It’s a story so common it’s practically a trope: a student comes to a liberal arts college and takes some unfamiliar class on a whim, only to discover that they have a passion and talent for it. This is very much a real phenomenon; I know many people who have radically changed their primary subjects of study, often spurred by a single exceptional class or professor.
When I came to college, I was fairly certain that I was going to be a double major in math and music; those predictions have, years later, come true. However, my first semester, I had a large open block in my schedule once I had planned my required math courses and an interesting first-year seminar. And so, I looked down the course registry, and something caught my eye. I thought about that notorious trope. This class could be interesting, I thought. It’s something I’ve always wanted to learn, but was never offered in my high school. Maybe, I’ll be a secret genius, or at least discover I have some aptitude for it. So I registered.
That subject was first-year Mandarin. And I was not a secret genius. Very far from it, in fact.
Chinese 001, Introduction to Mandarin, is offered every fall, and 002 is offered every spring; the two courses are designed to be taken over the course of a full academic year (though placement into 002 is possible). Many students (i.e. everyone in my lecture section except me) have some degree of prior knowledge of the language, but it is designed to be accessible to complete beginners. The class meets every day; M-W-F are drill sections, where one practices, and T-Th are lectures, where one learns new content. Drill and lecture are registered for independently from one another, meaning you will have been a part of four separate classes by the end of the year; you will know most people taking first-year Mandarin well, and will have struggled to talk to them many times over about favorite foods and directions to train stations. These classes are not large. In my first semester, my drill had exactly three people in it every day: the professor, a senior, named Hannah, and me.
I had no Chinese name; one of the first things the professors did was give me one. I was, for an hour a day, not Spencer, but 書彬 (Shūbīn). The first few classes were dedicated primarily to learning how to properly pronounce words in a tonal language. This was the basis of everything that would come after, so it was crucial that we knew what we were doing (to this day, I still get occasional compliments on my pronunciation, even if I cannot remember the word for soup). Then came the words, the characters, the writing system, the grammar, and everything else. And so, the challenge began.
Chinese remains the most challenging class I have taken at Swarthmore. Other things have been difficult, other things have been complex, other things have taken time, but nothing has demanded I reshape the workings of my brain in quite the same way. While others seemed to be able to recall every single character, I struggled to remember how to write my own name for a week. While others could combine grammatical structures in ingenious ways, I kept on accidentally saying that I wanted to eat French people instead of French food because I could not disentangle the sentence in my mind. While others could join words of all different tones together in long, fluid strings, I had to (for the first little bit at least) physically conduct out the directions of the tones–high, rising, scooping, and falling–with my finger as I said them to ensure I did not blur them together.
It was exhilarating. In terms of the sheer volume of things I learned, and the change in competency and capability from the first class to the last, Mandarin is (and probably always will be) the undisputed champion. Near the end of the first semester, they had all of us give interviews to graduate students in education from Hong Kong. No scripts, no recordings, simply writing down everything live. This was a terrifying proposition; I felt like I could barely keep up a conversation, and now had to participate in a dialogue with someone I didn’t know. And yet (with the help of a crash course the day before on various critical phrases such as “could you please repeat that,” “I don’t know that word,” “could you please talk slower”), I managed to do it. I, in a language I first spoke four months ago, had managed to talk to someone for almost twenty minutes about their life. She had a turtle named 小鬼 (xiǎoguǐ, translating to “little demon”). I was kind of shocked as I left the interview that I had managed to keep it together the whole time.
The class never got easier for me; I was consistently the last person in the room to master concepts. Every new sentence structure was a mountain to climb, every new character a challenge to memorize. Near the end of the second semester, we had to write a ~600 word essay. Even writing something that short, fewer words even than this post, was Herculean. And with great effort comes great payoff, and I managed to write my little essay about my favorite restaurant in Swarthmore. I was darn proud of it.
Take classes on whims. Force yourself to readjust your brain. It is rewarding like nothing else. You may be bad at it, and you may stay bad at it; I certainly did. But the thrill of exploring new territory and the satisfaction when you see how far up the mountain you have climbed will be well worth it.