Studying Chinese Language and learning the culture -- studying the culture to learn the language

Studying a foreign language is a gateway into a new culture. Thoughts and ideas are expressed, and phrases are structured to directly reflect the culture. Learning the language is the gateway to understanding the people.

Chinese, however, requires more than just the study of the language. Often times proverbs consisting of only 4 or 8 characters (words) entail a great deal of meaning. They are the profound morals of ancient tales. If you were just to hear or read the proverb without knowing the story, you'd be missing meaning. To understand the language and be fluent, you have to study the culture. Now the language is insufficient for communication and studying the culture becomes equally important.

For example if I were to translate one proverb I just studied: Towards oneself spear shield. 自相矛盾。 The meaning is that someone is being a hypocrite or is contradicting themselves. The story behind this phrase is that a salesman was boasting about his spears and shields. He said there's no shield in the world that his spears couldn't penetrate. Naturally his shields were also the strongest in the world and he boasted there were no spears able to penetrate them. When asked what would happen if one of his spears were used against one of his shields, the man had no answer. A foolish and blatant hypocrite, the moral and meaning of the story is summed up in those four character above, literally: self, towards, spear, shield.

This is a relatively simple example of the entanglement of culture and language. Often times only the first 4 characters of an 8 character proverb are written somewhere. If you know the proverb and the culture behind it, this is all you need to grasp the meaning. Take someone like me, however, who is proud to recognize these characters but can't decipher the meaning: People before earlier come. Well it ends up meaning, after you know the rest of the proverb and the culture behind it: "Greater than all who have come before him."

Now Chinese love to quote and reference these proverbs. They've been learning them for years and it's totally common for them to bring them up when talking about business. So if you truly want to master the Chinese language and communicate without hindrance... studying Chinese culture and history is a requirement. As if studying the language itself wasn't a daunting task, now we've all got more work to do. The good news is that the study is quite rewarding.