Learning Chinese in Beijing

Learning Chinese here — at least the first baby steps — has turned out be easier than expected. I’d expected to hire tutors. A Berkeley grad student I know who had lived near where I live now had done that. I found ads offering tutoring on a craigslist-like site. I started with the cheapest ($10/hour — which is a lot in Beijing). After an hour, I cut short the first lesson. It had been excruciating. “X means this. Y means that.” In my tutor’s defense, we didn’t yet have a textbook to work from but paying $10/hour for a textbook reader seemed pricey. By then, two people — a Tsinghua student I’d met in a dining hall and the girl who sold me my cell phone — had offered me free Chinese lessons.

“Why should I pay you if others will teach me for free?” I asked my tutor.

“Why did I spend four years in college learning how to teach Chinese to foreigners?” she replied. (That was her major.)

That wasn’t persuasive, I said.

She said she had a Mandarin accent but others might not.

“To speak with everyone I should learn from everyone,” I said. This is an attractive feature of Beijing: It’s much more a melting pot than other Chinese cities, such as Shanghai.

By now I’ve had several lessons from three different people who offered to teach me for free. It felt like fun, not work. They volunteered to teach me because they would learn English at the same time. Most Tsinghua students want to go graduate school in America, where they can expect to do very well — Dark Matter notwithstanding — so long as their English is adequate. I may be at the exact place on earth — the Tsinghua campus — where English-speaking ability is valued most highly. It might be a special time, too: As the Chinese educational system improves its teaching of English, I expect the value will go down. If I were in Sweden, no one would volunteer to teach me Swedish.

The difference between my paid and unpaid teachers reminds me of a famous psychology experiment on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation done by Mark Lepper and colleagues at Stanford and published in 1973. They took two groups of kids and put them in a room full of toys. One group was told they would be rewarded if they played with the toys. The other group wasn’t told this. Two weeks later, the kids were put back with the toys. Kids rewarded for playing with the toys played less with them than the other kids did. It’s such a profound effect it’s like there are two different motivational systems.