Sort of like Orange Wednesdays. Except in this case the orange is specifically Chinese.
I don't know if you've noticed, but I have a lot of spare time on my hands, even with working, travelling and trying to explore new places taking up most of my days. I very rarely spend the rest of the time doing anything productive, which is why I've decided to give myself a kick up the 屁股 and devote at least one day per week to hardcore Chinese Mandarin language studies.
It doesn't have to be Wednesday if I'm doing something on Wednesday, but at least one day a week should be properly intense. No more of this going-to-the-park-and-watching-the-turtles-swim-around-while-making-lazy-notes-from-my-pocket-Mandarin-phrasebook for me. Turtles have been distracting me from academic achievements since I was five.
Maybe I'll write a blog post every so often covering what I've learnt to help motivate me, because it's clear how much disproportionate value I give to blogs. These potential posts will cover aspects of Mandarin language that I feel I've sufficiently mastered, setting my stupid mnemonics and memory aids in stone for other language students to accidentally come across and be confused, disappointed and angered by.
You're probably not learning Mandarin, so don't read these posts as they will be of no interest. They're mostly just for me... you know, unlike the rest of my universally accessible stuff.
This week: telling the time.
I've already mastered Chinese counting with the help of this stupid visual memory exercise that did actually work to build those neural connections (even if I had to re-learn how to pronounce some of them once I got to Taiwan).
When you know numbers 0 to 10, it's very easy to learn how to make them into tens and so on.
Mandarin numbers 11 to 99
11-19 are '10 + unit' - so eleven and twelve are shí yī (十一) and shí èr (十二) ('ten-one' and 'ten-two' up to 'ten-nine')
Multiples of 10 are 'number x 10' - so twenty and thirty are èr shí (二十) and sān shí (三十) ('two times ten' and 'three times ten' up to 'nine times ten')
All other numbers between 21 and 99 simply add the relevant unit to the ten - so twenty one and twenty two are èr shí yī (二十一) and èr shí èr (二十二) ('two times ten plus one' and 'two times ten plus two' up to 'nine times ten plus nine')
The only dodgy part here is that two - normally èr (二) - sometimes becomes liǎng (两) when it's used as a qualifier. Annoying, yeah, but it's the only oddity you have to learn, so deal with it. Not like English numbers, with their 'eleven and twelve' (why not 'one-teen' and 'two-teen'?), and 'two,' 'three' and 'five' becoming 'twe-,' 'thir-' and 'fif-', or 'forty' dropping the 'u.' Even 'teen' is a bit stupid, now I think about it - why be Denny Different?
Mandarin time
This simplicity extends to Mandarin time, which is treated digitally. None of this 'past' or 'to' business. The Chinese have always been ahead of the game. And then stuck in 1976, or whenever digital watches were the peak of futurism. The only additional words you'll need are:
zhōng (鐘) - the equivalent of 'o'clock' (I remember it as a Big Ben style 'bonnng')
diǎn (點) - the audio equivalent of the visual colon or decimal point between the hour and the minute
fēn (分) - the word for 'minutes'
There's a whole other load of vocabulary needed when it comes to asking the time, but I'll stick to the responses here as they're almost patronisingly straightforward.
One o'clock yī diǎn zhōng (一點鐘)
3:20 sān diǎn èr shí fēn (三點二十分)
Five to six wǔ diǎn wǔ shí wǔ fēn (五點五十五分)
Mandarin days
Days of the week couldn't be simpler. They're simple for the Chinese people's own benefit, not yours, as the seven-day week and twelve-month calendar were among the dubious 'gifts' our colonial ancestors thrust on the Chinese a couple of centuries back.
So rather than learn or adapt the namesakes of various irrelevant Norse gods that almost no native English speakers really understand anyway, the pragmatic Chinese kept things simple and opted for 'week + number' - with xīng qī (星期) being the word for 'week.'
Okay, apart from Sunday which is specifically marked out as the supposed holy day (literally 'heaven day'). But come on, it was Sunday. Cut them some slack.
Monday xīng qī yī (星期一)
Tuesday xīng qī èr (星期二)
Wednesday xīng qī sān (星期三)
Thursday xīng qī sì (星期四)
Friday xīng qī wǔ (星期五)
Saturday xīng qī liù (星期六)
Sunday xīng qī tiān (星期天)
Mandarin months
Months are every bit as easy as days, as long as you can count to 12. Except this time it's 'number x month' with the number coming first, followed by the word for 'month' - yuè (月). Can you handle this level of complexity?
January yī yuè (一月)
February èr yuè (二月)
March sān yuè (三月)
April sì yuè (四月)
May wǔ yuè (五月)
June liù yuè (六月)
July qī yuè (七月)
August bā yuè (八月)
September jiǔ yuè (九月)
October shí yuè (十月)
November shí yī yuè (十一月)
December shí èr yuè (十二月)
What did I tell you? If only English was so straightforward and it was '-embers' all the way. Why do the '-arys' give up so soon? Why isn't August in the autumn? I'm glad I never had to learn that stupid language.
These Chinese studies are looking good - if the whole language is this straightforward, I should be fluent in no time! It doesn't get more complicated from here on in, right?
...Right? Kill me now.
Photos taken in Taiwan
