Language Barrier: Learning the Body, From Tǒu to Jiǎo

I am aware that Pepper isn't a fully-developed person.

Meet Pepper! She teaches me Chinese words for the body. She is my new friend, even though she doesn’t say much.

Chinese pronunciation requires two elements, the sound combination of the letters and the proper tone. One word can have four different tones. Change the tone, change the meaning. With one slip of the tongue, lotus becomes puke, which changes the “tone” of your conversation a bit.

Pepper is helpful, but I was learning words based on their relationships with each other. Head is tǒu, so hair is tǒu fà, so then eyebrow is méi máo, and then mouth is zuí, and so on. If I start at the top of the body, it takes a loooong time to get to foot, or jiǎo. Learning words independently of each other is key for their usefulness. I must know jiǎo as quickly as I know tǒu.

Also, because Pepper doesn’t speak, it’s up to me to master my tones. Those tones add a complicated layer to learning.

What to do? How to learn? Good old-fashioned repetition. When I teach my students, we practice the same nine words over and over and over during the class. We yell them. We spell them. We dance a jig with them. We play games with them. We yell them again. To learn my Chinese, I follow the same method, only I don’t yell (I use my inside voice), and I don't jig. I write each word ten times, with the tone. I speak it ten times with the tone. I then write the English equivalent while speaking the Chinese version with the tone. Try speaking one language while writing in another at the same time! This brain-bender makes my mind work really hard to forge the connections into my neurons.

I move onto the next word, repeating the steps. The process looks like this:

Looks just like those third-grade spelling lists, doesn't it?

Finally, I quiz myself. I quiz myself again. I test myself again the next day. It’s tedious, but it works. Just ask me a word or two from Pepper's body!