I’m pretty bad at Mandarin, despite having studied it for almost half my life. In my home country of Singapore, we all have to study a ‘mother tongue’, a second language usually determined by our ethnic background. While I’m half-Indian, which would have technically allowed me to opt for Punjabi as a second language instead of Mandarin, the majority of people in Singapore are ethnically Chinese and there’s much more support for it. For example, you may actually study it in schools as opposed to having to go to extra classes on the weekends at specialised Punjabi schools. I’ve therefore been studying Mandarin in some capacity since I was five, up till the age of eighteen.
But I’m still not great at it. I didn’t speak Chinese at home, since my father doesn’t speak it, and I never consumed Chinese media. I struggled with keeping up a level of Mandarin proficiency that wouldn’t lead to me failing every exam I was given. I probably could have done more to improve my fluency, in hindsight, but I didn’t. Obviously, as an adult, my Mandarin is worse than it was when I was actively taking classes to improve it. My late grandmother spoke many languages, but the one we had in common was Mandarin. In the last few years of her life, I had a lot of questions for her, but no way to communicate them. I’d sit next to her on the sofa and try to talk to her in stilted Mandarin, piecing together what she was saying in reply through context clues and the limited vocabulary I still remembered.
That is exactly what Chants of Sennaar feels like. This game,well-described in this article by my fellow Features Editor Ben Sledge, is a fascinating puzzle game that gives you instructions in hieroglyphical languages. As you learn glyphs, you can start guessing at their meanings to piece translated sentences together. Matching glyphs to actions or objects in your journal will give you their confirmed meaning, helping you decipher more glyphs down the line since you’ll have more context. Just like in Mandarin, each word or concept is a character on its own. Also like in Mandarin, some characters contain other characters, like how (spoiler) cemetery is a box-shape containing the glyph for death. Mandarin very often melds common characters together to alter their meanings.
Playing Chants of Sennaar is exactly like talking to people in Mandarin, if you’re as bad at it as me. It’s probably what being bad at a second language is like, in general – when I was in Spain in my early twenties, I’d only taken a measly semester of basic Spanish in university. Outside of Barcelona, I was pretty much screwed if I forgot anything I’d learned about the language. I’d stare at waitresses open-mouthed while trying to figure out exactly what they were asking of me. Aqui? What does aqui mean, I would think, wild-eyed, until it clicked in my head that she was asking me if I was eating in or taking the food to go.
Translating languages in your head looks a lot like Chants of Sennaar. There are the words you know, the words you think you know, and the words you have never heard but you can guess from context. Chants of Sennaar reminds me exactly how embarrassing it is to be terrible at a language, but also reminds me you can always wing it, and it’ll probably turn out alright.
