1. Play the radio or TV on a Chinese station – 24/7 or at least during your waking hours.
   It is easier if you are in China but you can use ppstream or italkbb’s new internet TV or find some online Chinese stuff and leave it on. Try to make sure you are listening to Beijing CCTV or that you are really listening to Standard Mandarin.
2. 3 hours every day only Chinese. even if all you know is Hi and Bye – only Chinese 3 hours every day
   In Shanghai I used to go a clothing market especially on raining days when no one was shopping. As there was nothing to do and no money to make, the sales girls where happy to chat.
3. Um…
   A Chinese um friend helps.   Strong motivation : )
4. Get lost
   Place yourself in a dangerous situation with a dictionary. Again high motivation – OK don’t really do this, I got lucky, but wow, it really helps if you live.
5. Don’t translate
   Think in Chinese, don’t translate. It will mess up your English and somethings you cannot say in English but it greatly helps. 

Tones, it is all about the tones.

The most important part of learning a tonal language is getting the tones and combinations of tones exactly right.

An intelligent native English speaker with some exposure to different languages can pronounce the phonetics better than a Chinese person who learned a dialect first then learned Mandarin. Southern Chinese have a really hard time saying shi, they always say si. One of the things that makes Chinese hard to learn is that few people actually speak standard Chinese. (Chinese … is a language family consisting of languages which are mostly mutually unintelligible to varying degrees – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language)

You cannot learn to speak Chinese without tones. Speaking toneless Chinese is painful to the ear and incomprehensible.  It is similar to speaking English like this – “You cwnnot stwrt to lewrn to spewk ChLnese wLth out tones. SpewkLng toneless ChLnese Ls pwLnful to the ewr.  There Ls nothLng more wnnoyLng thwn someone spewkLng ChLnese wLthout the tones… “

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Tones change meanings. Classic example “ma”
ma1 = Mother; ma2 = rope; ma3 = horse; ma4 = scold

Do you want to talk like this  – this it the horse that gave birth to me. This is my step-rope she married my father last year. – ?

How to get the tones right?

Practice saying any word in tonal pairs – ma is fine you already know how to pronounce that – ma like mama/mother.

1-1,1-2,1-3,1-4 /2-1,2-2,2-3,2-4 / 3-1,3-2,3-3,3-4 / 4-1,4-2,4-3,4-4

Practicing these tone combinations is absolutely essential to speaking Chinese like a native.

Start from day 1 if you want to be intelligible.

Enjoy!

Are you sure you want to do this?

People often ask me for advice on how to learn Chinese. I must warn you it is painfully hard and learning to read and write is like learning a separate language from the spoken.

My written Chinese is still limited to simple text messages. I am not sure if I will every read and write at the newspaper level. NB: I recall asking a friend who had lived in Canada for a long time how to write a word. It became a group debate. Chinese who have lived abroad for a long time forget much of the writing. Having said that I have a friend doesn’t speak but can read and write. I think having a  photographic memory helps : )

Learning to speak is a less lofty goal. I have met many non-Chinese who can speak at some level, I myself speak daily Chinese fluently though at the time of this post my business Chinese needs work. Of course there is Mark Rowswell.

You need to decide early on if you want to read and write or not. If you do, you need to start now. The learning process is different if you want to learn to read/write and speak/listen and it takes time.

It is possible to speak intelligibly after 2 years living in China. It is possible to learn to read and write at a reasonable level in 4 years of full time study, if you have the gift and determination.

I will post some tips on this blog most of them for learning to speak/listen. Feel free to submit tips and ask questions. I will help as I can.

One of the interesting complaints that I heard by Chinese when visiting doctors in Canada is they care about the numbers not the patient. I have found it to be true. Once during a visit with a specialist in Canada, the doctor walked in looking at the ‘chart’ talked for a few seconds and then walked out with out ever looking me in the eye.  When visiting a Chinese doctor in Canada or China most of the time is listening to your experience of symptoms and asking some key questions as well as looking at your tongue and checking your pulse.

In China you keep your medical records with you and store it at home. It is not a big secret like in Ontario where you cannot even get your own test results with out written permission from  your doctor. I am told in Alberta that is not the case you can get your results from the lab.

I personally have had much better results with TCM and other alternatives than with western medicine.

One day while dining with a group of friends in Shanghai, one person ordered a soft Tofu dish. Its consistency is usually similar to jello. I watched him try many times unsuccessfully to pick up some Tofu with Chopsticks. I had been eating with Chopsticks in Canada for 8 years previous to moving to China and didn’t think this was going to work as it was extra soft. Chinese food is usually shared  i.e. eat out of the same bowl/plate and avoiding collisions is generally polite, so,  I was waiting for him to grab a bite so I could get in and get some too. At first I waited but being very hungry I grew impatient and grabbed a spoon and started eating.  I was expecting the usual “Ah  you don’t know how to use chopsticks” nonsense. Instead he looked at me and said: “You’re smart” grabbed a spoon and started eating.

Offshoring – the relocation of a business process from one country to another. Usually done by companies from industrialized countries to less developed countries with the intention of reducing the cost of doing business.

 Outsourcing – the transfer of the management and/or day-to-day execution of an entire business process to an external company. This service provider could be in the same building or in another country.

 Outsourcing is convenient for dealing with short term problems or problems outside your core competency. Outsource tasks that don’t contribute to the bottom line or the long-term strategy of the company.  

Reasons to consider include

Human resources – is there a lack of skilled human resources locally? Should you train or should you offshore? Where can you get skilled people? If you need special skills that are not available in your area you have two options 1. bring them to you. 2. bring the company to them. A more detailed analysis is needed to determine which is better, but there are many secondary advantages to  offshoring.

Time – Availability – is there a distinct advantage to 24/7 availability? If you need to have skilled people available 24/7 distributing the team globally so that everyone is working during their day hours and provide you with  24/7 coverage is a distinct advantage.

Time – Continuous processing – Consider if code is checked in at the end of the day and the testing starts the following day then it is not until the 3rd day that the developer can react to test results.  If the tests are done overnight with results ready the following morning the developer can react more nimbly to any issues that arise.

Political advantage – I know of at least one large US company who specifically chose to have an engineering site in China to engender favor from the government. It was hoped that this would make it easier to get government contracts, create awareness and show that they can support their product from within China.

Cost – This is the trickiest factor to calculate. Are you getting the same ROI in terms of productivity? This is relatively easy to calculate on a low technology manufactured item i.e. a chair.  Much harder to evaluate on software, service etc. example – you are saving money by outsourcing your call center but how many customers do you alienate because they cannot understand the heavily accented English of  your support representatives or the idea of great customer service is measured differently in different cultures? Outsourcing can be a great way to reduce cost but you need to carefully calculate the real advantage. More you need to be aware of instability. I have lived in 30% inflation and it can suddenly make that new factory not cost effective within a few years.

Ramp up time/ learning curve  – both you and your new staff will need some time to learn to work together and understand what is needed to succeed. It may even be necessary to spend a significant amount of time reaching an understanding and agree on what exactly is ’success’. Offshoring is not a quick fix, I have seen companies pull out just before they were about to start realizing ROI. Offshoring is a medium to long term term endeavor can realize great benefit to the corporation but it must be carefully analyzed and controlled to reap such benefit.

Secondary affects – Will your best staff leave because they don’t want to train their replacements? Will morale at your site go down ? Will your current staff impede the success of your new site? I can recall one instance where US engineer referred to a Chinese engineer as cheap labor. This had a very negative effect on the whole company. How will you mitigate this risk? or can you avoid it all together?

It is definitely possible to have a successful offshore operation if you have made the right choice  and you planned, prepared and are able to deal with the issues that will certainly arise.

I will add articles on different aspects on how to be successful if you choose to offshore.

I asked him how my mother was supposed to know to set the environment variables (or even what they are). Documentation? – None, Prompt? – None, Verbal instructions? – None, Error message? – none.

He brought it to me later and it worked automatically with no need for user intervention, the way it was supposed to work.

To be truly successful as a software engineer and perhaps technical person in general you need to have a real sense of compassion for the end user. It is that ease of use that makes the difference between good software and software no one wants to use. People don’t want to have to learn how to use technology; they want it to work like magic. They do not want to expend effort trying to figure out what it is you were thinking when you wrote it. If you want your software product to be successful, make it work like magic. Make it work so even anyone can use your software instantly.

Technology needs to be a benefit to society not an addiction, burden or way of life. Technology is the means not the end. More, technology needs effect beneficial outcomes.

I have seen two disturbing instances relating to this. One is a company that wanted to genetically engineer crops so that they were pesticide resistant. This is insane. Engineering a crop to resist pests, I can see the logic, but, to make plants more resistant to chemicals that are not working so you can add more is not a valid or useful approach.

I recall a conversation with landscaper that was complaining that the region was restricting chemicals use to kill grubs in lawns. He wanted them to either up the dose allowed or allow use of ‘stronger’ chemicals. At that time Nematodes were available and the landlord has used them to great effect. The landlord had had no success with chemicals but Nematodes did the job naturally, effectively and in a way that did not poison the environment. Even knowing this, the landscaper insisted that he should be allowed to use more dangerous poisons and in high doses. He clearly had lost sight of the goal and was simply infatuated with a technology he did not understand.

Technology needs to be harmonious. The technology itself cannot have ‘side effects’ that end up being more catastrophic than the original problem. i.e. a teacher wants to quiet the class so they throw a grenade into the class before entering. The kids are quiet but…not a beneficial outcome. The peripheral impact of the technology is also a critical part of what makes it good or bad. We do like warm houses in the winter but is coal technology a good way to deal with that?

Technology must be a harmonious means to a beneficial end. Any technology that is not should be abandoned or replaced and any technology that is should be adopted. To make this happen in our current economic system beneficial technology needs to be profitable and it is important to note that the calculation of the cost of an individual technology should include the whole impact on society as a whole and over time.

Finding myself in a serious predicament, I called a Chinese friend in Shanghai that I traveled with frequently, hoping they would have some idea of what to do. They called a former classmate who called a former classmate in Xi’an. I waited in a net bar having no other recourse.  Someone came to the net bar, asked me if I was ‘Badaling’ handed me a big wad of cash and said please call your friend. I did and confirmed that I received the money and he left.

When I got home I thanked my friend and took her to dinner, repaid the money and she passed it on etc. The Chinese classmate system is an unbelievable support network.  It brings the saying “a friend in need” to a new level.