2026-06-05
11 分钟Today I'm going to talk about learning Chinese back in 1968, what I went through then,
and what I would do differently today.
And from that, you will see the extent to which language learning has improved and has become easier.
For a number of reasons.
So in 1968, I was sent to Hong Kong by the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, my employer.
My job was to learn Mandarin Chinese and that's what I did full time.
So I don't remember everything.
I know we had at least two-on-one instruction because I know that when I was sitting in a classroom
with a fellow Canadian diplomat and I was told that in Chinese to say, are you going?
They say, you go not go.
His reaction was, is that ever stupid?
He was not a very successful language learner.
You can't treat things in a new language that are different as being stupid.
You have to get used to them.
At any rate, my next recollection is that I was struggling with a book called Chinese Dialogues,
for which there was also audio.
Audio spoken, what seemed to me, very, very quickly.
Now, in doing some research, it turns out that Chinese Dialogues which was written entirely in a Romanized version,
like what we call Pinyin today, but which then was the Yale Romanization script.
And the audio was produced eight years after the book was first published.