Paul Breen: Why now’s a good time for learning a language

But you don’t have to be a student in that sense to learn a language.

And with autumn knocking on the door, and then winter just around the corner, maybe now’s as good a time as any to start.

It’s surprising though how we sometimes get the inspiration to start learning a language.

When I was at school I was more interested in subjects such as English Literature and History than in French (or even Irish).

But when I left school and went off teaching overseas, I grew more interested in being able to communicate with people in their own language.

As I travelled the world while teaching, I picked up snatches of Japanese and Korean through work and held a brief, fleeting fascination with the learning of Italian because I was mad about a girl from Rome.

In more recent times, I’ve developed an interest in Chinese. And not because of any youthful crush, but just for the love of learning itself.

The way that this journey began though was quite an unusual one.

It started with a trip out there in the summer of 2018. That was a combination of work and holiday, in the city of Suzhou (which I’ve mentioned before, as the place with an animal shelter I helped at).

However, that first summer in Suzhou, I didn’t know about the animal shelter, or the volunteers, and I didn’t really know the language either.

Of course, I’d no real need to speak or know very much Chinese.

With even street signs, shopfronts and menus in English, the phrase book could go back in the suitcase.

English served as a shared language, even though many of the native Chinese self-admittedly speak what’s known as ‘Chinglish’, a colloquial combination of the two languages.

Then one afternoon, I decided to walk the more ramshackle backstreets of the city. Here, traces of English evaporated into a scrabble of indecipherable Mandarin.

Then amidst my travels, I made an unexpected discovery. Purely by accident, I found the spark for learning Chinese.

That spark came in a very unlikely form. As I wandered the backstreets, I arrived at a sushi shop, guarded by a black and white dog that looked to be some variation of an English cocker spaniel.

Strikingly too, it was almost the double of my sister’s dog, named Molly, back in Ireland.

Being fond of taking photographs, I had to click a picture of this dog I named ‘the Chinese Molly’.

Unfortunately, there was one major problem. I couldn’t speak the language. I couldn’t explain to the shop owners why a random foreigner would want to take a photo of their very ordinary dog.

Fortunately, the language of photographs is a universal one. I showed them a picture of the Irish Molly.

Not even knowing the word for sister, I mustered a white lie in a single word: ‘Māmā’.

The owners laughed, liking the sentiment of a tourist taking pictures of an Irish dog’s Chinese twin.

But when the picture was taken and the meeting over, I felt a sense of sadness that I hadn’t been able to use even basic phrases.

Out of that strange event, I decided that next time I went to China, I would be able to say some straightforward sentences.

At the very least I had ambitions to master the simple translation of “my sister’s dog”.

Thus began my quest to learn the Mandarin version of Chinese, since that’s the variation spoken in Suzhou.

Further south, in Hong Kong and some places nearby, they speak another variation, Cantonese.

That autumn I enrolled in a Mandarin Chinese class at The University of Westminster where I used to work.

The teacher was a really dynamic Chinese woman who found my story very funny, and soon I brought myself up to a level of holding basic conversations.

However, one area that I was never great in was putting together collocations and possessive phrases.

Nobody ever seemed able to work out whether I was talking about my sister’s dog, or my dog’s sister, for example.

Still, I could at least say who I was and where I was from, and perhaps more importantly, order food and drink in Chinese.

Unfortunately, and quite ironically, Covid-19 interrupted my Chinese language learning journey but this whole experience has taught me another very valuable lesson.

The bigger picture here too is that we all share a common language of humanity if we try hard enough – whether we are Chinese, Taiwanese, Irish, British, Russian or American.

Two dogs of a similar look, on opposite sides of the world, inspired me to learn a language.

This autumn, I’m hoping to have another crack at it. Already I’ve downloaded the Duolingo app which is really good for building vocabulary and then maybe I’ll go back to the phrase books as well.

It’s not an easy thing to learn a language, and many people start but never quite get around to finishing.

According to Google Scholar, the two most common reasons for sticking with language learning are unsurprisingly romance and work. But everyone has their own distinct motivation.

For me, the love affair with a new language began through a chance encounter in Suzhou’s backstreets, needing to request permission for a photograph.

Although I never found that sushi shop again on any of my subsequent travels, the Chinese Molly lives on in my memory.

So too does ‘the Irish Molly’, although she passed away a couple of years ago now, leaving a notable gap on the sidelines of Brookeborough Heber McMahon’s GAA pitch.

She used to go down to the ground when games were on, and was such a regular that she once appeared in the Facebook ‘Hashing with the Hebers’ series (in English, not Irish or Chinese).

And maybe, when I’ve finished studying the language of the Chinese Molly, I’ll go back to the Irish I learned in my schooldays.

Paul Breen is @paulbreenauthor on X.