Good Good Study: PR Professional and Longtime Taobao Aficionado Details the Benefits of Mandarin Fluency
As part of the Beijinger’s daily Mandarin Month series ahead of our June 25 Mandarin Mixer, we are profiling some of the capital's most fluently bilingual laowai. The star of today's installment: Robynne Tindall, a TBJ alumna and current marketing and communications manager at Aman Summer Palace. Below she tells us about the challenges of learning Chinese and how the benefits vastly outweigh those difficulties (especially when it comes to online shopping).
What advice would you give to someone before their first Mandarin class?
Take it seriously. Whether you're a university student or learning Mandarin alongside work, let's be honest: you're not going to get anywhere with a one-hour class once a week. Chinese is a proper undertaking, particularly if you want to learn to read and write as well as speak.
The other advice I would give is to immerse yourself in the language, although if you're in Beijing you're already in the right place for that. I saw the most significant improvement in my Mandarin skills when I joined a company as the only English speaker and found I had to speak Mandarin all day, whether I had the vocabulary or not, much more so than any "conversational Chinese" course I took at university.
What prompted you to buckle down and study seriously?
I suppose since I was studying for a BA in Chinese Studies at university, I was always pretty serious about it (expensive tuition fees will do that for you). However, arriving in Nanjing during my year abroad as part of my degree, and discovering that I could barely read a restaurant menu, made me realize that I still had a long way to go. In our last class before we left the UK our teacher had told us we "weren't ready" and she was right. This was definitely an incentive to buckle down, if only to prevent us from ordering weird offal-related dishes by accident!
What was the biggest challenge of learning Mandarin, and how did you overcome it?
For me it was, and still is, learning the tones. However, over the years I have found that having every tone down to a tee is not as important as it first seems – most of the time people will anticipate what you mean based on context. The whole "I told him to 'eff off' when I was just trying to say 'hello!'" scenario doesn't happen as much as you'd think. Not that you should use that as an excuse not to learn your tones, of course!
Tell us more about how you've used Mandarin in your professional life, and how it enriched your career.
For my current job, I speak Chinese all day, every day. The majority of my colleagues are Chinese, and being in PR, I have to deal with a lot of Chinese media. Although most people do speak English, I often find it helpful to clarify my meaning in Chinese.
What have been the biggest benefits of Mandarin fluency?
It has definitely helped me professionally. Being fluent, I have been able to take on roles that might otherwise have required me to have a Chinese-speaking assistant. And clearly hiring one person instead of two is an attractive prospect for any employer. I also feel that being a Mandarin speaker makes it easier for you to get to know your colleagues and get involved with company culture, and this can be useful in any number of ways – accessing help with a project, getting the scoop on company gossip, eating delicious snacks brought back from colleagues' hometowns, you name it.
On a more personal note, being fluent in Mandarin gives me a tremendous sense of independence living in Beijing. I don't need to rely on friends or colleagues to get things done, whether getting a taxi or fixing the internet.
Finally, Taobao! And online shopping in general. I buy pretty much everything online now and while not impossible, this would certainly be more difficult if I couldn't read characters or deal with kuaidi delivery men.
Interested in improving your Chinese language skills? Meet more than a dozen schools at our June 25 Mandarin Mixer at Home Plate BBQ. Pre-registration for this free event is required; click here to take advantage of free booze and other goodies offered to our first 200 registrants.
In the mean time, keep checking our Mandarin Month page for event updates, study tips and tricks, insider knowledge about Beijing's best language centers, inspiring interviews with foreigners who have mastered Chinese, and more.
This post is brought to you by Pleco, Project Pengyou, and Ninchanese.
Photo courtesy of Robynne Tindall
