Let's be clear: I've only had two lessons so far and I can barely count to ten reliably. If pressed to put together all but the most basic of sentences I'll need at least three minutes to remember the right words. I still am not quite sure about grammar, either. But yesterday I asked someone about buying tea, and today I ordered milk tea (twice) and an omelette using the few words and sentences I knew. I was even able to imagine what words and phrase I could use to order some of the foods being sold on carts along the sidewalks.
After nine months of stumbling blindly through Taiwan without being able to interact, I'm at last able to communicate, albeit barely. Learning Chinese is frustrating, although I'm pretty sure learning any language for the first time (at my age, no less) would be frustrating. There's all this studying and repeating and memorizing that has to be done. My method is to take small chunks of time (bus and MRT rides, mostly) and force myself to learn a little bit more, then push just beyond the point of "I hate this, it's too hard" and then stop. Usually at least one or two new lessons will stick.
I could do this with just a book, but I'm glad for my tutor. She points out things I wouldn't have figured out on my own and it's a relief to have a native speaker listen to me while I'm learning new words. She can tell me "Yes, that's right," or "No, it should be _________," so I know for sure I'm not going to go around mispronouncing things or using words the wrong way.
It was only this winter that Nicole told me that when you say "two hundred", you don't say "er", the word for two, you use "liang," another word for two used for counting in higher amounts. E.g., "liang bai" (two hundred) not "er bai" (also two hundred, but the wrong word for two). It'd be like saying (in English) "My birthday is on December three." Everyone knows what you mean, but it's not correct.
Having my tutor around cuts down on those mistakes and makes me feel more confident about the accuracy of what I'm learning. Especially when it comes to tones. Speaking Chinese is like singing a song, your voice has to go up or down or hit a high/low note depending on the tone for the word, and without someone to listen to me and explain tones in detail, I'd have thrown in the towel long before now.
It's a bit sad that I'm only just starting to learn Chinese with only three months left on my contract in Taiwan. Additionally, I want to move to Japan next, and learning Japanese is one of my major goals. But I don't think I'll put Chinese permanently on the shelf, just put it away for a bit. After all, I like Taiwan a lot. I could come back, either to live or to visit, and either way the language skills would be useful.
My tutor asked me why I'm learning Chinese when I'm only going to be here for another three months, and I told her that I don't consider any learning endeavor to be a waste of time. Even if I never need Chinese again after these three months, I'll never look back and think that investing time in learning it was a waste.
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