 So ha, and today I gotta say to everybody, me how, because we are very excited to bring you another episode of China, Hawaii, and You. I'm your host, Andrew Zimmerman, and I'm really, really excited for today's episode. We're gonna be doing things a little bit differently, though. In the past, we've been talking about a lot of politics stuff, and a lot of people have a lot of concerns with the Evergrande crisis and how China is interacting with the Taliban and the riots in Hong Kong. But today I think we're going to go with sort of a less of a political angle, and we're gonna talk about Chinese as a language, which is also really fascinated with me for a long, long, long time. And so today, first I wanna introduce our guest, Jacob Truman. Jacob is a former missionary with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He served in Canada in a fairly heavy Chinese-speaking area, and we're gonna talk to him about his experiences in Mandarin. So both of us do not look like we speak Mandarin, but at the end, we're hoping to prove that we actually know what we're talking about. So Jacob, do you wanna give yourself a little bit of an introduction, say anything that I missed? Yeah, yeah. My name's Jacob Truman. I was born in Utah, and I finally live here now, and I'm here studying for school. And I just wanna first say that what I say in my opinion doesn't reflect any of at all the views of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I'm just a member of the Church, and I don't have any say or anything what they believe. This is just my personal opinion. So take everything I say with a grain of salt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, don't worry. We're not really here to talk about theology too much because the big thing that I'm really interested in is the, I believe it's called the MTC program, the Missionary Training Center, where from my understanding, you get something to the effect of nine, is it like nine weeks of language training and then they just throw you onto a plane? Yeah, pretty much. So yeah, we spent nine weeks in a pretty intensive language learning environment. We'd be in class for six hours a day, and then we have like an hour of language day where we'd be able to learn it by ourselves. And then, yeah, after nine weeks of training, they sent us off to Canada. And then we were, so I was specifically in British Columbia, as I was in Vancouver for most of my time. And in a suburb of Vancouver called Richmond. And there's a, in Richmond, there is about like 52% are from China of the population there in Richmond. So it's a really high population. So we got to use it all the time. And as missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ were always put in pairs. And so for my first like three months, I was paired with a native speaker. So someone from Taiwan for about three months, then someone from Hong Kong for about a month and a half. And then from that point on, it was, I was just by myself with another white guy and we were just speaking Chinese in Canada. Yeah. You know, I gotta say, I did a lot of reading into the intensive programs that they put you through. And I remember thinking to myself, no matter how intensive what they're going to be putting you through, nine weeks is still nine weeks, right? And subjectively, like I know for sure that if I had to like start over from like some language that I don't speak, for example, Korean, I cannot imagine being anything, anything even resembling competent or useful or barely even comprehensible, much less trying to tell somebody about a church. Did you ever have that kind of feeling of like, you know, I am useless here? Yes, definitely. So the first, I'd say the first four. So the whole focus of the MTC and that focus of nine weeks is to be able to create in the language and to be able to make basic sentences and to teach basic principles about our church. That was the whole entire focus. I didn't know how to meet someone, how to say a prayer, how to share your testimony about a principle and maybe share a scripture, maybe. And that was kind of their goal is basically give you the bare bones, the bare necessities and help you to be able to just understand the basics of the language like Hingin, like how to pronounce it tones, just the bare basics. They didn't even touch characters, didn't even worry about that. Just focus on speaking and creating the language. And then when we got there at first, my first four and a half months when I was with that native speaker, I was kind of a supporting role because I was just kind of do my best to share and he would like, we would practice a lot right before. For example, if we were about to teach someone about the nature of God, we would practice it like three times before we'd go into that lesson and share that with someone. And so he kind of prepped me for it. So I have some family members that are in the Church of Jesus Christ, a lot of their saints. I have some family friends. My aunt served in Chile and my friend's family, I know he has a sister that served in Los Angeles and they did Spanish. And so I'm sure that there's like, people get Spanish, people get maybe Portuguese or something. What was your reaction to getting that letter in the mail that said like, hey, you're gonna be learning Mandarin but you probably didn't really have any experience with it at all beforehand. Yeah, I was a little surprised. I was like, why Canada of all the places, you know? Why Chinese of all languages? Right? I honestly had no idea. I took a little bit in high school but I literally learned nothing in that class. I just kind of knew how and where are you from, the basics, the two basic phrases, all I knew. And then I went in basically blind and I had no idea what was gonna happen. And I was just shocked, but I was super excited. I really wanted to learn a language and I couldn't have asked for a better one, so. Yeah. No, subjectively, I think that facing Mandarin in particular is such a uniquely awesome challenge because I just imagining myself if I was going through the missionary program and I understand like the two years is not really necessarily supposed to be about you. It's supposed to sort of be about furthering the work of the church. But at the same time, I gotta admit, if I got the letter saying that you're gonna be picking up Urdu or something that you're extremely unlikely to use within the domestic United States, I gotta say I'd probably be a little disappointed. So I think you probably feel like you made it out pretty good, don't you? Oh yeah, definitely. I feel I lucked out. I've got the best of the deal I could, I think. Yeah. So I wanna talk to you a little bit about Mandarin as a language design. What are some of the things that you think make Mandarin uniquely challenging? And what are maybe some of the things that people think are really hard that you think maybe actually aren't as difficult as they might seem? Yeah, I think definitely the hardest part right out of the gate is characters. Is that that's a whole aspect of the language that is, it seems like an insurmountable feat. Like the idea that a word is a character and that there's as many characters as a word. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so I think that's definitely the hardest part and definitely writing, writing out those characters because there's like a stroke word, how you write them, I would say that would be the hardest part. But I think one of the things that kind of scares people that actually is actually really nice is the grammar and the pronunciation. The grammar is very simple and the pronunciation, it really just dumps down English and it's just really simple pronunciation. Like in English, if you make thousands and thousands of different sounds in combination with Chinese, but Chinese, they're very limited. And so you only have to learn like one or two new... I actually know the exact number. Do you know how many there are? Like in terms of syllables ending a given opinion pronunciation? It's like 16. 16, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So that would, so like Nong, O-N-G, maybe that would be one, but you can also have Tong. So Nong and Tong would be one common pronunciation. And then another would be like cha or ba with the A ending. That's another one. And so there's only 16 of these, right? And so it's insane to me how much information people are able to fit with seemingly a quite limited pronunciation system. Yeah, yeah. That's why I have characters. There's so many homophones. Oh my gosh. Yeah. In fact, one of the things that I think is most interesting about Chinese is very often you will have characters that share the same pronunciation. In fact, there's a really famous poem. I encourage everybody to look it up. It's something to the effect of a lion eating poet or something like that, right? You know what I'm talking about, I can tell. But the premise of this poem is it tells a story about a poet and some lions. But if you had somebody read the... It's a comprehensible poem. But if you had somebody read it out loud, it would just be something like, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. It would sound completely nonsensical. So I think that's one of the big challenges people have is sort of making that mental acceptance of like, okay, sometimes things will have the same pronunciation and I'm gonna just have to remember it. There's really no other way around it. Yeah, definitely. So one of the things that I wanted to bring up is one of the things that I think doesn't get talked about enough is Chinese doesn't... It's true that there are some things that Chinese doesn't make easier for you, right? So if, for example, if I'm speaking, if I'm a native Spanish speaker and I'm trying to learn the word president, I already have presidente, right? So I can probably tie these over pretty quickly, right? Chinese does not do that work for you, okay? Chinese, you gotta know it's on poem and you can't even guess how that's spelled or how that's written, right? It's either you know it or you don't. And I think that does provide unique challenge in the sphere of Mandarin. But there are uniquely things about Chinese that actually I think speed up the learning process and make it even easier. Do you wanna talk about some of the ways that Chinese is in some respects easier than English? Cause I have definitely a lot of opinions on that but I want you to go first. What are some ways that Chinese is easier than English? Yeah, definitely. I think kind of like we mentioned earlier the pronunciation just because it's so straightforward and so simple and that the grammar pattern, really the basic grammar pattern is our grammar pattern in English. And so right now I work as at the MTC program and so I teach missionaries Chinese and I when I'm teaching them they're trying to help them understand the grammar I'm like just imagine you're a caveman and you're talking caveman speak, you don't need your does, you don't need your twos, you don't need tenses, you don't need, you know it's really just really simple grammar and sometimes it's hard for them cause they wanna add like, how do you say like the in Chinese? And you're like, well it doesn't really exist. And they're like, what? So it sounds wrong in their head when they're translating it but in all reality in Mandarin it's completely correct. Yeah, so I joke with people that basic Mandarin is, so when you have for Mandarin that's when you try to use like find out the translation for like a, so an indefinite article, right? Basic Mandarin is when you're trying to figure out what the indefinite article is for a and then intermediate Mandarin is when you find out that that word doesn't exist, okay? And you just say, Pingguo. Extremely high level Mandarin is when you say nega, nega, nega, nega, nega and you like, you use the measure word for everything. So you could say, Laige, Pingguo or Laige, Laibejiu. So you actually do have these things but if you were literally to translate them instead of saying I want a apple you would actually sound like I want one apple. And I think I want one apple is very, very strange for expressing ourselves in English, right? Because it's not that it's intrinsically weird. It's just we've never said to like a family member or something, I want one apple unless it's like maybe at a grocery store or something but we don't just say one to use instead of up. When we could, it's just the fact that we don't makes the change very strange to us. And then I think one other thing that makes it a lot easier is that in many ways Chinese is more internally integrated than English. So for example, do you know the word for schizophrenia in Chinese? I don't, but I can imagine it makes sense. Yes, it does. So it's Jing Shen, Fen Lie, Zheng. So Jing Shen, I'm sure you know, it means like your body's energy or your mental energy in life. And then Fen Lie is like to separate something, right? And then Zheng is with the, I forget the name of the radical but there's a little part on the outside of it that indicates that this is a type of disease. It's the same one, it's the same outside that has on being. So I think when I first saw that in a TV show Jing Shen, Fen Lie, Zheng, I was, I immediately got it. Like I immediately was able to say like, okay, got it, that's the word, that's the word for schizophrenia, right? But then I noticed if I would ever ask my Chinese friends, hey, do you know the English word for Jing Shen, Fen Lie, Zheng? And they would think about it and they'd say no and I'd say it's schizophrenia. And then we talk a little bit more for about a minute and I said, hey, remember that word? I just taught you, you remember what it was? 100% of the time they forgot. Yeah, so I do think that there are some ways that Chinese actually does make speaking for you quite a lot easier if nothing else because they internally integrate things really, really, really well. So I highly encourage people if you've ever thought about making the climb for the Great Wall of Chinese, do it. So I wanna ask one more question about the language itself and then we'll go into a little bit maybe about funny stories about kind of learning that you did. You said at the very start of this that the hardest part of it is sort of staring down the fact that you're gonna have to learn literally thousands of characters, right? There's really no way around this. And how did you make that happen because for me, when I was living in China it was actually significantly easier than I would think it is because literally I couldn't look anywhere and not see Chinese, right? There was literally writing in my own room, right? So I couldn't help but learn it and get a pretty quick use to the patterns. And then before long, I was able to sort of say like, hey, I've never seen this character before but I recognize this part and this part. So I was able to like combine them really, really efficiently just because I had had that much exposure. So how did you make that climb for picking up thousands of characters without living in China? That's a really good question. Honestly, it was a process, definitely. I think it started off with... I spent most of my, a good chunk of my time serving in a congregation where there were mostly like college students. A lot of like exchange students where they're from China or from Taiwan or from Hong Kong, we did a lot of texting. And so that helped a lot. Like texting, I would type out something weird and they would like correct me. That helped out a ton. And then I got to a point, I tried it like six months after learning. I was like, okay, I'm just gonna try it. I turned my phone into Chinese and it was so hard. It was like, I couldn't do anything on my phone. I had no idea what anything meant. Pleco, Pleco is a Chinese dictionary app. That was my best friend all the time. And then I, but I just stuck it out and I just kept trying and just kept leaving it there and leaving my phone in Chinese. And that helped. I'd spend every day reading in characters. I'd read the scriptures, I'd read the Book of Mormon in Chinese. I'd try to and I'd have the peenie right next to it and also the English and then my dictionary. And honestly, the best way that I learned how to learn characters was really just through texting. Texting with native speakers. That was probably the best way that I learned the characters. Yeah, I think the, I'm very much in kind of like all of the above kind of person when that sort of leads me into my next question, which is basically what sort of mindset do you think needs to be adopted for successful language learners? Because I think in, especially in modern society, we really get inundated by a lot of language programs that say learn this spicy language or any language really in three months. You know, you will buy this program and then you'll be good to go in 90 days. I think that modern society really has an affiliate, maybe an affixation I think on these concepts of like sort of easy fixes. And I think that these sort of mindsets is why every year we feel like we hear about somebody who said a New Year's resolution to learn Spanish or whatever. And you know, by the time of February, it rolls around it completely withers away. So what do you think are some of the mindset differences that need to be adopted for successful language acquisition, especially if something as hard as Chinese? Definitely, I think you have to clearly identify the why that you're learning the language. I think that is probably super important. Are you doing it just for fun or are you doing it for maybe better career opportunities? I feel like that's really important. For me, my why was kind of chosen for me because I was to be a missionary to explain more about our church in the Chinese language. And so that one was a pretty easy box check for me. But then also important to recognize too, it's really humbling to learn a language because you have to be willing to make mistakes and to ask for help. You have to be willing to humble yourself and to say, I don't know how to say this, I need help. I don't understand what you're saying. Can you please explain it? And I think that that is probably one of the most important steps to language learning, being willing to humble yourself and ask for help and to be willing to recognize that you are going to make mistakes when you speak and not let those embarrass and stop you. Yeah, that's really, really important to have that sort of sense of humility. I think a lot of people, you talked about the why of why you're doing it, right? I think to be honest with you, when it comes to language learning in the modern day, a lot of people kind of just do it because they want to feel smart or they want to have sort of just something to add to their resume, but they're not necessarily like dedicated to becoming somebody that literally uses this language for the continuation of the rest of their life, right? Like, I tell people, for me, right? If I stopped watching Chinese dramas on Netflix, if I stopped reading the books that I have, I even have the Bible in Chinese that I've been very much like to, but I'm not even a religious person. And doing those things in perpetuity of the rest of your life, only under those kinds of mindset conditions, I think will you be successful as a language learner, to be honest with you? I think anything less isn't really going to cut it. Definitely, it needs a little commitment, like almost a lifelong commitment to continue it. Yeah, lifelong commitment, maybe not even to necessarily learning because I do think you can reach a level high enough where like it's now not particularly practical to learn new words, but just a continuous usage, right? You want to think of like every word as continuously degrading in your mind and every time that you happen to say the word, it's like the words freshness in your mind is once again, they're renewed. And I think that itself is really, really valuable. So the next thing we're going to go into is funny stories. All right, I remember I asked you earlier if you had like some kind of a story when it comes to Mandarin of maybe a failure, maybe something that happened to you that you thought was really funny, maybe even a success story, maybe something that made you feel really proud. Do you have anything that you want to share with your audience? I think I remember, I thought there's a lot of different things I can think of. I remember, there's too many to think of, there's too many embarrassing moments. But I think one, I think my favorite thing was seeing the people's reactions sometimes. Like it was pretty funny one time we were on, so in the Richmond, there's this public transit system, it's called the SkyTrain, it's kind of like a subway, but it's like on a bridge. And we would go on there a lot just to meet people. And I was talking with one person in Mandarin and we were having a normal conversation. And after our conversation ended, I overheard his Taiwanese youth, because they apparently hadn't heard us talking. Like, oh, they're saying, oh, those are missionaries. They speak Chinese, they're like super weird, they're like talking trash about us. And then they got off at the next stop and as they were walking off, because they were talking to each other at the same time, I said, you know, Tai Chi, and I was like, see, goodbye, Chinese, you know, like, and then the gate closed and I was whisked away to the next stop. It was just lots, just fun things like that. We were, yeah, just things like that. But I think, I think I had, I definitely had embarrassing moments. I think I blocked them out of my brain, in all honesty. Yeah, that's probably a good idea. Because definitely it's difficult for me to remember being the kind of person that doesn't speak Mandarin. But I will tell you one particularly funny story. So it was at a massage parlor. I don't know if you know this or not, but in China, people are really, really big on massages and I've always had like muscle pain in my life. So it was really cool being able to go to a place for like, you know, $20 when in Hawaii I might pay like 90 for an hour massage or something like that. So I would go very often once a week plus. And I found also it was really good opportunity to practice my Chinese. And one of the things that the ladies would always want to know is if I had a girlfriend. Every time, I think it's just something that happens when you're like a young man in your 20s. Like every older woman around you wants to know if you have a girlfriend or something like that. And so the masseuse ladies would always ask me if I had a girlfriend, if I was interested in getting married in China. And I remember saying in Chinese, let me see if I can remember exactly what it was. Now there's two words for it. Jacob's gonna understand this joke a lot faster than most people will I think, but there's two words. And I was meaning to say, if I get married in China there will probably be two weddings. That was what I was thinking I was gonna say. If I was getting married in China there would be two weddings. One in America and one in China. So I said to the masseuse lady, if I get married in China, there will probably be two weddings. Two weddings. Now the two words are wedding and wedding. And the thing is wedding is the word for wedding. I did not say the word for wedding. I said wedding which is the word for divorce. So I said, if I get married in China, there will probably be two divorces. That was, oh God, that was, oh my gosh, I was just horrified when I found out what I had said. Oh man, they just switch up, they just switch like all the time and they have different meanings and it's like. Yeah, well, the key there right is you have to, you have to be live calculating if what you're saying makes sense. And the way that I sort of never forgot that again is Lee who like the Lee character, like Lee Kai Lee is actually, it means like to separate or to leave something, right? And so once I kind of saw that and never made that mistake again, but I think even if it didn't have that, I was just so embarrassed that it, oh my gosh, I don't wanna think about that. Okay, so we should speak a little better and before we get going, can you get it, how's it going? Okay, no problem. Do you think that anyone can be a good translator? I think the most important part is that they have a willing heart, willing to do it. If they don't have the desire, it's hard to do it because it takes two years to do it. And there's no way to do it. It's something that you've thought about before. Yeah, I agree. If you don't have that desire, you don't have that obsession, then I think you have to learn Chinese. Chinese is probably the most difficult language to learn. But I think as long as you still, you still have to learn this language, you have to learn it well. Then I feel like one day you have to talk about it just like us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I also think, as far as I know, as a American, it's very likely to learn Chinese. It's very likely to waste time because in some parts of the United States, Chinese are rarely seen, right? And what city do you live in? I don't know. What city do you live in? But I live in Hawaii, most of my people are Japanese. Yeah, if you're in California or New York, you might meet a lot of Chinese people. For example, I'm a teacher in the village now, right? I have a lot of teachers in the village. They all go to Los Angeles, New York, and the entire city of California. And there are some in Maryland and in many different places, there may be some Chinese groups. Where are they? I'm going to stop you right there because we don't want to go too long on that. But yeah, very, very, very nice. Sometimes I got to do that too. I'm like, God, how do I say Maryland? I know, right? Yeah, yeah. I only remember my own state, California, and New York. That's it. Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, well, we're right about out of time. Is there anything that you kind of want to leave the audience with about something that you sort of want to say about your church or anything, maybe like any kind of product that you want to broadcast or anything like that? Yeah, you know, if any of you are interested in, I love just chatting with people and getting to know people. If any of you are interested to learn more about church or how I learned Mandarin, feel free to reach out to me or any of your any missionaries in your local area. They have, it's the Church of Jesus Christ, the letter of the saints. They're probably wearing a black name tag. They're in pairs. They would love to chat with you They would love to chat with you. These are the most friendly people on earth. All right, yeah, definitely. And then, you know, people have got your Facebook. I'm sure you don't mind if they reach out to you on a message. You shouldn't be that hard to find. But yeah, I think your Chinese is definitely really, really good. And I can tell that you put in a lot of time for it. And I know that, you know, although we have, you and I had really different reasons for studying Chinese, right? I think what I see in you is something that I see in a couple foreigners, actually in China, you and I are that many, which is a genuine passion for thinking critically about the language and thinking about what kind of person can become someone that's fluent in Mandarin. And that is something that I really, really admire. So thank you very much, Jacob, for coming on. Thank you very much for everyone's for tuning in. We're very, very happy to talk a little bit about this great wall of Chinese as a language. And we really, really hope that we can have more people on to talk about why we love this language so much and why we think you can do it too. Mahalo everybody.