I remember the moment I decided to learn Chinese. I was three thousand feet above the surface of the earth, flying back from a visit to my in-laws. I felt rested after a week away from the office and relieved to be heading back home. In Greek myth Atlas drew strength from having his feet on the ground but I seemed to be gaining power the higher we flew. I felt as if I were standing high above the slipstream of time, looking down upon all the little compartments of my life from the apex of a monumental arch.

Approaching forty, I do my best to keep my mind alive. I listen to the BBC World Service while driving to work and subscribe to Scientific American. I rent foreign films and the occasional documentary. I still read Freud, and on my nightstand Darwin and Frazer patiently await their day next to my earplugs and antacid tablets.

I wanted to learn Chinese for the sake of mental exercise, like Valéry taking up verse. In that moment aloft I felt I had mental reserves which needed to be committed to a project, like a wad of cash burning a hole in my pocket. From everything I read, mental resources seem to be use it or lose it, like the pre-tax dollars in a healthcare spending account. I hate crosswords and can’t find anyone to play chess with so learning a new language seemed the only way to go.

Looking back, I have a sneaking suspicion that my notion of what to expect was unconsciously derived from the 1980 TV mini-series Shogun. I would hire a tutor, a young woman in a silk kimono who would raise one hand to cover her mouth as she tittered at my mistakes. I would squint at the character for a tree and my keen intellect would discern what others could not, the roots and branches of a tree-like shape in the figure. When her robe slipped open, her wordless offer of intercourse would be accepted out of respect for a culture in which it was obligatory and would proceed with the quiet grace of the tea ceremony.

September came around and I still hadn’t done anything. My daughter would soon be starting Chinese in pre-school, which made it almost seem like a parental duty to try to keep up, part of trying to raise my family above the average cultural level of our surroundings out here, which I would summarize as beer and British soccer.

I told my mother and stepfather about my plan when they visited. What are you going to do with that, my stepfather said irritably. It was the same reaction English majors get at seventeen. Who are you going to talk to, my mother said, almost offended, since it wasn't her. And my wife doubted I could learn anything at all since I can’t remember trash day or which shopping center has the burrito place we go to.

Next thing I knew I was signing up for an adult ed class that met Tuesdays after dinner at the local high school. I bought a dictionary and a guide to the characters on-line and spent close to an hour choosing a brand new notebook at the office supply store, even turning back in the parking lot to exchange it for a different one with narrower lines and more pages. It was a two-sectioner but I could use the second one for my next project.

On the first night I got the time wrong and despite having carefully planned to be at least ten minutes early, I walked into the room already twenty minutes late. I couldn’t figure out how it happened. I felt dizzy and frightened just being inside a high school, mysteriously guilty and illegitimate.

The other students were elderly retirees eager to haggle for souvenirs, as well as a few people who had Chinese daughter-in-laws or spouses, or so I inferred. To my surprise we never went around and introduced ourselves, which was the one certainty I had gone in with. The overall classroom atmosphere was a lot like being on a tour bus abroad, cautiously giddy.

Our teachers were husband and wife, an American and the short, fearsome bride he had brought back from Taiwan many years ago and who now patrolled the aisles like a class monitor correcting pronunciation. From time to time she corrected his as well, only when asked but the threat was always there.

I was disappointed to be informed our textbook would be an audiocourse consisting entirely of dialogues to listen to and repeat, along the lines of:


Mr. Brown, welcome to Beijing. I’ve come to meet you.
Thank you for coming to meet me.
What will you drink?
I’ll have black tea.
Here is your black tea.
Thank you. It is delicious.

The biggest problem with night school is you’re tired. Like a platoon going out on a dangerous patrol, we lost a few of our company every night. It was unclear whether they were deserting or being picked off by the enemy, and whether that enemy was the inherent difficulty of the subject or the chosen method of instruction. Instead of completing the book's ten lessons in ten classes, the teacher began each meeting with a review of everything we had learned up to that point, and so by the end we had only gotten to lesson five. Instead of a sense of progress, much of the time it felt like going backwards.

Our class was all pronunciation and no vocabulary. We drilled vowels and consonants but never improvised sentences nor thought much about the meaning of the sounds we made. One night when my wife offered to help me study, she asked my name and I told her it was Peter Brown.

I had never experienced learning by rote before. In college I had even avoided lectures in favor of small seminars, which allow one to be annoyed by the opinions of others and to annoy them in return with your own. By comparison this was like finding out after your parents had dropped you off that you had been sent to fat camp. Encountering these crude methods for the first time only now, I reached a desperate point where I found myself asking if there was something fundamentally Chinese about them.

Let me share a little of what I learned for those who may not know. First, almost every syllable in the Mandarin dialect is spoken in one of four tones: high, ascending, down-up or descending.

The first tone is like going up on tippy-toes or having your balls squeezed. It is like the beautiful moment in an American musical when one passes from speech into song: The hills are alive…

The second is the rising tone that Westerners associate with asking a question.

The third is a taunting sing-song that drips with sarcasm: We would have been on time if Ro-ger here hadn’t insisted on taking a short cut.

The fourth sounds curt and angry.

These strange vocal twists reminded me of the extra motions of someone bowling or playing pinball, leaning his body in the hopes of influencing the trajectory of a ball after it has been released. In this case they are made while the sound is being formed and not afterwards but they somehow seemed just as comically superfluous.

Because it involves trying to locate and use unfamiliar muscles, learning to make new sounds is almost like physical rehabilitation. I found that if I mocked the sound it only came out slightly over the mark, my own sense of what was ridiculous and what wasn’t no longer being trustworthy here.

Even hearing the difference between the tones requires some rewiring of the brain, some updating of the firmware. Your ear must be trained, acclimatized, “reeducated,” as it were.

Second, instead of a phonetic alphabet, Chinese is written using thousands of characters which must be memorized individually. As time-pressed amateurs we were thus condemned to illiteracy in advance and would pursue our studies with the aid of a system of Romanization. But the relief of having the Chinese words transliterated soon turned to a feeling of betrayal upon finding that many of the familiar Roman letters sound different than they do in English. Among the consonants, for example, X is sh-, Q is ch- and Zh is j-, and the vowels are worse. Learning with the Pinyin system feels like neither real Chinese nor an accurate transliteration but rather a bridge one hesitates to cross for fear it may be entirely imaginary.

It’s frustrating learning a new language and finding no satisfactory equivalents for certain key words. The idea of shouting Au Secours instead of help in France seems absurd, and doesn’t Entschuldigung mean that Germans never really have to say they’re sorry?

The Chinese greeting Ni hao doesn’t feel like a hello, but even more disorienting is the fact that Chinese does not really have Yes or No. Instead one answers a question by repeating the verb positively or negatively. Q: You going to lunch? A: Not going.

Yes and No are very important words; they buy you time before parsing. Grieving this most unexpected and most untimely demise, I raised my hand with a question. If I ask someone something and they can see I didn’t quite catch their answer, are they at least going to nod in the affirmative or shake their heads in the negative? The husband referred the matter to his wife, who tilted her head to think a second. No, she said, blinking.

I also had trouble with words that sounded too much like English words. To me “Wo” already means slow down or sorrow, thus it is not available to mean Me. “Wo men” means We in Chinese not women and “You” should mean you but is pronounced Yo which should mean Hey but means Have. Bu shi sounds uncomfortably like bullshit.

Xie Xie, however, is a beautiful and fitting way to express gratitude. Pronounced Sheh Sheh, it has the same quiet modesty as saying hush, as if one is sweeping away both the generous deed and oneself its unworthy recipient.

As a kid I always admired the wisdom of Chinese food. It was already cut up for you, which also meant that you didn’t have to worry it was undercooked inside, and the increased surface area let it really soak up the sauce. Perhaps there is a kind of morselization in the language as well, which is made up of short words put together to form larger ones.

The Chinese, traditionally represented as highly ceremonious in the West, are in fact remarkably brusque in conversation. Ni hao translates to “You good?” and a sentence is made interrogative merely by adding Ma at the end, which feels suspiciously like grunting out a Hunh. Where an Englishman might say, The wind has been very strong lately, hasn’t it?, my Chinese mother-in-law would say, Windy!

It’s funny how when you’re learning a language, the rules against generalizing about a people seem to be suspended, now that it is supposedly a matter of culture rather than race. It’s as if someone is taking you aside and saying, Listen, if you’re really going over there then you will need to know the truth about them. I can’t tell you how many times I have been told that the Chinese are obsessed with food, usually by Chinese people. Furthermore, our teachers told us, the Chinese do not like to be hugged, they ask surprisingly direct questions about salary and marital status, and do everything through a bureaucratic network of connections. The eighteenth-century novel I’ve been reading does seem to support this last claim, though there clothes are much more important than food.

It’s always a shock to start learning a language and find it contains unnecessary distinctions which serve no real purpose but must nonetheless by internalized with great effort. Why should nouns have gender in French or cases in Latin and German? More shockingly, one realizes there are needless complexities in one’s own language that until now seemed perfectly natural. I had expected to be given a series of tables and charts but Chinese grammar is so simple you can pretty much skip it. Adieu, 501 French Verbs! This awareness of one’s own flaws should encourage humility and make it easier to be accepting but for me unfortunately it did not.

Every language is a scandal in the way it reveals that which is unnecessary in others. It is a scandal that Chinese has no alphabet and equally a scandal that Romance languages require conjugation. Learning a new language we inevitably catch a painful glimpse of the ideal speech which eludes us. Such a vision of unattainable perfection may destroy us, just as Actaeon was destroyed after glimpsing divine Artemis bathing nude in the woods, or at the very least kill the noble spirit of inquiry.

As stupid as it is to complain about the rules of a language, to try to write up a review of it as if it were a restaurant or something, perhaps this impulse can serve as an antidote to those who rhapsodize too much about its beauty. Language is like teeth, dead matter when there is no breath behind it. If a smile is truly beautiful it is never just because of the teeth but because of the person and the reason they are smiling, and in retrospect the wrong reason will make that same smile ugly indeed.

Every language is a broken system, but if we can see this, why can’t we fix things? Why is it so difficult to reform a language? Perhaps this is in part because its flaws have come to seem natural to those who speak it, even a matter of pride and social distinction, like the difference in English between who and whom or avoidance of the split infinitive.

The biggest reason systems are hard to change is that they involve what one might call a sequential or time-differentiated buy-in. Languages are live systems which are in use continuously and can not simply be taken off-line for repairs. Each individual speaker must conform at their own moment of training and once they have done so they have an investment in the existing system and it is in their interests to perpetuate it by having others conform as well.

How strange that it was recently believed by many that the world might end in the year 2000 because most computer software had been written using two digits to store the year instead of four. If even such minor changes are so costly to an already existing system, imagine how hard it must be to make a real change.

We can use reason to understand the world but, Marx and Obama not withstanding, reason seems powerless to change it. At best we can use our reason to explain why the world is an irrational place, why people vote against their own best interests, eat their way towards an early death and clutter their homes with worthless junk.

If man were ever to wake up one day a truly and perfectly rational creature, he would still have the crushing legacy of centuries of irrationality to sort through. There would still be the dead hand of the past to be dealt with, its stiff fingers clenched tightly at his throat.

I think what originally drew me to Chinese poetry was a feeling of kinship with the humility of defeated men, a feeling that this humility was not just a matter of middle age and professional and political failures but also somehow a cosmically appropriate attitude.

I set out to learn Chinese with the hope of raising myself up from the world of brute fact surrounding me but studying a language one only re-encounters that same brutality of fact on a higher level. The momentary illusion of freedom in choosing a project is thoroughly crushed in the endless unfreedom of trying to stick with it.

Did I at least get my mental exercise? How should I know? If your goal is not specific knowledge but to improve the functioning of your brain, you can’t test yourself on content, you would have to test on the current rate of acquisition. A proper experiment would therefore require learning two dissimilar languages in succession. If you learned the second one faster than the first, and not because of improved work habits, then you did in fact get smarter.

I had expected my brain would be a little slower than in my college days but found rather that it regularly came to a dead stop. When you memorize something, you look at it and repeat the sound and something happens but when I looked at the words there was no sound. The dough of my mind was dry and unyielding, nothing made an impression on it.

I need massive amounts of sleep in order to think; I don’t mean eight, we’re talking ten, twelve, fifteen hours. When I stay in bed until my eyes finally pop like a turkey thermometer, then my mind at last starts working and I begin to make connections again, strings of words begin to weave themselves into garlands about my unfurrowed brow.

Most days I’m so tired I’m practically blind. I look at a page of letters and my underpaid eyes defocus in protest. It’s as if I can feel an actual physical resistance coming off of it, like the tiny puffs of air from an air hockey table or a glaucoma test. I doubt I learned ten words and towards the end I began to forget the little I had learned. If I were taking the class for a grade I would have dropped it and if I were taking it for a job I would have cried or fucked my boss.

Can I slow the death of my mind by effort, or will I only feel it more keenly? I suppose I should be glad I don’t need my brain anymore, if I ever did. Technically I’m not sure I failed because it’s not like I ever said was going to master the language and I did attend every class but one when I was sick, but in any case it doesn’t matter. The whole experience has brought the familiar sour taste of failure back into my mouth. If I wasn’t a failure for doing poorly at Chinese, I was one for taking its peculiarities personally, for having an emotional reaction to a linguistic system, for abandoning something I started, and for poor initial goal-setting.

What would be a realistic goal to set for myself? I really can’t seem to train my sights on anything small enough to be within reach. Even to be the best-dressed guy on the second floor of N-building I’d have to start tucking in my shirt and getting monthly haircuts.

In my life I have already failed once, as a writer. If I fail as a father, I won’t be able to go on. But everything before me seems to require so much goddamned patience. Where, I ask you, is it supposed to come from? And how soon can I expect it to get here?