For our Live-It challenge we did a skill swap. I partnered up with Cameron, who started learning Mandarin at the age of 5. I’ve always wanted to learn Mandarin, and hope to add it to my language repertoire in the future. That said, I was ecstatic whenever Cameron began teaching me some Mandarin.

He taught me how to write, “how are you”, which is transliterated to nee-how in Mandarin. What I learned very quickly was that there is a specific way to write in Mandarin. In English, the strokes can be varied without much of a problem, but since in Mandarin there is much more precision in the characters it is imperative to perfect individual strokes and learn the strokes in their proper order.

Cameron also showed me how characters function to make specific words and meanings. For example, the character for “tree” alone is it’s own word, but when combined with another “tree” character the meaning of “forest” is conveyed. He also showed me a word that involved a combination of “woman” and something else to mean “respect” (it may have been another attribute of value, but I think it was respect). This led me to ask him about how the language plays a part in Chinese culture. From what we talked about, it seems like women are inherently more revered in Chinese culture; that much is evident from how certain positive meanings are created when combining the “woman” character with other characters.

I asked Cameron how able he felt he was in Mandarin. He told me that he knew about 2000-3000 characters, to which I was taken back. The obvious comparison is having 26 letters in English to make words. Despite my shock, what he said after was even more eye-opening to me. He said that in China you have to know about 10,000 characters to be considered literate. Again – as someone who wants to learn Mandarin at some point in my life – I was amazed at the breadth the language covered. I often wonder what it would be like to have grown up in a completely different culture, and the values that come along with that. I think the languages we learn have a massive effect on our cultural values, and exploring that would be awesome.

Overall the Live-It skill swap was actually really nice. I always like to learn new things and it’s often easier to learn something directly from another person than from a textbook or online resource. Now obviously I don’t know Mandarin from a thirty minute session with Cam, but the insight he provided into the language and culture was fascinating enough to be well worth the time.