Wait, my Mandarin is not awful? Or is it? 🤯

Reflections on two weeks of roller-coastering.

Image of Taipei101 completely off but still beautiful, created with Dall-E 3 and based on the picture at the bottom of this piece.

The past two weeks in Taiwan have been full of surprises.

Discovering Taipei’s filled with Japanese food chains and that not every bubble tea is incredible were quite the shockers, but my experience with the Mandarin language has surpassed all else, except maybe the magnificent landscapes and temples I’ve seen.

I’ve gone from the stupefaction of understanding more than I thought I would to the depressing realization I struggle to make any sort of full sentence. All this followed by the discovery I could hold a simple conversation without a dictionary while tipsy but also get an unfortunate carrot juice.

Let me talk a bit more about this last one.

On a sunny afternoon yesterday walking around in Tamsui (淡水), I went to get a pineapple juice. Realizing I didn’t know the word, I looked it up first. Turns out it’s bōluó (菠蘿). I went ahead and ordered a bōluó guǒzhī (菠蘿果汁). When the lady repeated, I wasn’t sure I had gotten it but it sounded like what I wanted.

Little did I know! The word for carrot is húluóbo (胡蘿蔔). Close enough for me not to notice the difference in the middle of the action. 😮‍💨

I was hoping for a refreshing pineapple juice and ended up with a big carrot juice, something I’ll likely never order again since I don’t like carrots in liquid format one bit.

Now, now, on the flip side, I’ve also succeeded in figuring out restaurants fully in Chinese, doing my check-ins. I even explained to a bus driver where we wanted to go and understood his whole explanation about the changes needed and paths to get to that place.

Now, I’m on a constant roller-coaster of experiences and laziness tends to take over whenever someone replies in English to my broken Chinese.

I’m also realizing I’ve been relying on my Japanese knowledge for way too long citing “Chinese characters are similar to Japanese anyway so I can get the gist.”

Well, turns out this works only with lower-level texts.

Real-life showed me there are a lot of characters I can barely guess the meaning of and most I can’t even hope to get the pronunciation right. And even when I can guess the meaning of one character, I often get lost when characters get combined to form new words.

I went to a bookshop yesterday to buy a Dragon Ball Z volume as I have this (clearly strange) habit of buying one in every language I can when traveling. I also wanted to get a textbook in Traditional Chinese (all the ones I have at home are in Simplified Chinese) but there weren’t many available so I’m going to have to look some more. I also want to buy a novel but I’ve got no idea what most of them are about. I’m leaning toward 幻日之時 but it seems like quite the challenge.

But, hey, why not call it my 2024 challenge?

We’ll see, I also have tons of Korean books to read after all.

Some other updates

I’m going back to France in just over a week but it still doesn’t feel like it at all. Luckily, with all this travel, I’ve greatly reduced my hours watching YouTube in favor of opening the Kindle app on my phone to read a bit.

I haven’t been properly studying any language for quite some time and I’m starting to feel the itch again. I know this trip in Taiwan could be considered studying as well but I just want to open a random textbook for a few minutes and dig into a random grammar pattern or topic filled with vocab I don’t know yet.

And yet, I also need to keep visiting while working and evenings are either short to wake up extra early to go far the next morning, or extra long talking to/drinking with other people in the guesthouse where I’m staying.

It’s fun but I am kinda looking forward to not feeling I need to visit places. Of course, I’ll complain about not having anything to see within two months of getting back but, hey, isn’t that the true definition of a French person? 🤭

As usual, cheers for reading,
Mathias

The original picture I took.