So, the past month or so I've been thinking that my Chinese studies have been going very badly. Up until earlier today that is. Over the last three weeks I've slowly been coming to the conclusion that the best meter by which to judge myself might not be the class average. For a while I held out grand hopes that somehow I would mount a miraculous comeback and overtake most of the class. As it became clear that my study habits weren't actually that poor and that my further capacity was limited, disillusionment set in followed by anxiety regarding future plans. Today two things happened. The first was that for a brief moment I angled my computer screen to see the reflections of my western compatriots (my seat is toward the front of the class). Both of them were just as lost. The real kicker though was that later in the day my friend told me that apparently the Asians in the class DON'T STUDY. Maybe it was a little racist of me, I had assumed that because the rest of the class was Asian my study habits weren't on par. It turns out the language simply comes much more naturally to the Koreans and Japanese.
That being said, the idea that I might not be absorbing all that's possible still haunts me. While the volume of my studying is probably sufficient the efficiency of it most likely is not. Put me in front of a research paper and it's a done deal. I have a set system for researching the topic, formulating an opinion, taking notes, cataloging information then writing and citing the paper. Ceteris paribus my 30 hours of effort will be of a higher quality than that of the average student. There's a learning curve to learning, and taking on a new a language is something I've never done before.
Characters: While there is some logic to written Chinese there's not a whole lot. Most characters are constructed of multiple basic characters called “radicals”. If you knew the background for why person + wood = rest it would be easier to keep track of them. I assume all Chinese school children understand the back stories for most Hanzi characters. However, even if you did know said explanations the characters say nothing about the way to pronounce the word they represent thus establishing a disconnect that must be overcome. Oh, and did I mention most people consider literacy as knowing 1,500 characters?
Tones: “Ma” with the first tone and “ma” with the second tone mean completely different things. There are instances when the person you're speaking to can pick up the meaning through contextual inference. Sadly much of time this isn't the case. Again, the writing tells you nothing about the tones. It's necessary to memorize them through the pinyin (what Google calls the romanization of characters) and then connect that to the characters. The tone of a word can also change in certain circumstances given a particular tone in the word before or after it.
Similar sounds: Take “shi”. First off there's “shi”, “xi”, “chi”. All basically sound like “shi”. That's before incorporating tones. It's remarkable how the tiniest cadence can completely transform a word. After months of being here and going to the same place five days a week I still consider it lucky when I can tell a taxi driver Liaoning Shifan Daxue. Even when it does work the way it plays out is, they look a little confused before it clicks. Then say "ahhh", followed by the exact same thing that I said and then they try to correct me by saying, again, the exact same thing that I said but very slowly. Listening is a bear as well, but frankly I'm just not advanced enough to be thrown into that lions den quite yet.
Overlap: Biǎo (表）means exterior surface, a model, a table, a form, a meter, family relationship or a watch. Biǎo (裱) means to hang a paper or mount a painting. Biǎo (婊) means a prostitute. For some reason in Chinese there are vastly more instances where more than one concept is attached to the same word, and usually more distinct concepts are attached as well. Don't get me started on “shi”. With Koreans if you don't know someone's last name (though technically last names come first in Asia) and want to take a stab at it go for Park, Kim or Lee. I'm tempted to say in Chinese if you don't know a word just dub in “shi”. Once you factor in this overlap along with similar sounds and the tones, what a westerner would percieve simply as "shi" could easily mean over 100 different things. That being said, wome the difficulty in this overlap might be in part due to the next, most oft overlooked and possibly largest issue in learning Chinese.
NO CULTURAL CONTEXT: In my opinion, understanding the multiple usages of words and makeup of Hanzi characters would be a lot easier if one were raised in China. The manner in which they go about explaining concepts either through spoken or written language is just an entirely different thought process. Open a door and turn on a light for instance are the same word Kai1. That kind of makes sense. But then again I constantly run across a string of characters which I recognize but make absolutely no sense to me when combined. Ask a Chinese person or pop them into the translator and a concept which seems entirely distinct from the original three characters is the answer. A lot of things that don't make sense might if raised here. It's a matter of making connections.
For instance, one of my cars is a 1983 Mercedes. Prior to that vehicle I had owned only American cars. The way things were done on the Benz originally made little sense to me. Problems stumped me easily. After years of ownership I now have an intuition when working on it in the same way I did with my old Cadillac. There way Mercedes engineers collectively think is different from the way GM engineers collectively think. There's an overall intangible logic to the way things are done. It's the same with language. Once you get it things are much easier. Sadly language is an organic and quite fluid construct and therefore much more difficult than a car.
The most oft asked question people throw my way is “how do you learn/teach a language when one party doesn't understand the other's native tongue?” This will be a pretty quick blog because in large part it's one of those “you've got to be there” sort of things.
My Chinese classes and the classes I teach are completely different for a few reasons. The first is the discrepancy in proficiency. The English classes I teach are of either teachers (who are intermediate to advanced) and the better middle school students of Dalian (who are largely advanced). Both can get their points across on the by and large. In those classes I focus on vocabulary building. I give them words and explain the concepts behind them with simpler words or with adjectives I also act them out. The second discrepancy is the age range. The teacher training courses follow the middle school courses (mostly because I'm only so vested in it) so both are a little juvenile. I play games with them and act like a clown a good bit of the time. Another is that in the English classes all of the students are Chinese. In the Chinese classes there are Koreans, Japanese, Russians and Westerners. The first three have limited English abilities.
So how the Chinese classes work... basically at this point they go for low hanging fruit. Most of the things the teachers get across are simple concepts. There's a lot of simple vocabulary and basic question and responses. The main way we learn what a word means is either through them pointing or mimicking or through the book book which is in English and Chinese. The teachers generally speak a tiny bit of English and once in a blue moon will use it but as a rule do not. One big thing they like to do is have the students simulate conversations. The new one is pairing people into groups and then instead of repeating what's written in the book have us just “talk” about things, for instance where the office is located. There's a lot of “repeat after me” and “what's this I'm pointing at”. For Hanzi (the characters) she makes us get up to the blackboard and write them out. The western world is losing that battle progressively worse and worse. Watching the Asians do it is mind blowing. So essentially, the Chinese classes don't work very well. As to how it would work out at a more advanced level I can't say. It seems like it would be more like the classes I teach where I can use simpler English words to describe the more advanced ones.
In my opinion the best way to learn Chinese would be to come here with a few years experience under your belt and take classes in a study abroad program with an American university for a little bit and only after that to jump into the deep end. FSU's teachers at TFSU spoke immaculate English. Any time we had questions they could answer it. Asking questions is the essence of learning. That being said, I still feel it's possible to pick the language up this way, just exceedingly difficult. This is opposed to at home, where it would be impossible in my estimate.
As to the English classes, most of them are not graded. My take on it is that you're there to give them experience with native speakers but you're not really a full on teacher. The school system recognizes that teaching someone a language when you don't know their native tongue is exceedingly difficult. So the answer to the question “how do you teach someone a language without knowing theirs?” is: “with great difficulty”.
Here's an interesting way to entertain yourself for about five minutes. If you don't have Google Chrome you'll need to download it for this (IMO blows firefox out of the water anyway). When I go to ebay.com without going through a VPN it redirects to ebay.cn. Google Chrome has a nifty feature wherein it automatically translates web pages that are in foreign languages. The result... it's completely different. Ebay.cn is full of advice on how to set up a seller's account and how to engage in international trade. If you search for something like "Mercedes" (别克) the only results that come up pertain to selling. There are 0 listings on ebay.cn for anything from or for Mercedes. None. Or for Audi, which is an IMMENSELY popular car here.
What does the west have to offer China in terms of trade? Clearly the service sector, they need Microsoft Windows and KFC. In terms of manufactured goods though little things like a wooden shift knob for a Mercedes that might have been produced in Germany but not China could help in terms of trade balances. So why don't we see something like that? There are a lot of Mercedes cars in China. Am I really to believe that there is not one entrepreneurial German car guy who is savvy enough to sell second hand Mercedes parts to Chinese the way they do to Americans? American Mercedes fanatics eat that stuff up. Euro version tail lights and that sort of thing fetch big bucks.
So as an Westerner you log onto ebay and half of the stuff is shipped directly from China. You order it, shipping is something like a couple dollars and it shows up within a few days. Yet in China ebay only barely function as a place for Chinese to purchase things they might not be able to find at home (after enough hunting around you do eventually find yourself in the us ebay version). Chinese ebay is just a symptom but a startling one.
So up until yesterday I didn't know my address. I knew what it says on the lease, what the realtor said it is and what my landlord says it is, but how to get mail delivered here was a different story. Things like apartment number, building number and so forth might be construed differently in another culture. For instance, if you wanted to say where my hometown is in English it's “West Palm Beach, Florida”. In Chinese it would be “Florida, West Palm Beach”. Bigger comes first. Then there's the matter of street address. Outside the door of the building it says 31... but the lease says 29. The building also has two towers, which the realtor called “units” in the address he gave to me. In America “unit” would refer to the apartment. And of course there's always the question of whether pinyin would suffice or if the address would need to be written in Chinese
Thankfully there was a way of testing it out before getting anything of value sent here. As noted in the last post I've subscribed to a variety of publications over the years but the one that's stuck is the Economist. Luckily it's also the most international of them. So all I had to do was keep updating the address until something showed up. As it turns out that section of the website doesn't play nice with the firewall here. Ultimately I changed it once, decided to give the change some time and after a little bit chalked it up to a lost cause. Apparently the realtor was correct though because yesterday I received my first Asian edition Economist! Of course, it's March 26th issue (received on April 11th) and the plastic covering is just beat to hell and back. In an initial boon to my confidence in my “estate agent” today confirmed that the address is definitely correct as I received another Economist... the March 19th issue.
At least subscribing in the States for two years as a student has saved a ton of money. The cover price is 75 yuan (about $11.50).
RSS Feed