As I said, by my own unofficial ruling, I am "conversant" in Chinese. Still, I don't know which is better, my Chinese or my German. I haven't studied German in seven years, but if I picked it up again, I might speak it just as well as I do Chinese, now that I've reduced those pesky perfectionist inhibitions. Not only that, but German words are so much more similar to English words, and I can read them instantly, unlike Chinese characters (I think I'm at fourth grade level with my reading and writing, if you were wondering). Chinese grammar doesn't strike me as very difficult; it actually shares quite a few characteristics with English. But in German class, after practicing noun endings and sentence structure, I could make sentences I was sure were correct. In Chinese, it's a completely different mindset. I know what I can't say, but how do I form a sentence with the natural air of a native speaker? Kind of reminds me why I was too shy to speak up in the first place.
In German class, the key was to learn to shift the rules to form sentences in the new language. In Chinese, it's a shift in attitude, in the importance placed on different words and phrases. For example, Chinese really likes verbs. There are tons of English sentences that wouldn't work in Chinese because they are missing a verb. You don't say "I'm full"; you say "I ate full." You don't say "I'm going out"; you say "I'm going out to play" or "I'm going out shopping." Suddenly the reason you're going out is significant--and it's hard to take this into consideration all of a sudden when it didn't matter to me before as an English speaker.
Chinese also likes compound words--words made up of two one-syllable characters. The nature of the language makes single-syllable words hard to understand, since there is only a limited number of phoneme combinations to choose from, even when you add in the four tones. (For example, as I mentioned in July, "not," "part," and "cloth" sound the same out of context.) This isn't that difficult to get used to, because we're learning the vocabulary piece by piece anyway. If the common way to say "wristwatch" is "hand-watch" rather than just plain "watch," I can deal with that, since that's how I learned it. However, this makes it hard to trust what you see in the dictionary. Even if you look up a character and learn its meaning, it probably isn't commonly used by itself, and therefore native speakers probably won't know what you're talking about. I guess this is where textbooks come in.
So this is probably all stuff you're supposed to get used to in the first year of Chinese classes, but I'm still at a loss when asked simple questions sometimes. Why? Because when someone asks, "Did you go to the store today?" you can't say yes or no. You have to pick out the verb, say "I went" or "I didn't go." When you toss in some auxiliary verbs, as in "Am I supposed to ask the teacher?" then it starts to get confusing. I think that's where you're supposed to use "That's right" or "That's not how it is" or "Reply hazy, try again." Another really hard transition to make, at least for me. "Yes" and "no" must be a really sweet perk to learning English.
Anyway, just because I've deemed myself conversant doesn't mean people take me seriously when I'm speaking Chinese. I assume most people know someone who doesn't speak English as a native language and who, at some point, has had serious trouble using English conversationally. Here's my question: isn't it tempting to think of them as childlike imbeciles? Okay, maybe I'm being a little unreasonable, but when I hear someone speaking awkward beginner's English, I find it hard to pick out nuances like politeness and sense of humor--the same lack of distinction that children embarrass their parents with. The point of all this is that my current level of Chinese is right about there--people finish my sentences for me because they usually know what I want to say before I know myself. Unfortunately, sometimes people choose to complete my sentence with something idiotic that I would never say, which is how I know that other people do, indeed, share my bias against non-native speakers of our respective mother tongues. No wonder I'm often too nervous to practice speaking Chinese. Well, in three weeks, I'll be back in the States with my Chinese-speaking boyfriend, who will hopefully be unfazed by my preposterous wording.