“GO AND LEARN MANDARIN Chinese,” the commissioning editor said, with an unpleasant glint in his eye. “Take these teach-yourself Chinese CDs, and this instruction booklet. Then, when you have learned Chinese, go out and speak Chinese. You have two weeks.”

Learning to speak Chinese is often used as a metaphor for “impossibly difficult”—along with rocket science, three-dimensional chess, and anything written by Stephen Hawking.

But how difficult can it be?

“That,” the commissioning editor said, lighting another Havana, “is what you are going to find out.”

Today The Times is giving away a CD designed to enable readers to teach themselves Mandarin Chinese conversation, via various conversations reproduced opposite and all next week in times2. My task is to road-test the course. I am not going to attempt written Chinese: the largest Chinese dictionaries contain more than 56,000 characters, and merely to understand a newspaper requires about 3,000. My mission is to develop, in a short space of time, the ability to order a meal, introduce myself and find the loo — basic survival Mandarin.

Experts agree that a teach-yourself audio course is not the best way to learn Chinese. The best way is to be born Chinese and grow up in China.

The second best way is to be taught by Dr Song Lianyi, of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at London University, coauthor of the course. Dr Song, jovial and beaming, has the great Chinese virtue of patience—just as well, as he has just taken on his most unpromising student in 20 years of teaching.

“People say Chinese is a difficult language, but what makes Chinese difficult is the writing,” he insists. “As a spoken language it is as easy and difficult as any other language.”

The most tricky aspect of spoken Chinese for a Westerner, Dr Song explains, is the different tones in pronunciation. There are four: the first, high and level; the second, rising; the third, falling and rising; and the fourth, falling. The same word can mean four different things, depending on its tone. The word ma, for example, can mean “mother”, “hemp”, “horse” and “to curse”. In English, pitch patterns add emotional color; in Chinese, they dictate meaning.

In many ways, Chinese is like a linguistic puzzle, fitting together in a series of logical ways: master the tones and you can unlock it. Chinese has no genders, irregular verbs, noun plurals, or tenses. For a novice, however, the tones offer multiple opportunities for confusion, particularly if your name happens to be Ben.

The name Ben is pronounced in the falling and then rising third tone – it also means “root”. The word ben pronounced in the level first tone, means “to dash forward”; in the fourth tone, however, it means, “incredibly stupid”.

To introduce myself, I say: “Wo shi Ben”. A very small change of inflection means that I am announcing: “I am incredibly stupid.” Ask for a “light” (dhuj) in the wrong tone and you might get a “big turkey”.

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