Dui bu qi; wo bu huisho zhongwen

"I'm sorry; I don't speak Chinese."

I've been saying that with alarming frequency lately, and it's getting to be a tiresome mantra.

I'm a pretty communicative (read: annoyingly loud and verbose) person. This makes living in a place whose language(s) I can't speak at all, never mind with anything near passable proficiency, an exercise in excruciating frustration. I knew this going in, but there's something about spending your life in a fog of almost unadulterated incomprehension that drives you around the fucking bend.

I’m a firm believer in “fake it ’til you make it” linguistics: I like to launch into a new language and force myself to learn it through awkward, misunderstanding-laden situations. But with Mandarin, this doesn’t work—I can’t piece together meanings to unfamiliar words, or sound them out while reading them; I certainly can’t guess at the word I’m looking for by bastardizing the English version, which works well in Eurocentric languages (biciclette! abandono! Zehr gut!). But spoken Mandarin and written Chinese don’t conform to Western norms of language, which is refreshing but also shitty if you’re me, and sick of being the jackass who points at things, mutters something unintelligible and then just resorts to speaking English really slowly, as though that will make it any less foreign to people who—quite reasonably—expect you to speak Chinese when you’re in China, dammit.

In some ways, Mandarin is relatively simple: It doesn’t have many (any?) articles, and best of all you don’t need to conjugate verbs when you change tenses. But there are special designators you’re supposed to use when referring to amounts (like a gaggle of geese or a flock of pigeons, but for ALL nouns), and there are five differentiated tones, so you can say the same syllable and have it mean five different things.

I just can’t wait until I confuse the “ma” that means “mother” with the “ma” that means “horse.” That’ll make me some friends.

Written Chinese is a whole other world of pain: it’s ideographic rather than phonetic, which is cool but makes it impossible to read anything by sounding it out. Hello, character memorization.

The sum of all this is, I become the North American tourist caricature I despise: I know a few words but can patch together few full phrases; I use hand signals a lot; I point; I resort to English and get frustrated when I can’t get my point across. It’s crap.

On one level, the helpless, alienated-foreigner feeling is probably a good way to get a sense of what it’s like to be in a completely strange place with no way to communicate. But I know Canadians are far less understanding of visitors who can’t speak English than most people here have been with me. Ergh.

I’m still hopeful I’ll pick up enough Mandarin to haggle, understand directions and maybe even have a conversation about the CCP. But until then, I sit on the subway on a little island of incomprehension in a sea of word I don’t understand—totally incommunicado.