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I was not going to make that mistake again; I signed up for Chinese classes immediately after my arrival in Beijing. I was fantastically jealous of the rapid progress my hallmate Jason had made learning Chinese and assumed I could produce similar results. The class was already on lesson eleven, but I was sure I could catch up. This was to be an uncharacteristic display of overconfidence.

The class consisted of Nelson, a New Zealander, Ling, from Vietnam, and thirteen Koreans. My teacher was happy to see an English speaker and thrilled I was a teacher.

Day one: I was completely lost, but I assumed I’d catch up in a few days.

Day two: I spent my class time in bed, suffering from gastrointestinal problems and cursing China.

Day three: I was exhausted, undernourished, irritated and overwhelmed. I chose to forget that in a new country, simple errands take hours, that a taxi ride might be the height of all frustration and that my beloved Korea was once a learning ground for me as well.

At any rate, back in class, it was as though my teacher had suddenly started speaking Swahili, and I was the only one who didn’t understand. Tears sprang to my eyes; I rummaged idly in my bag, biting my lip and holding my breath. I tried counting to ten, which never seems to work.

Through the fog of my misery, I heard my teacher calling, “Nancy, don’t worry.” She wrote “bang zhu,” the word for help, on the board. “We will help you.” The rest of the class looked at me, nodding sympathetically. Well now, I couldn’t leave.

I told my friend Gert that it wasn’t the first time I had made a fool of myself, and he cheerfully responded, “And it certainly won’t be the last.” I agreed because, after all, I had taken twelve years of math, and being the slowest in the room was familiar territory. Chinese was something I wanted to learn—how hard could it be?

We started with vocabulary, which seemed simple enough. But then the nightmare began. The teacher gave us a list of what appeared to be random words, repeating them in Chinese over and over again and writing messy characters on the white board. We attacked our individual dictionaries—the foreigner’s little red book—and linguistic chaos ensued.

Mandarin Chinese contains 50,000 characters—no one knows them all—four spoken tones and thousands of local dialects so diverse that some neighboring villages cannot understand one another. It seems to be, at best, some ancient emperor’s ironclad way to ensure a large, illiterate peasant class and, at worst, a diabolical joke.

Everyone knows that the meaning changes as the tone changes. For example, four tones of the word “ma” produce four very different words: mother, hemp, horse and curse.

What I didn’t realize is that the same word will have countless variations in each of the four tones along with different written characters and, of course, different meanings. Conversely, different words, different tones and different meanings sometimes share the same character.

Using a Chinese dictionary involves finding the “pinyin,” or Romanized spelling, whose section is subdivided into the four tones. First, I had to decipher my teacher’s handwriting and, second, remember the specifics as the other characters streamed before my eyes.

Take the lesson on “clothing” for example. I would flip through the dictionary pages, searching for the word “xie” and the appropriate tone section—the fourth one in this case.

First, I’d see “evil,” then, “in harmony” and, a little later, “to hold something under the arm.” Finally, I might find “shoes,”—apropos to the lesson, but by that time, the class had moved on, and I was lost again; and that’s if I could find the word at all.

Our teacher would continue her attack of Chinese words in her high-pitched voice, while Nelson fumbled with his dictionary and one Korean translated for the others. Ling graciously whispered explanations to me, but in unintelligible English. This was a language quagmire—on one side, I was struggling with poor Ling’s magnanimous efforts, and on the other, understanding just enough Korean to be confused, but not enough to benefit from the explanation. It went on and on and on.

My teacher had an unrealistic sense of my potential based solely on my pronunciation skills, which to her, translated into a great facility for language. What everyone seems to forget is that parrots can imitate what they hear but have no particular language skills, and they probably have better retention than I do.

On a good day, I was in the bottom tier for listening comprehension and reading and tied for last in sentence structure. On a bad day, I heard nothing; I read nothing; and I sat there with a sour expression on my face. Students like me are the reason teachers suffer burnout. My Chinese teacher felt terribly guilty; we were both teachers of the same age and, therefore, equals. “If you do not know,” she said sadly, “then I feel that I am not good.”

I registered for two more weeks of lessons, largely to rebuild my teacher’s shattered self-esteem. When I realized the only way I could endure the two hours a day was by playing various movies in my head, I gave up.

“Don’t worry about it, Nancy,” another teacher told me. “I’ve been studying for four years, and I still don’t speak well.”

That was supposed to make me feel better? I was hoping that someday, this language would be attainable but compared to the spoken language, written Chinese is the unkindest cut of all. I can imagine the ancient scholars languishing in gilt robes, stroking long, thin beards and cackling over the complexity of each character.

“Let’s add another few strokes….that’s right, now some lines on the bottom.” Amid more hysterical laughter, they’d say, “Stop, stop, you’re killing me! They’ll never get this!”

How anyone, even Chinese people, can learn these characters is incomprehensible to me, and I sometimes suspect I am the victim of an elaborate hoax. Reading a newspaper requires a base of 7,000 characters; knowing 3,000 is functionally literate. However, recognizing the characters isn’t enough—there’s also the context.

A sign that reads “tian,” the word for heaven and “wai,” the word for outside is advertising a roast duck restaurant. Roast duck, you see, is outside heaven.

To my great irritation, Jason has now started doing dictation in his Chinese classes. This seems to be on par with me taking a trip to the moon—a fantasy and not a likely possibility.

Gert, studying Chinese as his 15th language, learned 500 characters in two weeks and forgot them all seven days later. I couldn’t even pretend to be sympathetic. I am now studying independently—read “occasionally”— and will stay until I learn Chinese.

“At the rate you’re going, you’ll be here forever,” was Jason’s cheerful reaction.

That may turn out to be true. I can think of worse fates. Maybe someday, I’ll be able to ride a bicycle through the city’s hysterical traffic patterns or eat roasted cicadas at the night market, but let’s take one thing at a time.

Parts of this article were previously published in "Travelers' Tales: China."

Originally from Long Island, New York, Nancy Pellegrini has been living and traveling in Europe and Asia for nearly eight years. She is the author of "Through Western Eyes: Korea," and her writing and photographs have appeared in such publications as Transitions Abroad, Go World Travel, Long Island Woman, Eye Candy, and International Living Magazines, as well as "Travelers' Tales: China." She now writes, teaches English and does television work in Beijing, China.

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