning Mandarin because I can do it for free.

Obviously there's a bit more to it than that. As I mentioned, I'm a teacher. I'm newly qualified, starting out in a second career, and it's competitive. I mean, really competitive! So any string I can add to my bow is something I need to be doing. When I heard that there was a free Chinese language and culture course for secondary school teachers available I figured this was exactly the kind of thing that would look good on my CV, so I jumped on it. It's one evening a week, for a year, with an exam at the end which will certify me to HSK2. And the text book and CD cost me €25, so really we're only talking about an investment of time.

But what started out as “probably something I should do for my career”, has quickly become something I’m really loving. Every week I look forward to my Monday evening class, and even though some weeks I feel like I can remember literally nothing from the last class, I really enjoy trying.

What has been most interesting to me is the experience of being right back at the very very beginning again, for the first time since I was a small child. Eight weeks ago I knew nothing at all about the words, characters and structure of Mandarin. To contrast this with when I first learned French and Spanish - I had already learned the Greek alphabet, and a lot of English words that come from the same Latin roots as those languages. Mandarin is totally different, and while that makes it more difficult in some ways, it’s also what makes it interesting and exciting and worth doing.

So, here’s the deal. I’m getting all this new learning for free, there’s no reason I shouldn’t share it for free too. If you’d like to learn along with me then check in here and I’ll aim to have at least one instalment up each week.

Reasons to bother:

• It’s free
• It’s better than staring at a TV rerun of something you’ve already seen and didn’t care that much for the first time around
• It might exercise your brain in a way it hasn’t been exercised for a while – and you might really feel good about that.
• You might know someone who speaks Mandarin and want to surprise them.
• You might be thinking of travelling to China sometime, and not want to be totally lost and dependent.
• You might have been meaning to learn a new language for a while
• ... whatever other reason you can think of. I don’t know, maybe you’re just really bored or want to one-up someone! 

Tune in next time for some basic written Chinese characters and sounds. Sounds like a riot, doesn't it? I bet you can hardly wait!

* to be clear, I don't regret being raised in England, I had a very happy childhood, I only regret that this robbed me of one part of my Irishness: the language.