By Eric Brand

I received a comment on my last blog requesting advice on how to efficiently approach the study of Chinese language, particularly with regard to Chinese medicine.

First, I think it is important to decide the degree to which you wish to use the Chinese language. Spoken and written Chinese can be acquired independently, and many people are able to either only speak or only read. If one can both speak and read, it opens up more doors because it allows for verbal communication with teachers and better opportunities in the East. The challenging questions you have while reading and studying can be clarified by asking an expert, and generally those who speak well have more opportunities to become integrated in Chinese society. If I didn't speak Chinese, I never would have been able to develop such deep relationships with my teachers and would never have gotten so involved with Chinese conferences and TCM politics and organizations. Learning to speak was a good decision for my lifestyle.

Follow up:

While I feel that speaking is generally invaluable, speaking alone is a bit limited if one cannot read. If one cannot read, one cannot access the literature. Thus, one's potential to study, read notes and charts, read classic and modern texts, etc is hampered. Reading is the most important skill for accessing information, and if you move home to somewhere with few Chinese speakers, you can still immerse yourself in a library of books and journals.

Many people choose to only learn to read Chinese, and never learn to speak it. In fact, many of the most prominent authors in the West only read, and do not speak. 100 years ago, it was rare for Western Chinese language scholars to speak Chinese, only reading Chinese was considered to be of academic importance. This has changed a bit because global society is more integrated, and people now travel to China a lot. Furthermore, more people use the same common spoken language (Mandarin) than they did 100 years ago. In Chinese, the written language is the same, but spoken dialects like Mandarin and Cantonese reflect a different pronunciation of the characters.

For someone who primarily wants to read the literature, it is not essential to ever learn to speak Mandarin. By learning to read, one gains access to tremendous amounts of information. Speaking requires its own learning curve, as the pronunciation and tones are difficult at first. If you plan to live abroad, learning to speak is important because it opens tons of doors. But if you don't plan to live in a Chinese-speaking country, one could argue that there is little point in learning to speak. Speaking requires a lot of immersion and practice, and it atrophies if you aren't using it regularly. In a nutshell, I'd say that if you like to travel and really want to become a bridge between Chinese and Western societies, learn to both speak and read. If you want to live in the US but want to gain access to the thousands of books, journals, and classics, focus your time and effort on reading.

Resources

To learn to speak, you need to start with basic university Chinese 101. Keep at it until you feel like you no longer need to go to class (once you have a base, your speaking will improve by just having conversations, and your reading will tend to get more specialized because you will likely focus on reading TCM material). I found it helpful to have intense immersion at the very beginning. Taking first year Chinese at a US university during the condensed summer term is good for this, or an immersion program abroad. You want to get over the difficult first hump quickly. Once the first hump is over, Chinese is not difficult to learn because the grammar is very easy and it starts getting really fun.

For acquiring Chinese medical Chinese, the best place to start is with a good TCM education in English. Use books that apply a consistent and accurate terminology system. Typically, most of these books are done with Nigel Wiseman's terminology, which offers the only comprehensive, integrated, and complete language acquisition and translation solution. All books by Paradigm Publications and Blue Poppy tend to use this system, so the English literature by these publishers directly reflects the reality of the Chinese literature. Use Nigel's Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine to look up English terms so that you understand the authentic Chinese concept.

If you learn TCM from English books that preserve the Chinese concepts, it is a piece of cake to learn Chinese medical Chinese. Essentially you are just matching characters to known concepts in your specialized English TCM vocabulary. Eventually you may choose to translate material yourself with different individual terms than Wiseman uses, but you will learn the language very quickly if you start with Wiseman's system. His approach is extremely well-thought out, thoroughly tested in practice for both ancient and modern literature, and it is extremely comprehensive. Wiseman basically made learning Chinese medical Chinese possible for the rest of us, his works save us all 25 years of brutal initial research. It is one cohesive system that is seamless across hundreds of English publications and linked to the terminology of the WHO and every other term system. If you use this system, it is easy to produce publication quality material that other experts will regard as transparent, academically valid, and faithful to the original source.

To use a system like this, start with the basic books. Wiseman has several great basic language texts. There is a series of five character books for learning some of the most common characters, and these are especially good for basic writing practice. The best two all around books are Wiseman and Feng's Introduction to English Terminology of Chinese Medicine and Chinese Medical Chinese: Grammar and Vocabulary. Mastering the material in these two small books will already give you a high degree of skill with Chinese medical Chinese, and these books have great exercises and layout. All these books can be found here

Beyond this, Bob Flaws has a book on Chinese medical Chinese, and Blue Poppy also offers Wiseman's Practical Dictionary of Chinese Medicine. Paul Unschuld also has a few books on learning Chinese medical Chinese, but in my opinion they are not the best learning books because they are a bit too advanced. Also, Paradigm Publication's Shang Han Lun is useful, because it contains Pinyin and Chinese as well as English, and it uses relatively few Chinese characters so it is a fun place to practice.

Next, make sure that you have free digital resources like Wiseman's incredible term list. You can download this for free by clicking here. We will also put this term list up on the Blue Poppy site so that it can join the other hundreds of free downloads we offer.

Get software like Wenlin to make looking up characters easy. Learning to read is basically a process of using a dictionary and looking up words, the better you get, the less frequently you have to use the dictionary. You will still need to use a dictionary for life, but you will notice that you have to reference it less and less as time goes on.

Now, start with an easy book, something that interests you. Materia medica is a good theme because the language is repetitive and simple, with a high proportion of TCM technical terms. Reading essays and articles is much harder, so don't start with these. After you can get through a book like dietary therapy or materia medica, start reading harder stuff. Before you know it, it will all be pretty easy. Biomedicine or any other specialized terminology has its own learning curve, so start with pure TCM material and work into wider stuff like integrative books gradually.

Now, show off your hard-earned efforts by hanging out with great teachers. They will see your effort and will take you under their wing. They will introduce you to their family of contacts and you will suddenly have a huge community that embraces you. Keep visiting the East frequently, keep making relationships, and the world is your oyster. Your classmates from college will look at your life with amazement because you will have such ridiculous opportunities. You will feel like the one simple decision to learn Chinese suddenly allowed you to have limitless career options anywhere in the world. You'll read endless fascinating stuff and you will be the happiest supernerd that ever lived. Learning Chinese is the path of least resistance, it is super fun, with a great lifestyle, fascinating learning opportunities, and the easiest way to have a stress-free, guaranteed successful career. It will blow your mind and wider your world in ways that you never even dreamed of. Do it and join us in transforming this field!