Some of you may know that I lived in Taiwan for two years in my early teens, where I studied the equivalent of four years worth of classroom Mandarin Chinese. It’s been a while, so my Chinese is very rusty, but right before we moved back to the states, I was as close to fluent as you’d expect a 13-year-old, fair-skinned American kid could be.
I even attempted to continue my studies upon moving back to America. There was a Chinese language school near where we lived, and I attended weekly for about half a year until life and school took over my free time. I still remember how surreal it felt to be the lone caucasian in a classroom full of younger Asian kids, from traditional Chinese families, who knew less of the language than I did.
One of the hardest things about Chinese is the concept of “tones,” that the word you say isn’t always as important as the inflection you use while saying it. This article that I found via BoingBoing reminded me of how difficult it must seem at first.
The point where I really started to despair was when I found out about the tones. Even if you keep the pinyin letters straight and master the unfamiliar vowels and consonants, you can still be misunderstood unless you speak with the right lilt.
The word ma, for instance, can mean “hemp,” “scold,” “horse,” or “mother,” depending upon whether your voice goes up, goes down, goes up and down, or remains steady. To make matters worse, the marks that signify tones in pinyin ordinarily indicate pronunciation: A flat line, for example, means a flat, high tone, not a long vowel.
It reminds me of how lucky I was to have learned the language at an early age, when I was more impressionable. Not only that, but to have had basically an entire country as language lab. There was virtually no TV in English (save for the occasional Fairy Tale Theater episode in the evening), and only one English-language radio station. I learned through pop culture and the classroom (and still have a moderately large collection of late 80′s Taiwanese pop cassettes to prove it really happened). Immersion, I’ve come to realize, was my best teacher.
…and I still find it funny that you can call someone’s mother a horse if you’re not careful. 
I took a semester of Chinese while in college. I’m very rusty now. I remeber though that “ma” was used at the end of a sentence to indicate a question. So instead of saying (my vocabulary is shot) “Are you a doctor?”, you would say “You are a doctor” and put “ma” on the end.
Ta zhir (can’t remember the spelling for the “to be” verb) daifu ma?”
Or something like that!
In the Romanization method I was taught, it would have been spelled “shr.” But yeah, that’s pretty much it.
As an example of how rusty I am, I had forgotten the word for “doctor.”