I have to tutor English in an hour to eight students, before then I still need to get dinner.  Since I finished my regular classes this afternoon I’ve done little more than buy more minutes for my phone, clean my apartment, buy bananas, and watch a pirated movie.  I am more than a little frustrated with myself for not spending more time studying Chinese.  The excuses come my mind easily but I know deep down I need to be doing more.  While it is true that living in China automatically improves your Chinese, I have certainly noticed this in the time I’ve been here, how much it improves depends on one’s resolve.  One of my most important goals that I gave myself for this year in China was to bring my Chinese up to a new level.  I was reminded of how important this is to a foreigner trying to make a life in China while reading the wonderful Chinese history blog: Jottings from the Granite Studio.  One entry, Thoughts on learning Chinese, struck me as the perfect way to explain the need to study Chinese:

Fifty years ago, Fairbanks and his students moved the field of Chinese history forward with their insistence on fluency in Classical Chinese a prerequisite of study. His students and their students also demanded a fluency of a sort in modern Chinese sufficient to read and decipher the occasional Chinese journal article or monograph. It was IUP Chinese. Great for discussing 封建社会制度 (Feudal society) but not so much for buying toothpaste or hanging out after hours with your Chinese colleagues. Fluency in the spoken language, for the Western historian, was a parlor trick—useful for presentations but to aspire to native fluency was a low priority and some even considered such a devotion to pure language study a waste of time.

Now I can’t imagine a member of my generation of China researchers, whatever the field, who does not aspire to near native fluency in spoken and written Chinese. No longer a luxury, it is a necessity and the number of foreigners whose Chinese is near native level has increased exponentially in the past few years. It’s not just Da Shan (a famous Canadian on Chinese TV who has perfect Mandarin) anymore. A whole new generation of young China hands has realized that it’s not enough to simply jump off the plane in China and exclaim, “I come from the West. Behold me.” In this century, China and Chinese are starting to request that we, the Westerners, deal with them on their own terms and those terms are frequently written in hanzi. Whether in business or academia, the Westerner who proclaims his relative ignorance of the language as irrelevant to his endeavors is increasingly an anachronism.