Speaking their language

Some foreigners go beyond mastering Mandarin to tackle diverse vernaculars

Mandarin is considered one of the hardest languages for a native English speaker to learn.

But, as if China's main dialect weren't difficult enough to master, Jayme Lawman decided to also take on Shanghainese.

The Englishman has become so proficient that he was featured in the documentary Searching for the Shanghai Dialect on Shanghai television in March.

When the film starts, Lawman - introduced by his Chinese name Luo Sijie - is shown greeting a shopkeeper in Shanghainese.

"Oh, you speak it very well," the middle-aged woman says, surprised to hear a foreigner using her native tongue, since many young Shanghainese are abandoning their dialect.

"How long have you been living in Shanghai?"

The Northampton, England, native came to China in 2008 to attend Shanghai International Studies University. He was content knowing only Mandarin for the first three years. Then his Shanghainese girlfriend invited him to the first dinner with her parents.

"I am sitting there at the dinner table, and I don't know what anybody is saying," the 23-year-old says in a video call.

"It was frustrating. It was like starting all over again."

And start all over again he did, using the same method he used to learn Mandarin. Since he doesn't like textbooks, Shanghai's streets became his teacher.

"The best kind of people who learn languages are like babies. When you're born, you don't make a conscious effort of learning a language. You just pick it up from your surroundings," he says.

"So I thought, I'm going to be like a baby. I'm just going to listen, and I'm going to try and guess what it is. I'm going to try and copy people, try to get the pronunciation right. If I didn't know what it was, I would ask - just like a child would."

Lawman says playing cards with locals in his final year of university gave him the biggest opportunity to practice Shanghainese. Now, as a sports coach at one of the city's international schools, he mainly gets to speak the dialect at home with his mother-in-law. (Yes, he got the girl.)

The Englishman, who has co-hosted a Shanghai TV lifestyle program, says he still regularly receives calls to appear on television. But he'd rather pursue his childhood dream of coaching students in basketball and American football.

Tyler Christler, on the other hand, wouldn't mind appearing on TV. In September, the 30-year-old American and a Chinese friend began recording language tutorials on video, which they share online.

The program introduces viewers to words in the dialect of Dalian, in Northeast China's Liaoning province. Although the dialect belongs to the same family as Mandarin, it has some distinct vocabulary and tone differences. In between bantering, Christler and his male co-host translate their featured Dalian words into standard Mandarin and English.

"A foreigner can speak the Dalian dialect. Amazing!" one viewer comments online.

"Dalian's dialect is going to rule the world," another says.

World domination isn't part of the plans of Christler, a talent recruiter who has lived in Dalian for most of his five-and-half years in China.

"It's personally just for fun, and it's contributing to the culture here in Dalian," he says.

The publicity also helps with his headhunting job - just as learning Dalian's dialect has aided matters of the heart.

Christler, who hails from Portland, Oregon, decided to seriously study the dialect when he was dating a Dalian local. At a dinner with his then girlfriend and her friends, he realized being fluent in Mandarin wasn't enough.

"I was really having a difficult time understanding them," he says.

"I was like: 'You know what? If I'm going to be friends with her friends, and friends with her family - which I would want her to be with mine - then I'd better learn this. Because this is what they're speaking, and I don't want them to just speak Mandarin to me because I'm a foreigner. I want them to be themselves'."

With the help of friends and his ex-girlfriend, Christler began learning his third Chinese dialect - he is also familiar with the northeastern region's Dongbei vernaculars.

Mastering a new language in adulthood is tough for most people. But, with a combination of effort, good teachers and talent, it can be done, University of Hong Kong assistant professor of linguistics Picus Ding says.

Being able to speak a second language also makes learning a third easier, he says, since bilingual people are already exposed to sounds outside their native tongues.

Lawman and Christler could only speak English when they arrived in China. They disagree with the frequent suggestion they have an innate knack for language.

Back home, Lawman says he tried to learn French and Spanish, while Christler took a stab at Spanish - with no success. And yet, these languages are supposedly some of the easiest for native English speakers to learn. Then again, they weren't in love with those tongues' native speakers.

Zhang Xiaomin in Dalian and Xing Yi contributed to this report.

tiffany@chinadaily.com.cn

Jayme Lawman (center) celebrates his wedding day with his groomsmen. Lawman started learning Shanghainese while he was dating his now wife. Provided to China Daily

(China Daily Africa Weekly 12/13/2013 page25)