The is an SBS Radio initiative to encourage and celebrate a love of learning languages in Australia. Visit to enter.
Learning a second language is not an easy task, particularly when it's Chinese. The complexities are vast and you could spend years perfecting the many intricacies.
Professor Nicholas Jose is a novelist and a lecturer of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.
But it was during his own studies at Oxford University that he first gained an interest in learning the Chinese language. This interest would go onto shaping the rest of his career.
“I was a student at Oxford University studying for my PhD and I had a friend who was studying classical Chinese. He said to me, 'in the future if you want to be a citizen of the world, you must know Chinese',” he tells SBS Mandarin.
“I thought it makes sense. So I decided to learn Chinese.”
After gaining his doctorate at Oxford, he taught in the Department of English at the Australian National University from 1978 to 1985.
Despite the joys of learning a new language, he faced several challenges, including remembering the Chinese characters.
“There are so many of them. Even for Chinese people, they may feel difficult.”
He says the key to overcoming the Chinese learning "barrier" is a good teacher and talking to people in a similar position.
Prof Jose was given the opportunity to learn Chinese while in Beijing where he worked and lived from 1986 to 1990.
Diplomat, giant pandas, and big numbers
The language capability also eased his transition into becoming an Australian diplomat.
He was appointed as a cultural counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing.
“The language was very important when I worked as a diplomat,” he says. “Certainly it was very convenient to be able to talk to people in Chinese.”
During his posting, the Australian Embassy had limited resources; only the ambassador had an interpreter. Prof Jose recalls that attending meetings by himself posed challenges.
“I had to do it in Chinese. Sometimes that was hard and sometimes I made mistakes.”
Prof Jose recalls that when he dealt with negotiations with China in regard to loaning giant pandas as a gift to Australia during Bicentennial celebrations, he encountered problems in understanding the numbers in Chinese.
“There were so many complicated numbers in that negotiation to do with money, to do with how much food the panda will need, to do with how big the space for them on the plane,” he says.
“Numbers in Chinese can be very difficult. Because the units are different, the commas are in different places for thousands and millions.
“It’s very easy to make mistakes.”
The Chinese language has two units which do not exist in English. The first one is “wan”, which means ten thousand.
Old Taronga Zoo Photo August 1988 - Giant Pandas They were a temporary gift from China to celebrate Australia's Bicentennial Source: Taronga Zoo
The second is a hundred million that is pronounced as “yi”. The numbers between 10,000 (wan) and 100,000,000 (yi) in Chinese are based on how many tens of thousands they have.
Learn the language with its culture
Despite more than 1.2 million Australians declaring Chinese ancestry, according to the 2016 Census, and also being Australia's largest trading partner, very few young people are choosing to study the language.
In 2019, only 380 non-Chinese background students nationally were studying Chinese through high school, according to the Australia-China Relations Institute.
Professor Jose recommends that when teaching the language, it’s important to tell the culture and history also.
“The language can’t be taught simply by itself.”
When studying Chinese in Beijing with a man who was an interpreter for Chinese politicians, Professor Jose learned many stories of “chengyu”, a four-character idiomatic expression that is derived from ancient literature and history.
“For example, there’s a common saying ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’. It depends a lot on whether that means exactly one hundred no more or means any number.”
Apart from his interest in culture and history, Professor Jose also emphasises the patience of language learning.
“You just have to have time and be patient. You learn a little bit and you keep trying, you can get there,” he says.
“For me, it has been very rewarding to study Chinese. Not just for the day to day work, but the philosophy and the fascinating Chinese thoughts.”
The SBS National Languages Competition 2019 is an SBS Radio initiative to encourage and celebrate a love of learning languages in Australia. This year we encourage Australians of all ages who are learning a language, including those learning English and AUSLAN to participate by sending us a drawing or writing that shows us ‘How does learning a language make a world of difference?’.
