Tag: Chinese language

The Real China: Conclusion

March 17, 2016 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 2 Comments

The ultimate travel fantasy is not to any place, but to the foreign country of the past, to see the people who lived in one’s home country and culture in their shockingly ancient yet familiar form. The language could be understood and the traditions recognized, but the words used and the way people were would be the most fascinating difference.

My desire to see China was not a longing to live in another hemisphere where the people’s faces looked different and they lived in more exotic architecture. I wanted to see China because I wanted to see what it was like to be human without being a modern American. I wanted life without the restraints of American assumptions. All of our culture and language has a precedent, and I wanted to be in a society that had grown from different roots.

Would the people’s facial expressions and voices be the same as I was used to- in general- only substituting strange-sounding words? Would I feel a natural connection with people and make friends across cultural barriers? Would I feel at home away from home? Would I find my niche? How would things feel differently from the way I had always assumed the world was?

Going to China was not just time spent abroad, a résumé highlight or adventurous gap year. It was life lived among people with completely different hearts, minds, and habits. Things overlapped, as human customs everywhere will, but in colloquial terms these people had no interest in football tailgates, processed foods, hip-hop music, or the American dream. (Well, if you want to be difficult, many Chinese families do dream of sending a child to America for college, and it seems as if as many Chinese as possibly can do emigrate out of China into whatever clean and wealthy country they can get into, with America traditionally at the top of that dream list, but that is not to say that the typical person in urban or semi-urban China conceives of life in American terms.)

In many ways, it was a relief to be there, and I savored the luxuries of Chinese life. By that I mean it was a luxury to find reprieve from the cultural nuisances I lived with in America. In China, the people might have had loud phone conversations in small, public spaces (e.g. the elevator or taxi cab) but my brain had no idea what they were saying. I did not have to involuntarily eavesdrop the way I do with all the rude, sometimes scandalous private conversations I overhear in America.

Another great thing, I only had a guest spot in Chinese society, so it did not stress me to hear people boast about their status. I had no idea, again, what it meant when they advertised the name of their university or the corporation they worked for. “Good for you,” I would tell them without envy. No one I met in China really had what I wanted, so proclamations of personal success rolled off me like water off a…Peking duck before it was killed and roasted- when it had water-wicking feathers, that is.

My acquaintances were not pursuing the American dream- a big house in the suburbs with a big yard, big cars, big salary, and big retirement fund- they were after the Chinese dream- moving to a big, crowded city with job opportunities at mostly depressing jobs, living in a dingy apartment, having one male child, having a foreign car that was inconvenient to park and dangerous to drive, and either getting rich from a non-stop work schedule or from Communist Party funds. I did not want what the Chinese were after, so it made it easy for me to shrug off the competition.

I also savored being around young people who tried to dress in a youthful way rather than an older, sexier way, whose appearance was modest in that they wore simple clothes that covered rather than showed off their bodies, modest in that their attitudes and actions were carefree and without worldly cynicism. The people did not often assert themselves and their identity. In China, when an authority figure or respected leader admonished the people, they listened. They may not have followed, and too often the things they did follow were the irrational words of a demagogue meant to cow the people, but as a people they felt oneness with each other and tried to band together.

That seems like ugly naivety to say that, I know, like I have come around after all my criticism to apologize for China’s brutal authoritarian state, but my meaning is the sense of place felt by the common man. Everyone in China seemed like a part of a whole, or at least the people I met uniformly expressed a strong connection to their Chinese identity. The phrase “We Chinese…” was used to begin many declarative sentences, and it was never a question if the individual saying it could speak on behalf of “we, the Chinese people.” Coming from a land of individualism, alienation, and identity politics, that seemed amazing.

And from the schools and students I saw, there were no obvious cliques of outcasts, rebels, or sharply defined popular kids. Making friends seemed so easy when every student spent their day with the same 30-50 classmates and they all saw school not as a social gaming table but as a serious work with coveted rewards of choice schools and jobs.

I was relieved not to be around the darkness and apathy of American individualism, where not one thing can be said, not one value can be preached, without the strife of vulgar internet message boards and self-justifying arguments. In a fractured society, every piece has sharp edges; they cannot be put together with incompatible pieces. I could better tune out the hostile words in China because I could not understand more than a small fraction of what was spoken. It was up to me to search out the English language materials of my choice. I was free from the bombardment of slang terms that grow like bacteria off of the internet, pop music, and television. No one in China ever told me, out loud, “LOL,” “awesome sauce,” “that rocks my face off,” or insulted my ignorance of the newest shorthand terms for drugs and sex acts. No one, except for people in Shanghai and Hong Kong- possibly– ever judged me for my clothes, for not wearing cool jeans and shoes, or for wearing my shirt tucked into my pants “like an old man.”

China, a land or loud crowds and pollution, was in many ways my place of solitude. I escaped the tyranny of American culture that had left me a pariah in my own hometown. I knew I would not be excluded or shunned the same way in China because the people did not know how to judge me.

My essays on China were not written for personal judgment, but for comment and critique of culture. I write not so much about China as about why people do what they do, how they live, and what are the observable consequences in a people’s culture. The perspective I gained in China I apply to my view of every culture, including my own. China happened to be the place where I lived, the place I commented on, but if you have been reading closely, you will have noticed that this commentary critiqued America sharply, too, and the broader cultural forces that are universal to all societies.

Back to the dream of traveling to the past. I would like to do this for the same reasons I went to China. All the documents and artifacts and the way the scholars, historians, journalists, filmmakers, and writers have described the past- is it true? Or more exactly, how close is it to the truth? What would the people really be like? Live like? Talk like? If they used English, how well would I understand them? Our dictionaries overlap, but from the way the people of earlier times wrote, I can tell they think, believe, and speak in fundamentally different ways than the people I live with today. I do not wish to escape to the past, but I would like to see it, be immersed in it, and let my observations and intuition shape my perspective. That is what I have done with China.

The real result is that there was much to be offended with in the country that I looked to with such airy anticipation. But if a man expects to live in any society, he either has to believe in it and be a part of it, or he has to make peace with his unhappy conscience and abide in a small niche of a corrupted whole. I could not accept the corruption of China. I could not smile and say the good outweighed the bad. I think I have long desired to depart the United States for much of the same reasons.

I am convinced that, if Americans from before our grandparents’ generation could see their homeland today, their strongest impression would not come from our computers, our convenient home appliances, or our city infrastructure. They would not be most surprised by a child using a smart phone or families traversing interstates in a hybrid car. Instead, they would be shocked by the way children talked to their parents and the way parents talked to their children. They would be taken aback by how all the easy technology had isolated people and made their minds dependent, how it had changed basic attitudes and behavior. I am sure they would question the widespread example of parents who were modeling a conformist, materialistic lifestyle for their children. Personal music devices and DVD players would not be as amazing as the language and content of the material being played. The amazement of smart phones would sour when it was seen how much they spoiled dinners and conversations.

Americans from the past might fall prey to the quick and facile lifestyle of microwaved meals and instant entertainment- human nature dictates they would- but I imagine that the first impressions of many would mirror my observations in China. I was not so surprised at the different vehicles being driven on Chinese city streets, but in the willingness of the drivers to run me over. People mattered most, not technology.

I was not confused by the sound of the Chinese people’s words, but by the volume and aggression they were regularly spoken with. I expected to see poverty, but what most alarmed me was how a brand new hospital building could be overwhelmed with loitering families who filled the just-opened lobbies with dirty blankets and careless trash. Foreign technology and television had made its way into China, and the ingestion of electronic media was very familiar to me. The car had made its way even to the smallest towns I visited (I was told by my two Australian friends that only about five years before our town had one traffic light and no cars). Technology in China and the outward forms of buildings and cities- while often very different- were familiar to me in their basics and not surprising at all. What shocked me about Chinese streets was not the way they looked different, but the way people spat and urinated on them. An American-born Chinese person (“ABC” in both Chinese and Chinese-American slang) can instantly be told apart from her Chinese-born peers not by her iPhone and Nike clothes, which can be bought in China, too, but by the way she wears her clothes and the way her face looks.

The point of observing culture- the point of this whole effort- is not to be found in a bloodless survey of outward modes of living. The point is to see the outworking of human thought and human hearts. My Aunt Fong would always tell me “China need time,” a strange apology from a civilization always boasting about its most ancient character, but no, I thought, China need reform- foundational reform that comes from the reform of people’s hearts

Since leaving, I have vacillated between foreswearing China forever and making a return someday to see Aunt Fong and try and find a better way of living there. I love Aunt Fong like my mother, and I talk to her every week over the computer. I also long to see all the friends and students I met in China again. I imagine being able to start new relationships with them, having my heart refined by experience and renewed hope. But I also keep in mind that China is still much the same place as I left it. I might be admired by the people there, but most of them can only giggle and gawk at me, perhaps asking me about my favorite NBA team and whether I can use chopsticks.

I do plan on seeing Aunt Fong again- how could I not? My dilemma now is how long to stay in China and what to travel there for. A one or two-week vacation is not worth the expense or time of a twenty hour flight in my opinion. A stay longer than a month would require a visa sponsorship; I would need to have work in China. I hesitate to do that because of the misery I already experienced standing in front of a Chinese classroom. As much as I respected my elementary school music teachers and participated in their classes, that is how much my Chinese students responded to me. To my former teachers: I have done my penance. I see what I was like. I am sorry.

I was always hoping to see more of the church in China. I have asked Aunt Fong to help me find a way to observe the house churches and meet with them. She has helped me get peaks inside a few churches in what turned out to be frustrated visits. Perhaps, God willing, that hope will fully come to fruition.

For now, I am where I am. I daily dream about finding a new culture to live in and observe, or I think through how best I should get to work from my home base in Iowa writing about my experiences already. Eventually, I hope to find a place where I can be at peace and believe in what I am doing, not so much because I have found the right location, but because I have been refined and found people that I want to join together with as one culture.

Thank you for reading and commenting.

Mantis vs. Chinese

December 3, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

(Continued from Plumbing and Blocks: A Metaphor for Language)
(Part 2/4: The Basics of the Chinese Language)
(Part 1/4: Why I Stopped Learning Chinese)

Why I Stopped Learning Chinese

In college, I had a Chinese professor, teaching a course on China, who boasted that Chinese has the easiest grammar of any language, and if anyone could write a paper identifying a language to demonstrate otherwise, he would give that student an A for the semester. Well, after living among the Chinese and hearing their language daily, also hearing their incessant boasts about how ancient and great their civilization was, how everything was first invented, done, or developed in China (even pizza, preposterously, of all things), and after losing patience with the Chinese way of life, I will offer some hyperbole of my own: Chinese is the worst language I have ever heard. Just the same as there might be some language spoken by a tribe in Papua New Guinea that linguists could contend might have simpler grammar than Chinese, there might be a language on this earth that sounds worse than Chinese, but my ears have not discovered it.

Now “heard” implies listening to spoken Chinese, and listening and speaking are only half of the major divisions of language (the other two dimensions being reading and writing). Based on what I have written already, I will leave it to the reader to imagine how inefficient and tedious it is, not to mention culturally exclusive, to use the Chinese writing system.

Those artful symbols seem so impressive until one tries to use them for all of life’s daily reading and writing purposes. Then, constantly stumped by the appearance of new words and having no idea how to pronounce them, and wishing that words could just be spelled out with a pen or keyboard instead of having to make an artful or sloppy piece of calligraphy with a regimented writing method, it dawns on the newcomer: using pictographic and ideographic symbols for all of a written language isn’t such a good idea.

English words may be irregular and their phonics flawed, but they work efficiently and they are very flexible and adaptable. There is a reason computer keyboards the world over use Roman letters, and it is not because an Englishman has possession of their patent. It is because those letters were developed through the millennia of several civilizations, and the result is language units proved by the furnace of culture and time. They work- very well.

Yes, Chinese writing also works (any extant written language can be said to work- people use it, don’t they?), but I would argue not nearly as well. The Koreans and Japanese, who developed their written languages from Chinese, both saw the need to break the written characters down and create alphabets out of them. The Chinese, who take inordinate pride in their history and tradition, have never seen the need to do likewise. Pinyin transliteration is the closest they have come to compromising with reasonability.

When using a word from a foreign language, something Chinese is hamstrung from doing, but something I think English does exceptionally well (English speakers, think of all the foreign words you know from languages like Spanish and Japanese, and all the French phrases you recognize- now, do you speak those languages?), Chinese has to use its existing characters and sound the word out- poorly. Remember, their smallest language unit is the word, not the letter.

Example: my home state, Iowa, in Chinese pinyin combines three unrelated words to form “Ài-hé-huá.” Those three words are literally “love,” “lotus,” and the adjective for “Chinese” or “Han” culture. So, basically the combination is gibberish, and a Chinese has to have familiarity with these quasi-phonetic combinations to know that the words are not lost but are pitifully trying to indicate a place name. In America, place names popularly use words from Native American languages, and Roman letters do a better than decent job of retaining the sound of the original language, though it takes an awful lot of k’s, vowels, and sign space to do so.

The written Chinese characters are what beguile foreign eyes and entice them to think Chinese must be such an exotic and esoteric language, but that is not the case. Once the alluring bait is taken, the sucker realizes the truth- that the incredible visual symbols are masking childishly simple words that mostly sound like “cheese” and “seizure.” I am almost serious. Chinese has so many sounds similar to “sh-” and “ch-” and “j-” that learning their language made me think I was in a speech therapy class meant to manage the way I pushed air through my teeth.

On the topic of the spoken word, I have to admit I am not much of an authority. I never heard Chinese spoken. I heard it barked, shouted, growled, blurted, hissed, sputtered, ejected, muttered, whined, scolded, chided, coughed, screeched, yelled, howled, whispered through closed lips, called out impatiently by a screeching woman, sung in a thin, tinny falsetto voice, and histrionically recited by a man for an audience, but I never heard it spoken. If one’s only exposure to spoken Chinese is a foreign film, it goes without saying that those actors were speaking stylized lines clearly enough for the boom microphone to pick them up. If one has heard the clamor of a kitchen in a Chinese restaurant, that is more like what I am referring to.

It is not the people’s fault that the language comes out so rushed, so clipped- that is the natural tendency when speaking the short, friction-filled sounds of Chinese. If the context ever demands enunciation, like in the narration of television commercials, and spoken Chinese is put on display, then the resulting sound is absurd and buffoonish. I expected viewers to crack up at the overdone, pompous voices on television- the voices having to fall up and down and flit erratically like a dollar bill in the wind in order to precisely hit the jarring tone changes between every Chinese syllable- but my Chinese friends’ faces were unflinching. They could not hear the ridiculousness of the language because they were native to it and the sounds could not be heard, only their meaning.

Those clownish Chinese voices were artificial, not representative of the voices I suffered in my daily experience. Those voices spat out the harsh, static sounds of the language that made me wince. Even though I had attained a base level of Chinese that would have allowed me to speak to shopkeepers and ask for directions, had I felt brave, I almost always avoided opening my mouth to get the locals’ attention. I didn’t want to be shouted at in return. When I took a taxi and had to communicate, I would mutely hand the driver a slip of paper with my destination written on it. Sometimes that wasn’t enough. The driver would badger me and try to get more money out of me, and I would testily mutter in Chinese, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand…” over and over until the driver would give up in frustration of I did and exited the cab.

It was a surprising contrast to my experiences traveling in Thailand and speaking to the rare Thai person met in America. In those cases, I was giddy to try out what few phrases I knew, and I was pleasantly satisfied when the happy stranger would smile and pleasantly reply to me in a clean voice. Most of the Thai people I have attempted to speak to really were friendly and accommodating, and the experience showed me how common humanity could bridge the gulf of culture and language.

In China, the people did not speak anything like a friendly, clear, accommodating voice. Even when a sweet young lady wanted to say something smilingly polite, the sounds of Chinese are so pinched and abrupt that the message sounded like she had a mouth full of food. I felt no compulsion to talk to the Chinese in their own tongue; I had a distaste for the exercise that bordered on revulsion.

I would put it like this: in English, there are three moods: the indicative mood, for statements and questions; the imperative, for giving commands and advice; and the subjunctive, to express conditional statements or wishes (e.g. “If I were rich, I would buy a new house.”). In Chinese, I observed only one mood: angry. Every interaction was quickly spoken and short-tempered. Several times an English-speaking Chinese student or friend would excuse a violent-sounding scene to me by saying, “Those people sound like they are arguing, but they are just talking” or “She just asked him what time the bus arrives.”

I could sense mild embarrassment in my Chinese apologist, and could not but question to myself when Chinese culture at large was going to take the hint from foreigners’ faces- white(r) with shock- and stop excusing the cacophony inherent in their speaking voices and make heartfelt reforms in their language and the way they spoke it.

I do not need to understand Japanese, by contrast, to pick up on the great politeness and reserve the Japanese speak with. Body language, tone of voice, and the sound of their words reveal it to me. Being around Chinese speakers in the many and various chaotic, crowded, and disgusting settings of a real Chinese city, I was struck by the intensity of volume and spirit the Chinese would begin speaking with in the blink of an eye. I could read in their voices and body language that they were agitated and distressed, at once bound close enough in community that strangers could quickly strike up a conversation as if they were a married couple resuming a paused feud, and distant enough that no one received strangers with a kind smile, a slowly spoken reply, and a gentle nod of the head. If felt as if the whole country was composed of stock brokers, always chattering and shouting- never speaking- and shoving each other to get to the front of whichever line they were in.

It dawned on me then, that I found no innate appeal in the Chinese language. The visuals of the written characters had worn thin and let me down, and I could not bring myself to adopt the people’s hot, quarrelsome way of speaking. I have often heard other languages spoken and found much beauty and appeal in them. Hearing the acrobatic lisps of Spanish speakers, the fluid friction of German, or the low, flowing syllables of Japanese attracts me and makes me curious about the depths their language conceals. I find I have a thirst to know their treasures of language and culture.

In China, I heard what seemed like endless boasting about their civilization, but after living in the real conditions of China, submerged in the torrent of choppy spoken sounds, I lost interest in their culture. I knew it was all a sham. The Chinese can school me in Confucian social order and harmony when their drivers learn to yield to traffic lights and pedestrians, when their people learn to form a line at the cafeteria, the train station, or of all places a national monument or museum, like the one dedicated to the Nanking Massacre, where all solemnity was broken during my visit by the mass of inconsiderate boors who would barge in with their elbows and stand to take pictures in front of others.

I realized this epiphany in real-life experience: language and culture are so intricately connected that it can be said language is culture. It was no accident that people who yelled at each other as a matter of course also honked their car horns nonstop at each other, pushed each other in all public places, and showed no shyness when spitting or having their children defecate in front of each other. Chinese culture had me disgusted, and its language had done little better. I wanted a part of neither.

Language, if one does not speak it, is an incredibly vast and deep system, seemingly impossible to conform one’s mind to. If one does speak the language, it is nothing at all. It takes no special effort for me to think in English. Learning Chinese though, or any other foreign language, would require great effort and that I took the time to live in Chinese-speaking society. Learning a foreign language then is a great compliment. The learner is declaring that this language and culture is worth his time, so much so that he is willing to make it a singular pursuit. The end goal is participation in a new culture and society. Again, it is nothing for me to visit a local restaurant, peruse the menu, and place my order, but for a foreigner dreaming the American dream, this is an impressive feat and a big step towards integration.

Integration became the furthest thing from my mind in China. I wanted relief; I wanted to leave. As the second semester waned, my Chinese studies all but completely ceased. I would still talk to Aunt Fong in Chinese, but I bitterly left my Chinese workbooks to gather dust. I did not want to be part of Chinese society. I did not want to remain in their country. Those are the real motivations for learning Chinese. Not wanting to remain in China, I no longer had those goals. Therefore, I stopped learning Chinese.

A Lesson and a Concession

Going through the effort to learn Chinese, and especially the exercise of thinking about language, has made me think differently than the common views on language. My perspective is this: when I hear someone explain a feature of a foreign language, I do not treat it like a rule, I treat it like a proposal. So, for example, when someone shows me that the written character for the Chinese singular pronoun “I” or “me”: 我, takes seven marks of the pen, I do not stroke my chin and say, “How interesting. Your writing system must contain much meaning within these complex symbols.” No, I open my eyes widely in a bewildered stare and ask, “Are you serious? Do you realize how tedious and time-consuming that will be to spend seven strokes on such a basic word? Not to mention, you’re going to have to design these abstract symbols of yours for every single word– every concept, function, feeling, action, and object.

‘Your stick figure makes sense for the word ‘man’ (人), but how do you propose to make an iconic representation for a word like ‘discontent’? No, stop. Don’t draw your symbol for me. Inventing it is the easy part. How do you propose you will teach every literate person in your society how to read and write each of your thousands of symbols? Your schools will be little more than factories where robotic children are forced to learn by rote to such an extent that they will lose all aptitude for critical thinking or creativity. But if that is what you want, carry on with the symbol making.”

And again, “You are proposing to make every word a one-syllable sound? And because your language units come as simple, solid words, you are going to do away with an alphabet altogether? No, no, no, that will never work. Think of what will happen when you try and introduce a new sound, when you need a new word to describe a new thing, or to incorporate a foreign word. How will you do it? How will you pass along to everyone the pronunciation of the new word? Your language units are already fixed, and there are no phonics or other universal standards of word sounds, so how will you solve the problem of making new words? You say all new words will be compound words? And foreign words can be approximately sounded out with your existing word sounds? Well, that sounds like an awfully broad use of the word ‘approximately.’ Listening to you say ‘Washington’ (Hua-sheng-dun) sounds like a man speaking with a frozen jaw.

“But your compound words idea- are you forgetting that using only single-syllable sounds is already going to force you to overlap and border similar sounds to the point that you will have to rely on those awkward, ugly tones to differentiate between the sounds? Even then, many of the words will still have the exact same sound and tone. There are more things in heaven and earth, Hu Rui-Xiao, than are dreamt of in your language units. Your words and sounds are far too limited. Combining your monosyllables into compound words might be a solution to the problem of making new words, but it only compounds the original problem of having too many words with similar sounds or the exact same sounds. It’s indistinguishable.

“Imagine this scenario: you are on the phone with your friend and you ask about the ‘ma’ vehicle. It’s spoken over the phone, and it’s in Chinese, so your words are doubly indistinct.

“Your friend asks you, ‘DID YOU SAY “MAHN” (慢)? YOU WANT THE “SLOW” VEHICLE?’

“You impatiently correct him, ‘NO, CAN’T YOU HEAR? I SAID “MA,” NOT “MAHN.”’

“He then rightly defends himself, ‘BUT THE TWO SOUND IDENTICAL. BOTH ARE SPOKEN QUICKLY AND THE VOWEL ISN’T FULLY FORMED, SO “MAHN” SOUNDS JUST LIKE “MA.” IT IS ONLY THE DIFFERENCE OF ABRUPTLY CEASING THE SOUND WITH AN OPEN MOUTH VERSUS LIGHTLY AND IMPERCEPTIBLY TOUCHING THE TONGUE TO THE ROOF OF THE MOUTH, CUTTING THE FULL SOUND OF THE WORD SHORT.’

“You proceed, ‘LOOK, I DIDN’T CALL YOU TO ARGUE ABOUT HOW UNCLEAR OUR LANGUAGE IS, I JUST CALLED TO ASK ABOUT THE “MA” VEHICLE.’

“Your friend again says, ‘DID YOU SAY “MA” (马) AS IN THE BEAST OF BURDEN WITH LONG LEGS AND A FAST GALLOP, OR DID YOU SAY “MA” (妈) AS IN A WOMAN WHO BEARS CHILDREN AND RAISES THEM?’

“Fed up with the runaround, you repeat yourself, ‘I SAID “MA”!’

“Your friend, no less confused, replies, ‘I STILL CAN’T UNDERSTAND YOU. I WOULD ASK YOU TO SPELL IT OUT- “D” AS IN “DOG,” “B” AS IN “BOY”- BUT WE DON’T HAVE AN ALPHABET. HOW DO WE EVER EXCHANGE EMAIL ADDRESSES WITH ONE ANOTHER?’

“You, by this point screaming, not just loud-talking, repeat again, ‘I SAID “MA”!’

“Your friend will say, ‘STOP SHOUTING!’

“And you will say, ‘I’M NOT SHOUTING! I’M ONLY SPEAKING CHINESE TO YOU. BRING THE “MA” VEHICLE!’

“Your friend finally compromises, ‘I’LL JUST ATTACH THE HORSE TRAILER TO YOUR MOTHER’S CAR AND DRIVE THEM BOTH OVER TO YOU.’

“Now, my friend, is this the kind of interaction you want to set yourself up for? Then please, be reasonable and develop some phonics, an alphabet, and a wider range of sounds. It will require that you make something new, that you innovate rather than repeating and venerating the works of the past. So, I will leave it to you, my Chinese friend, to move toward the path of sensible innovation or remain where you are in the haphazard slough of fixed civilization. I know which option you should pursue, but I fear which one you will stubbornly hold onto.”

I may sound exceptionally jaded to the Chinese language and its culture, but my dissatisfaction is in due proportion to the height of my expectations and the depth of my real disappointment. I had so much hope and time invested in Chinese, and what was the result of my labors? I could use a spare Chinese word or phrase in a discussion with a bilingual friend, but hearing and seeing the Chinese language in public had become too wearisome.

I did not care to cross over with both feet and become familiar with a language that rushed out in such hostile and harsh sounds. I did not want to talk to someone using a voice like that, and I felt no personal trust with a person who spoke to me like that. We would sound like two dogs fighting over a bone, and any fluent onlookers would have to interpret for foreign ears that we were just commenting on how lovely the weather was going to be for our upcoming holiday.

At least, if I had learned a language like Russian, I would have sounded nefarious and arch. People would hear me and either think I was scheming something or lamenting my woeful place in this world. Almost any other language, and people would say what a charming and alluring accent I had. Speaking Chinese is seductive to no one. When Chinese speakers use English, the Mandarin speakers speak ploddingly, breathily, but with not much of a flavorful accent, and the Cantonese speakers, who have nine standard tones in their language, sound like banjo strings being plucked, tightened, and unwound.

And as far as I know, no Chinese words or idioms have proven themselves worthy to use in English, other than food names (e.g. “bok choy” or “chow mein”), and the simplified phrases “Chop, chop” and “Long time, no see” (this is a common Chinese saying, but it is not for certain that the English phrase came from the Chinese parallel).

Contrast that with French, a language whose artful phrases seem tailor-made for flourishes in English sentences. It sounds so much more sophisticated to say “C’est la vie” instead of our plain “That’s life.” The only advantageous Chinese words I have found are their numbers (credit for this insight is owed to Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success). Chinese numbers are pronounced quicker than English numbers, so they are easier to speak and remember, and there are no irregular numbers like “eleven.” In Chinese, that would be “ten-one.”

After my studies and my time in China, I was left with a smattering of simple, practical knowledge of a language that I did not want to use in its homeland, and which is mostly useless to me in America, where Chinese is a lingua franca to no one, and where the first and second generation Chinese immigrants can either speak English to outsiders, or if incompetent, can keep up a cold, distant front with those outside their group. I am not denying that Chinese people can be friendly or work and speak with others. I am not interpreting language fluency as friendliness. I am saying that in my experience with foreign immigrants and visitors, I have found it easy to talk with the Japanese and Thais, for example, but difficult to approach the Chinese, get on their wavelength, and establish trust.

When I spoke Thai to the Thais or talked about Japan to the Japanese, they smiled and talked back, but when I have gone against my better intuition and dared to speak Chinese to the Chinese in America, they mostly seemed shocked or uncomfortable with it, uninterested in talking to me. That is in America though. In China, there were times when my white face attracted a crowd, and many Chinese students eagerly peppered me with cheerful questions.

I do not feel vengeful toward China and its people, mostly I feel disappointment and exasperation which I issue in the form of real observation and rebuke. If the Chinese were humble about their language, if they disfavored boasting about their country and culture, I would see no need to be critical. I have no quarrel with the bashful, modest languages of the world, however absurd and unwieldy they may be. My problem is with pride and pretense, especially when it is undeserved. A language that sounds like ice dropped into a deep fryer should be more embarrassed of itself. Instead it proclaims itself and pretends it is unknowable, not able to be understood by outsiders. No, the problem with China is when it is seen and known, when it is exposed to outsiders and they are able to comment on it.

Lastly, my concession, which is only necessary. I have made quite a few censorious remarks on the Chinese language. I need to remember my place and keep things in perspective. St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 14, wrote that “Even things without life, whether flute or harp, when they make a sound, unless they make a distinction in the sounds, how will it be known what is piped or played?” At this point, the pride and vanity of my flesh smile and say, “No distinction in the sounds? Surely he must be talking about Chinese.”

But then I am corrected by Scripture, later in the same chapter: “There are, it may be, so many kinds of languages in the world, and none of them is without significance.” There I am shown, there my whole argument is tempered: Chinese is not without significance. It still has great beauty and use among a great number of people. I found it unpalatable, and I have my reasons for disliking its modern form and practice, but these are after all entirely subjective opinions.

My problem is not really about the essence of a language, but the way it is rudely and irrationally practiced today.

I am one displeased individual who must remember that Chinese has its significance and purpose apart from me. I do not care to speak it or study it, but it is still worth speaking and studying in itself. I will leave it to those at peace with Chinese culture to do so.

I still love China.

Plumbing and Blocks: A Metaphor for Language

December 2, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

(Continued from “The Basics of the Chinese Language.”)

(Part One: “Why I Stopped Learning Chinese.”)

(Note: my references throughout are to Mandarin Chinese, or the standard dialect of Chinese which I learned and was exposed to. Cantonese and other major dialects I did not live with nor learn.)

From Part 2: For those more familiar with Chinese, please forgive me where I have been imprecise or ignorant. And for those unfamiliar, I hope I have provided you with some insight and a feel for my experience with Chinese, which is admittedly very limited. Before I get into my complaint on the Chinese language, I would now like to offer a personal observation, an analogy for Chinese and English that is entirely subjective but I think an accurate and easy way to understand the essential difference between the two languages.

Plumbing and Blocks

English is like plumbing. The thousands of words English has accumulated from other languages like the many pieces and parts stored in the bins of an old plumber’s workshop. An old hand can look at a problem and assemble a solution any number of ways using parts and pieces from different language bins. A simple problem- choosing the right word to complete a sentence- is like a simple repair of a leaking faucet. If the leak was caused by a hairline crack in the pipes, the plumber could plug or patch the leak for a quick fix, or replace the section of pipe altogether. In the same way, English words can be substituted with any of our language’s many synonyms, or the select word can be removed altogether and replaced with another. If the entire sentence is corroded, then the plumber needs to get to work, tinkering and replacing all the seals, pipes, washers, valves, screws, and nuts, i.e. the verb tense, the mood, the word choices, the tone, the syntax, the use of the right nouns, and adjectives that fit just right. Everything must fit together and allow the flow of water- in this metaphor, meaning- without leaks breaking out between pipe connections- i.e. word combinations- that do not fit each other. It is all complex and intricate. Word choices must fit the job, and all words must agree with the verb tenses and flow together towards the sentence’s intended meaning.

For illustration, let us suppose that I want to communicate and describe my upset stomach. Think of all the words and phrases at my disposal. My workshop is filled with shelves of plumbing parts to choose from. My mental plumber can select words originating from several different source languages or put together common English words to form phrases. I could simply plug the leak, saying, “I’m sick.” That will do, but the problem could be better addressed. I could alternatively say, “I’m ill” or “I’m feeling ill.” These sentences say the same thing, but when choosing between words the difference is that between using basic PVC plastic piping, that will work for basic applications but cannot handle high water temperatures, and using copper pipes that are stronger and better able to fortify the flow of meaning. In plumbing, it is water pressure, water temperature, and the location of pipes that determines the material- metal or plastic- to be used for the job. In English, the considerations for word choice are eloquence, context, and meaning.

In this illustration, eloquence is not necessary, yet word choice can still improve my chances of having my specific meaning understood the way choosing the right size washer or O-ring will ensure my pipe fittings do not leak. “I feel bad,” needs to be narrowed down. What is the problem? “My stomach hurts” will work. That efficient sentence is simple yet specific enough to communicate the intended meaning. But again, plumbing can be complex and so can sentence-making- choosing the right words and assembling them to fit the problem. “My stomach is upset” or “It hurts” will not inform my listener what kind of cure I need. I could add another sentence and build a longer connection of pipes. “I think I ate something bad.” Or “I ate something that disagreed with me.” There is a descriptive personification! I never knew food to be opinionated, but I intuitively understand the sense meant by saying that it “disagreed with my stomach.” If I want to attempt a diagnosis, I could say, “I think…” or “Maybe…” to venture a guess, or if I feel certain I could say without introduction, “It is food poisoning.” Think of all the options! So many different word choices and sentences for the same problem. English has shelves and shelves of subtly differing parts which can be sorted through and assembled together.

One could choose the bin labeled “Medical Words” and dig through and choose a word like “diarrhea” if that were my stomach’s problem. Then, the word chosen is from Greek, meaning “flowing through” (speaking of plumbing), and used medically in English it carries the meaning of all the associated symptoms, causes, and cures. Perhaps it is another medical problem with my stomach, so I face a different set of options. I can say, “It’s acid indigestion,” or using Greek again, “It’s pyrosis,” or more colloquially, “It’s heartburn.” So many options for so many things, and an abundance of words to build from.

Lastly, I could select words based on formality, feel, and context. “I’m sick” works simply, with anyone, but “My tummy hurts” is how a child attracts the attention and affection of her mother. If I am concerned with the feel of my words, their connotation, I can swap my source language box. I could go to the “Latin” box of plumbing parts (a very large box in English’s workshop) and pick out “nauseous.” (Note that the Latin “nausea” is in turn based on a Greek word, and English words commonly trace their ancestry back through more than one source language, so in this respect the analogy of boxes of plumbing parts breaks down. Perhaps parts that originated from one language box were sorted in with another?) “Nauseous” is such a strong, multi-syllable word. Very Latin. It has much more dignity than “sick,” in case I need to dress up my sickness for a discriminating audience. I wouldn’t want a dinner party, for the sake of my humorous example, to have to think about the unclean processes of the human body.

And if I’m really sick, I could exclaim/announce/shout/expel/interject/or cry out, “I’m going to throw up!” or “I’m gonna hurl!” or “I’m about to puke!” or “I think I’m ready to vomit!” or “spew” or any number of vulgar, colloquial, or slang terms. English goes on and on. In my experience of Chinese (language, culture, and people) the same standard words, phrases, and expressions were pretty much universally used by everyone in a rote way. It was not a normal thing for me to hear someone put their individual spin on a common saying.

Switching between source languages (in English, usually French, Latin, Greek, or Old English and Germanic) for descriptive words works just like changing a single valve or pipe in a plumbing system. I could say “daily” using a common English word, or I could say “every day” and make a phrase out of two simple pieces, or combine them into “everyday” and make a word with a subtly different meaning. Or, I could resort to Latin and seem sophisticated by using “quotidian.” Maybe the context requires the flair of French, and I say, du jour. Or, I might want to make a philosophical point about the common experience of daily life, so I go back to the “Latin” box and cull up “mundane.” Think of all the possibilities that can be fit together as an ad hoc (Latin again) solution for the sentence and context at hand. Daily allowance = “per diem.” I live life “day by day” or “one day at a time.”

It is a wonder how anyone can stay above water in the overflow of word choices that is the English language. But as the old plumber knows from experience just about where to look in his crowded, cluttered workplace to find the part he is thinking of, so does the English-speaking brain know which set of words to choose from. In this respect, English is not all that different from Chinese or any other language, but the number of words and word bins to choose from is much more abundant, overflowing, multitudinous, ample, bounteous, copious, profuse, populous, numerous, voluminous, and perhaps superfluous.

What is most like plumbing in English is word agreement and flow, the necessity that all the parts of a sentence are fit together properly and that they support the flow of meaning in one direction, just like a plumbing system must fit together properly and support water flow in one direction. Incongruent word choice is like ill-fitting pipes; they disturb the mind like drips from a leak. If a small child said, “Mommy, my tummy is nauseous,” one would assume the child was either precocious or trying out a newly learned vocabulary word. In the same way all the words in a sentence must work together, and the sentence must fit the style and tone of the context.

Most critically, to English and plumbing, the flow of the sentence must be consistent and in one direction. If I incorrectly used a verb tense and said, “I is going to the store now,” then my sentence has sprung a leak. My sentence still carries water- the meaning comes across, but there is a leak of verb confusion. A major meaning flow problem would be like saying, “I have been to go to the store tomorrow.” A listener has no idea what time frame this action is meant to take place, the same as a poorly assembled plumbing system could send water flowing in conflicting directions or into dead ends, with the result of burst pipes and major water leak.

This analogy could be expanded to cover even more aspects of English, but I have already written more than enough to make my point convincing: English is like plumbing.

Chinese, now, is like blocks, the colorful wooden cubes that small children play with. If the reader can excuse the unintended condescension of the analogy, I will explain. Those six-sided playthings are one simple, solid object that has different images painted on each side. Each of the six sides has four edges and can be rotated to face one of four ways. The blocks can be arranged individually and then in combination with other blocks any way the child wants them. This is very Chinese.

In Chinese, words are very simple, having one syllable with the usual pattern of one consonant followed by one vowel, but by altering the tone of the word- rotating the block onto one of its four edges- the face of the block appears differently. It is still the same block face, the same consonant and vowel, but that adjustment in orientation (tone) makes it a different word. Also, as each block has six sides which would have to be examined and handled many times before the whole surface of the block was exactly remembered in the mind’s eye, so the written words of Chinese must be examined and handled- broken down according to root characters and brush strokes, then written out countless times- until that visual memory is unshakably implanted in the brain.

Most pertinent to this analogy, imagine a child (or adult) setting up some blocks any way he wanted on a shelf, metaphorically building a sentence, then objecting strongly when someone else- a foreign language learner- tried to do the same. It would be baffling. The foreigner would question the idea that the blocks really could be arranged in any order, the way Chinese can combine so many words together and is alleged to have no grammar (I have heard this boastful “no grammar” claim before, but I will leave it to a boring linguist to deconstruct it). The foreigner would object, “But I did it just like you!” The native speaker would know though. He had trained his eyes to catch even the slightest difference in the arrangement of his blocks. “There is no grammar,” but the Chinese know which words go together, and though they often cannot explain it, they can perceive when their words aren’t used just right.

In my pronunciation practice with Uncle Jiang and others, I felt like I was setting up my blocks on a display shelf for their scrutiny, and they would huffily say, “No!” and then rearrange my blocks- my pronunciation- by sliding a block over with their finger just a hair. I am a native English speaker, so I thought, “What’s the difference? I speak my words approximately the same as they do.” But no, they could tell. My pronunciation of Chinese tones, which might have sounded identical or close enough to me, could be found outrageous by them. Chinese grammar has no rules save the capricious feelings of its native users, like the whimsy of a child’s arrangement of his toys, and Chinese pronunciation is just as subtle as that of a child who insists his toys must be exactly arranged.

Also note: blocks do not connect. Pipes must connect by being inserted together, being arranged in a system having the right shapes and distances and gravitational flow. But blocks can be stacked or set side by side in any arrangement; there are no joints or threads with which to connect one block to another. Words in Chinese come whole; there is no conjugation of verbs or modification of nouns and adjectives to connect them to another word. Chinese does not have “go, to go, am going, did go, will go, went, gone.” Chinese has “go, go, go.”

Chinese words can simply be set next to each other. One block can easily be swapped out for another equally-sized block and the arrangement will hold, so long as it is a native speaker who knows how to delicately arrange the clumsy objects. If you don’t have the touch, your hearers will soon be calling out “Jenga!”

Yes, Chinese is like blocks. Now that I have essayed to demonstrate this and acquainted the reader with the nature of English and Chinese as I very much imperfectly understand them, I can commence my complaint.

To be continued.

The Basics of the Chinese Language

December 1, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Laoshi Dustin teaches Chinese.

(Continued from “Why I Stopped Learning Chinese”)
(Note: my references throughout are to Mandarin Chinese, or the standard dialect of Chinese which I learned and was exposed to. Cantonese and other major dialects I did not live with nor learn.)

For comparison between the two languages, English and Chinese, let’s look at the word “good.” To do so, I will need to begin a new section which anyone who is already learned in the Chinese language will find tedious and unnecessary. I urge these readers to skip past this post and save me the embarrassment of having my mistaken explanations and generalities corrected.

“Good” is a simple word, easily spelled in English, and to write it one merely has to use the letters he has long been master of: g-o-o-d. In Chinese, the equivalent word is written “好.” This is likewise a simple word in the Chinese writing system, which grades written characters according to their complexity (that is, the number of strokes needed to write a word). In Chinese, a complex character can have upward of twenty strokes. For purposes of reader comprehension only, consider the printed English alphabet, wherein all the letters are written with one or two strokes of the pen, unless one is writing for calligraphic purposes and uses three separate marks to make a letter like “k” or “m.”

The relatively simple Chinese word “好” has six strokes. It is made of two symbols set side by side. “女” (three strokes) which means “woman” and is a pictogram, or pictorial symbol, of a woman grown large with child, and “子” (also three strokes) which means “child” and is a pictogram of a baby wrapped tightly in nursing clothes. Don’t ask how these symbols are supposed to resemble a woman and a baby (I think the “woman” symbol looks like a passable stick figure drawing). It is like the rule of constellations: someone discovers a pattern, he gets the right to name it, it catches on with people, and soon everyone points to the sky and says, “Look, a bear!” when everyone knows full well that the stars look nothing like a bear, major or minor.

Chinese writing today developed out of primitive symbols (not necessarily inferior, just primitive) inscribed onto a hard surface (i.e. bamboo, inscribed with a reed pen, and before that the preserved written artifacts came on bones or tortoise shells). Brush and ink were found to be a better writing method, much quicker, and so the characters began to take on their elegant abstract shapes. With words like “好” we get a glimpse into the Chinese mind. A woman with child is a good thing. Hence the characters for “woman” and “child” form an ideogram (a symbol not of the visual world but the conceptual) for the quintessential representation of good. Not surprising then that China is the most populous country on earth and Han Chinese the largest people group. The character for “home” (家) is a symbol of a roof with an abstract pig underneath, so in ancient China, it was a pig that made a house a home.

Not every written word in Chinese can be broken down to find these charming insights. Not by a long shot. And not many words are simple pictographic symbols, like “木” for tree, “林” for woods, and “森” for forest. The majority are a combination of two or three simple characters: a root to give a hint about the sound or meaning of the word, and an accompanying symbol to distinguish the individual word and perhaps further suggest meaning. As an example, the character for bird is “鸟.” Most every type of bird: chicken, turkey, hawk, pigeon, and so forth, has this character embedded somewhere in its Chinese symbol. In the most basic arrangement, “鸟” is paired side by side with a second, distinguishing symbol to give a hint about the word’s pronunciation or specific meaning. “Chicken,” for example, is written “鸡,” and “duck” is written “鸭.” “Bird” is on the right, indicating the category or type of word (birds), and the distinguishing symbol is on the left. These side by side examples are only one basic form though. The root characters might also be stacked above or below others and contained within other symbols, and very commonly it looks more complex and confusing than the clear side by side examples. Their present-day forms have progressed through stages that have seen the words modified and added to considerably. It takes a lot of deciphering to get at the root of the words and understand their etymology.

So, the memorizing of Chinese characters is aided by mnemonics, but still there is the Herculean task of memorizing the symbols for thousands of individual words if one aspires to achieve an educated level of literacy. Word by word must be written stroke by stroke, over and over again until the stroke order and writing motions are lodged in the brain. If the rote practice of writing characters is abandoned, then how to write them is soon forgotten. The eye still recognizes words when reading them, and the mind has a vague memory of the written symbol, but it is indistinct. Attempting to write the word is useless because Chinese characters must be exactly and intricately drawn. Imagine if writing the word “it” was not a matter of remembering “i” followed by “t,” but memorizing “dot, down stroke, horizontal stroke, downward stroke” in that order. Then imagine memorizing stroke by stroke, first through last, in order, for words with one or two dozen strokes, multiplied by the thousands of words needed to build an educated Chinese written vocabulary.

The popularity of computer keyboards and text messaging has given rise to the modern Chinese observation: “take pen, forget character.” Even Chinese students, who have studied written characters their whole life, struggle to recall how to write certain words, especially when they have ceased writing practice in favor of the keyboard. Our resourceful yet stupid American youths can simply make up their spelling based on text messaging: “r u gone 2 tha gym?” Forgetful Chinese cannot ignorantly staple strokes together because the characters need to be written exactly, or pretty near, standard.

And the students in China strive harder than the pupils in any other language to achieve basic literacy and to acquire a working written vocabulary. Even though the Chinese language has only several thousand written characters in common usage, it takes years to master them all. Each of these characters has to be practiced dozens of times in a writing book before it can be used freely. At the height of my personal studies, I estimated that I could write close to three hundred words off the top of my head, and I recognized at least five hundred by sight- which is not enough to be very helpful in real conversation. I rapidly lost the ability to write mostly all of these words after ceasing regular use. Note: while the written language uses a relatively small number of written characters, these characters are regularly combined in Chinese to form new compound words (example: “How much?” is a two-word combination that is literally “Many-few?”), so the number of words used by a speaker or writer of Chinese, like any language, is practically unquantifiable. It all depends.

But how about typing these symbols on a computer? And how do foreign speakers learn the sounds of the written words if Chinese symbols have no phonics? The answer is a writing system called pinyin, which I mentioned earlier. Pinyin (pronounced in Chinese like “peen-yeen,” spoken through the nose with the tongue held against the roof of the mouth and the open lips fixed in place) uses Roman letters to imitate the sounds of spoken Chinese, only the letters have been loosely adapted and assigned new sounds. For example, “qi” in pinyin Chinese sounds like “chee” spoken quickly through a pinched mouth. “Xi” sounds like “shee,” also spoken with a quick, hissing sound.

Additionally, pinyin uses tonal marks over the vowels in a word to indicate which of the four tones to use. The tones are critical in Chinese for meaning and comprehension. Saying “ma” with a high-pitched even tone could mean “mother” or “to wipe,” whereas saying “ma” with a rising, low to high-pitched tone means “horse.” The simple consonant and vowel pairing “ma” can make seven different, common words, using four tones and one neutral tone (no inflection or stress in the voice). Even with four differentiating tones, words still overlap on the same sound, like “mother” and “to wipe.” All the possible syllables in Chinese have these tonal variations which can change the meaning of the word completely. In English, clearly, saying the same word with a different tone does not change the essential meaning, only the emotional tone or context.

Every syllable in Chinese must have a tone, and every word in Chinese is a one-syllable word, a compound of two one-syllable words, or possibly a phrase of several one-syllable words. Also, syllables must be a consonant followed by a vowel, sometimes ending in the open consonant sounds “-n” and “-ng.” Therefore, fa, fan, and fang, are possible sounds for Chinese words, but a consonant-vowel-consonant combination like fal or fat is not.

To understand how this works out, let’s go back to “好,” the Chinese word for “good.” In pinyin, its sound is written “hǎo.” That is one syllable, a consonant followed by a vowel sound, with a tone mark over the “a” to indicate a rising tone. This pinyin script teaches someone familiar with Chinese pronunciation how to pronounce “好” (it sounds like the question word “how” spoken with a low, rising voice from the back of the mouth). Now, if using a computer or sending a text message, pinyin can be used to input “好” or any of the thousands of other idiosyncratic Chinese characters that would never fit on a keyboard. The user would type “h-a-o,” then the computer program would display a list of the common words that are written “hao” in pinyin. “好” is a very common word, so it would probably be in the first slot in the program’s list, so the user would press “1” and “好” would be entered onscreen. There are other Chinese writing computer programs that go by stroke input, but I found pinyin input to be the easiest method and much more user-friendly; it didn’t require a working knowledge of the written characters’ stroke order.

Typing “nihao” (for “hello”) into a pinyin input gives these options. Option 1 is the most likely option; in this case, “hello.” To select Option 1, the user presses either 1 or the space bar.

The list of options for every syllable input might have had you wondering why such a thing was necessary. Again, it is because every possible consonant and vowel combination is differentiated by the four tones, and the words sometimes overlap, having the exact same sound and tone. “Ma” and “hao” can make many different Chinese words. The pinyin letters are the same, but nonetheless the words are written with a different Chinese character. Chinese is very limited in its possible consonant-vowel combinations. Certain consonants can only be paired with certain vowels. Imagine in English if “she” was possible but “show” was not, and you will have a simple abstraction of what Chinese is like. Looking at the pinyin section of a Chinese dictionary, it becomes readily apparent that the Chinese language is a moderate collection of permutations. Nearly all the words are limited, single consonant and single vowel combinations. English allows for most any pronounceable consonant cluster, and consonants and vowels can form whatever syllables are practically demanded. A word like “strict,” for example, starts with “str-,” a three-consonant cluster inconceivable in Chinese, and it also ends in a hard-stop consonant cluster: “-ct.” Chinese words, written in pinyin, cannot do that. They must end in short, open vowels or in an open consonant sound: “-n” or “-ng.”

Having short, one-syllable words and limited combinations of consonants and vowels necessitates that Chinese has far fewer written words (characters) than English. Chinese uses compound words to create new words from its basic building blocks: one-syllable words, so it is not lacking when the people need a new word to express a new concept. It is only that the new words are all compounds of the existing, simple words. A funny example from the modern age: “computer” in Chinese is a compound word combing their words for “electric” and “brain.” Very simple, perhaps charmingly so, from an English speaker’s perspective. But it must be considered that English accepts all comers in its world word buffet, so long as the word works and has a nice feel or pronunciation. So the English language has an unmatchable amount of words by way of its borrowing from other languages. Regardless, the words and sounds of Chinese are nonetheless quite limited. The sounds are very often similar, indistinguishable to the untrained ear, or even actually identical, indistinguishable no matter whose ears you use.

One other thing, besides pinyin, which was implemented as part of the latest stage of the development of the Chinese language, that being Chairman Mao’s cultural reforms and the intent to make the written language easier to use: simplified Chinese. Simplified Chinese is basically making shortcuts in the complex, intricate, and numerous strokes of many Chinese words. Taking the pen to write “龍” (“dragon”) requires 16 brush or (commonly) pen strokes in traditional Chinese. Making it simpler, but still somehow recognizable, simplified Chinese writes the same word/symbol as “龙” and only uses 5 strokes. An economical alternative trying to make a written language which is by nature cumbersome a little less so.

One word which could use the simplified treatment, which relates back to one of my original questions on the Chinese language, is the character for “I”: 我. The most common pronoun and most common word in speech is pronounced simply (it sounds like “wuh”), but it is written with seven marks of the pen. These seven marks, while written rapidly, are astonishingly too numerous- at least four or five too many- for such a common word.
I know this passage has been tedious, an informal information dump, but I believe it is relevant and necessary to include in my discussion on the topic.

For those more familiar with Chinese, please forgive me where I have been imprecise or ignorant. I will forgive you for not skipping over this section as I asked you to. And for those unfamiliar, I hope I have provided you with some insight and a feel for my experience with Chinese, which is admittedly very limited. Before I get into my complaint on the Chinese language, I would now like to offer a personal observation, an analogy for Chinese and English that is entirely subjective but I think an accurate and easy way to understand the essential difference between the two languages.

Continued in Plumbing and Blocks: A Metaphor for Language

Why I Stopped Learning Chinese

December 1, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

(Note: my references throughout are to Mandarin Chinese, or the standard dialect of Chinese which I learned and was exposed to. Cantonese and other major dialects I did not live with nor learn.)

Anyone teaching English as a foreign language, anyone living in a foreign country, in my opinion, ought to make the effort to learn a new language.

Per teaching English, it is crucial that the teacher understands how to think through language, how to deconstruct sentences and convey meaning to people who have never lived in the context of the language’s home culture, whose ears do not hear the difference between a syllable’s sounds or a word’s feelings. If a man intends to teach, he should be humble enough to learn. Doing the work of thinking through a new language enlightens the teacher to the obstacles before the language student and, I should think, teaches him empathy for those who are learning.

For those living in a new country, the benefits of learning the native tongue should be obvious to anyone. Consider buying medicine from a row of bottles labeled only with foreign script, calling a phone directory to ask for assistance, scheduling an appointment, asking for directions or any kind of help; imagine the need for holding a conversation, interacting with a fellow human being in a meaningful way, or ever participating in the native culture and society. At the very least, learning the natives’ language shows them you are serious and respectful about your stay in their country, and it clears you from charges of hypocrisy should you ever lose patience with an overseas customer service call center and tell the representative on the other end to learn English.

These reasons are enough to induce any serious English-as-a-second-language teacher (there are a few reported to be in existence) to give learning a new language a noble effort. The mountain is a tall, steep climb though, so the new language learner will need a high level of constant motivation (and that from within, not necessarily without) to steel his discipline. He has to want to learn the language. I had, as mentioned, a fascination with East Asian cultures, and a curiosity- shared by most, I suppose- for the artful brushwork of Chinese handwriting. Plus, the dissimilarity and difficulty of Chinese did not intimidate me, it intrigued me. I can look at a food label in Spanish and work out what “sal” and “azúcar” mean by comparing them with English, but when looking at the Chinese symbols on the same food label, I have no idea which of the little dots and dashes to start with. The intricate characters are impressive, but equally abstruse. There is no way for a foreign speaker to sound them out or even begin to guess their meaning. So I wanted to learn the key to unlocking Chinese symbolism. I wanted to satisfy the many questions I had about a language I could not fathom yet which functioned as the communicative and cultural medium for well over a billion people.

For instance, what do the pronouns “I,” “you,” “he,” “she,” and “we” sound like in a language with no connection to Latin? And how are they written? Is there simplicity and significance in their sound and appearance? In English, “I” is written and spoken as simply as is possible, and the rationale for this is axiomatic- in spoken language no other word is used so frequently. The word I use to refer to myself, “I,” ought to be able to be spoken rapidly; there should be no effort in saying it or writing it. I wondered, does Chinese follow this same self-evident logic?

Could I distinguish words by their sound, by onomatopoeia? “Onomatopoeia” comes from the Greek term for the “making of words,” so how did the Chinese make words? In English, the words “fast” and “quick” sound fast and quick, and “slow” and “languid” sound slow and languid. Could I extract the meaning of Chinese words from their established sounds? That is, would the Chinese word for “love” sound soft and expansive? Would harsh verbs like “kick” and “cut” sound as, well, as they were supposed to? Or would they be indistinguishable and (completely) arbitrary as the sounds for plain adjectives like “tame”? And with China’s writing system, famed for its exotic beauty, what would the special words look like? I mean, they could write the word for “sign” however they wanted, but the words for “tiger” and “dragon” and all that Chinese glamour, and big words like “love” are supposed to look… um, I will draw on my juvenile vocabulary here: cool.

So let it be known that I entered into my Chinese studies with a deep well of enthusiasm and interest. I had the self-motivation necessary to begin a new discipline and overcome the obstacles and setbacks inevitable along the way. There are so many languages and cultures that I could not summon the effort to spend an honest hour of study on (and I wager my readers who examine themselves will admit the same). Chinese was a language and culture I had a thirst to know more about.

Aunt Fong and I, ready to take on all things China.

My Studies

I mentioned that my first Chinese friends, Caili Ma and Aunt Fong, were my first Chinese teachers. Caili had experience teaching Chinese as a foreign language, so she would work with me in practically the same way that I learned to teach English, which was focusing on one piece of language and drilling it until I became comfortable with it. Caili would take turns asking me questions and having me ask her questions, always on one language focus or one sentence structure. An example, translated from Chinese: “Who is he?” “He is a man. He is my brother. He is 24 years old.” “Who is she?” “She is a girl. She is a child.” And so on.

My other teacher, Aunt Fong, had never taught language before, and her English skills were sorely lacking, hampering even basic communication with someone who did not intuitively understand her expressions and body language. Aunt Fong and I did intuitively understand each other, so we could get along and palaver our points with patience. I thought of our pairing like Han Solo speaking to Chewbacca, where we had an emotional bond and mutual understanding despite our exclusive languages. In this analogy, I was the tall spectacle in China, more than six inches taller than the average Chinese man, and differing in skin and hair, and Aunt Fong was the charming one with social ease that allowed her to approach anyone and start a conversation, once even getting us invited into a stranger’s KTV room for food, drinks, and singing, so I suppose that makes her the Han Solo and me the Chewbacca.

Aunt Fong’s ebullient personality affected our study time together; we would jump from topic to topic, never settling on one piece of language or ever establishing a plan. She would print off Chinese language study sheets online and give them to me, and after a haphazard four-hour session, I might pick up some new vocabulary through exposure. Exposure is helpful to get used to the sounds and rhythms of a language, but I was certainly unprepared for asking or answering questions when I arrived in China months later.

Once there, I began a much stricter study regimen with Aunt Fong’s husband, Uncle Jiang, a Chinese language professor. He had never tried to teach an adult to speak Chinese, but he was well-learned in Chinese language and literature and had studied English to an advanced beginner level, so he had the knowhow, ostensibly, to teach me. We began meeting two nights a week for two to four-hour study sessions.

Because China is a strongly patriarchal society where the teacher or the father of the family holds court, dictating or occasionally throwing a tantrum as everyone sits passively in uncomfortable silence, and because I am too meek and polite to ever voice an objection, our study sessions lasted for as long as Uncle Jiang wanted them to. This meant I would be sitting at his wooden table as he paced around the apartment, chewing sunflower seeds, spitting out their shells, and commanding me “Again!” whenever I paused long enough from my recitations to swallow and clear my throat, reading and re-reading lesson stories about friends going to a bookstore until Uncle Jiang was likewise exhausted and dismissed me around ten o’clock.

The first lesson, he grilled me and grimly shook his head after I tried to pronounce the four basic tones of Chinese for him (I will explain the four tones momentarily). “No,” he grumbled in a low voice without inflection. When I had practiced with Caili Ma, I was able to mimic her tones, but there was a gap of half a year between then and when I demonstrated for Uncle Jiang, so the mental impression I had of Chinese had rusted and warped in the meantime. He would have me repeat the four basic tones and the consonant sounds of Chinese over and over, telling me without gentle euphemism, “No… No. You…are wrong.”

I once sat with him for ten straight minutes, staring at his mouth as he had commanded me and repeating the Chinese sound for “c” without pauses. Ten minutes isn’t such a long time, but those minutes passed “c” by dreadful “c,” Jiang modeling and me repeating hundreds of times. I thought I knew how “c” was supposed to sound in Chinese, but Uncle Jiang got frustrated with me right away and insisted we drill it and drill it. Eventually, my brain turned to mush and I stopped thinking, only reacting and- I swear a tape recorder would back me up on this- exactly emulating the sounds emitting from Uncle Jiang’s mouth. He finally gave up on correcting me and shook his head. A day later, the university’s Foreign Affairs Officer, Amy Hu, whose English is excellent, told me that “c” in Chinese pinyin script (I will also explain pinyin in a moment) sounds like “-ts” in the words “lights.” That’s what I thought in the first place. I kept that in mind and from then on my supposed “c” problem was solved.

For my homework from Uncle Jiang, I would repeat the sample sentences from my workbook a set number of times until I could speak them at a fairly rapid pace. With his exacting pronunciation critiques and my repetitive drilling, I attained a decent beginner’s level of Chinese. Certain phrases were imprinted on my brain that will stay in my memory, ready to be called up for near-fluent use until the day that I die.

There was something that I quickly forgot and will forever lose unless I pick up my workbook again: the written Chinese characters. Chinese has no alphabet and no phonics. Chinese words are not built up out of parts, they come whole, so every word must be memorized individually. (Technically, it must be said that the written characters are built up out of parts because the simplest symbols and shapes are combined to form new symbols, and all characters draw from the same pool of standardized stroke movements. This means that Chinese characters have similarities and roots- it would be impossible for them not to- however the root symbols are usually not reliable for pronunciation or even meaning, and memorizing word by word is still very difficult and time-consuming.) To memorize a written word in Chinese, a student has to learn the proper stroke order (i.e. pen or brush stroke), which essentially leads the hand to draw the character. In English, young students need only learn how to write the 26 characters A-Z. After struggling with the difference between “b” and “d” and likewise making sure to face the loop of the “p” on the right side, any moderately bright kindergarten student is ready to write any letter at will in only a few weeks of training. Then, using phonics and familiarity, any word can be spelled.

For comparison between the two languages, let’s look at the word “good.” To do so, I will need to begin a new section which anyone who is already learned in the Chinese language will find tedious and unnecessary. I urge these readers to skip past this next section and save me the embarrassment of having my mistaken explanations and generalities corrected.

Continued in “The Basics of the Chinese Language.”

The Real China: The Chinese Classroom

November 13, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 1 Comment

As a foreign teacher in China, I was only expected to teach oral English. Grammar and reading were the domain of the Chinese English teachers. My expertise, coming from an English-speaking country, was speaking and teaching Chinese students how to speak. My native English ability made me valuable to the university- enough that they would pay for a good portion of my flight costs and provide me an apartment for the 11-month term of my contract- because I could not only model proper pronunciation, but take this language that students had been studying in grammar books and speak it. Yes, grammar and language knowledge (and especially knowing how to teach) are important for teaching English as a Second Language, but if you can form new sentences in English, at will (this is the test for language fluency), then you are an expert. Growing up in English-speaking culture and speaking this language from childhood will alert you, naturally, when a Chinese student asks, “Where are you come from?” and grant you the authority to correct him, “It’s ‘Where do you come from?’” No grammar credentials needed.

But I had studied English in college and taken an English language teaching course, so I had some ideas about how best to get students to work through the language. The zeal of naivety is a powerful substitute for real experience.

I had a real problem though that every language must face: no one can learn to speak by watching a native; they must be guided to attempt speaking for themselves.

I had gathered from Chinese students and from their English teachers, both foreign and Chinese, that the oral English classes followed a regular pattern where the teacher would give a topic at the end of one class (e.g. “Where would you like to live in the future?”), and during the next class the students would speak (i.e. read or recite) what they had prepared. I could see the benefit in that: the Chinese classroom is all about following precedent, and speaking extemporaneously terrified most pupils with the dread of embarrassment in front of their peers. I might not know what word to use and then I’ll be standing in front of everyone like a fool, without anything to say!

Also, if the right topic were chosen, the students would be eager to share (in my experiences, an eager class response did occur a few times, but it was rare. The dead look on students’ faces usually said, “You expect me to talk about what?”). So if I chose to follow this method, the students wouldn’t balk at something new, a good portion of the class could pretend that they were really speaking English, and a few bold adventurers might actually wade into new conversational waters.

I decided not to do that though. Speaking is its own language skill, and real speech and conversations follow conventions and patterns that occur in real time. Speech has many forms, and even though public speaking on prepared topics is one of those forms, I wanted my students to practice speaking spontaneously in real life scenarios. So, for my lesson structure, I would introduce and explain the speaking topic of the day (e.g. “Asking for Information”), then demonstrate an exercise for the first scenario (“You are trying to find the school library, so you ask a professor for directions.”). After that, I would tell the students to role-play this with a partner, and after about five minutes- more or less- I would call for everyone’s attention and have a couple sets of partners repeat their role-play conversation for everyone so that we could review the exercise as a class. A sensible plan, perhaps, but there were some inherent problems of the Chinese classroom I could not overcome.

I mentioned that Chinese students follow precedent and avoid speaking up to prevent loss of face. This is not just a natural temperament shared by many. It is a near-universal disposition, a product of the culture that has been built in by all the small things that shape the students’ everyday experience. In contrast, American students are expected to speak up and they are rewarded for it. When I was a high school student I dreaded having to raise my hand to earn my “Participation” grade. Shyness and reserve are either mildly disdained or avoided. Many American classrooms today are shaped by expectations for open discussions. The theory is that student and teacher interaction is best facilitated through a circular or U-shaped seating arrangement where everyone can see each other’s face and the teacher is about equidistant from every desk (lecture halls are different, of course, and not every classroom is set up this way).

In China, every classroom I taught in was a large, long room with a chalkboard and podium in the front, facing rows of long, narrow desks and benches- bolted to each other and bolted into the floor. I saw no exceptions to this. Some classrooms had better furnishings- that is, they had a computer and a projector or a better chalkboard or a podium that was sturdy and didn’t fall apart when you set your bag on it.

A typical classroom at my university. The back chalkboard was always painted on with writing and pictures, usually some kind of slogan. In this case, the large characters say “Teacher’s Day,” which is celebrated on September 10th in China.

From my teacher’s vantage point, it looked like Venetian blinds laid out, with 30 to 50 students crammed in between the slats. The desks were only a bench top with (maybe) some cubbyhole space beneath to hold pens and a couple books. And the seating was very narrow and uncomfortable; there wasn’t enough room to stretch out, so most students would hunch forward and lean into the desks with their chests. Try sitting side-by-side with someone on a constricting bench and carrying on a conversation with them. This, and being asleep, is why people don’t speak up in church. And it is why Chinese students, having spent their young lives this way, will not speak in class. Goad or coax them as I would, they would not. They would not speak up in my class, they would not speak up for a pass, they would not speak up here or there, they would not speak up anywhere.

Add to the seating arrangement the Chinese reverence for the teacher, who usually lectures, and phones and other various distractions, and you have the ingredients that prevent interaction. Seating might seem like a small, surmountable thing, able to be overcome by planning and will, but its dominant effect is subtle and psychological, shaping the teachers’ and students’ ideas on classroom learning. It physically inhibits social interaction between students sitting in the desks by directing their eyes forward, and without an environment conducive to social interaction there is no conversation. Students believe the teacher doesn’t notice them individually, they disappear into the block of seats. No one wants to speak up and break the anonymous silence. That would put everyone’s eyes on them.

This is the Chinese classroom, and sitting in this environment for the large majority of their day, for most of their life, has shaped those students to the degree that I could ask them if 600 RMB ($100 U.S.) was the typical monthly rent for an apartment and repeat myself, rephrase the question, ask loudly, “Yes? No?” and still not get an answer from anyone. It was infuriating. Over and over I experienced that you can bring a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. When lesson planning, if I came to a part where the students had to give their input, I would ask myself, “Can they be creative? Can I trust them to participate and move the flow of the lesson?” Having learned quickly from classroom experience, I knew whenever I asked myself this question that the answer was no. I would either start my lesson plan over or work out an alternative for when the students would sit in stupefied silence.

I met four students who lived in this UNFINISHED off-campus apartment.

This is their kitchen. I hope they weren’t paying $100 a month for this.

Really, the way things worked out, I learned that during the role-play time a small number of students would do the exercise I asked them to do, most might mumble to whoever was sitting next to them and kept an eye out for me, keeping their voices so low that I couldn’t hear them no matter what they were saying in whichever language they were saying it in, and a good number made little effort to conceal themselves doing math homework, reading for another class, taking my picture on their cell phone, sleeping, or text messaging. I had to accept the bad and work with it. Discipline is tough to maintain period; across languages and cultures a novice like myself stood no chance.

In my teacher training prior to China, I was taught to walk around, listen in, and offer correction or answer questions as needed. But when the students are huddled together in a block of long, narrow desks, I could only look on from the outside (that’s not a bad metaphor for China: a mass of humanity crowded together, indecipherable and impenetrable from the outside). So I would pace up the aisles and shimmy sideways, banging my knees, as I passed through the last row of desks, making a pretense of listening in and observing the students’ faces and behaviors.

I noticed all the little details that they had in common. How they would twirl their pens compulsively, each one fluidly repeating their favorite motion and passing the pen around their fingers. As a student, I was a compulsive doodler, but I never noticed any artists in China, only dexterous pen acrobats. And when they wrote, they all used their right hand- no exceptions. I asked a Chinese teacher if I observed that correctly, and she said yes, all students are taught to write with their right hand. I had to infer that this was because of the complexity of the Chinese writing system, where each word has a precise way to be written and the stroke order must be memorized.

When I watch Americans write, I sometimes notice people who invert or reverse the stroke orders I learned in school. That is, they might write the letter “e” starting clockwise from the tail and spiraling in, opposite the way that I do. But handwriting is sloppy in America. It’s very common and trite to hear people joke that they can’t even read their own writing. I always questioned what the purpose of handwriting was if it was illegible, even to the hand that scribbled it. Why not scratch whatever symbols come to mind if the writing doesn’t even look like English script? But that’s America, where anything goes, and being casual and nonjudgmental are unimpeachable virtues.

Not so in China, where students are still expected to meet a standard other than being diverse or tolerant. With Chinese characters, if a writer painted with the ink brush in the left hand, it would look slightly different; every stroke would be off because the hand would have to push the brush instead of pull. Plus, every Chinese word must be memorized. There are no phonics to make learning new words easier, the mnemonics are not at all intuitive, and everyone is expected to learn to write the characters the same way. Repetition is the only way. When each word must be memorized, and universal literacy is on the line, that demands that everyone studies hard, using the same method.

Strangely related to my classroom handwriting observations, I recoiled at the sight of the long fingernails that some of the girls and a lot of the young men grew out on their little finger. I never learned the real reason for this style. One friend told me it was convenient to have one long nail to scratch things and handle things and whatnot. Perhaps. As an observer, I can say that it was effective in raising the hair on the back of my neck in mild disgust.

Not the best picture, but it’s the only one I have where you can see the long pinky nail. Look closely at my stylist’s right hand.

I would scan the students’ shirts and smirk in confusion if I saw English words misspelled or words arranged randomly. If the clothing companies wanted to use English, I thought, why don’t they just copy and paste text they find online? These companies copy everything else. Occasionally, one student might have had on an American college sweatshirt or a sweater that read “Nebraska.” I would always ask those students, “Have you been to Nebraska? Do you know what that means?” Of course, they had no idea, and I usually had to point at their shirt and tug at mine to indicate to them that I was asking about their shirt.

I became used to seeing variations of the same five basic hairstyles for girls (four of which had bangs that stopped even with the brow line) and the same three styles for boys (buzzed short, combed across, and the popular “poof”- a tangled mess of hair that stuck up as if they woke up and never combed it). When I saw a male university student with long strands down to his shoulder blades, it shocked me. I’m sure it was the same reaction middle America had to the first longhairs of the 60’s. So, bored by the interchangeable bobs, I differentiated the students by character traits and fashion choices; things like brightly colored eyeglass frames, over-sized frames on some girls, or even frames worn without lenses. I thought that it was foolish, if not pretentious to wear frames without needing vision correction, but those who wore them defended the fashionable practice for its “cool” style.

Most of my female students’ hairstyles conformed to this.

Every so often I would see some sort of English reading material on a student’s desk space. I would ask her if she was reading the book for class or pleasure, and maybe try and milk some questions out of it if I thought the student was friendly and able to handle a bit of small talk. Some students, though, I knew to just walk by. Either they would clam up with embarrassment and fail to respond audibly, or I had learned from past experience that there was no way they were going to put together a complete English sentence. One student, when I asked her a question related to the class exercise, looked me right in the eye and quietly but coldly told me, “Please, leave me alone.” And that I did, for the rest of the year.

In the middle school I taught at, more so than at the university, I noticed a lot of calligraphy practice books and pens with special writing nibs. Throughout China, I observed brushwork and fanciful writing fonts far more often than images and icons. The Chinese writing system is what the people grew up learning, what they practiced, and hence, what they loved. It is always on the Chinese mind. I even acquired the Chinese habit of breaking down the characters I saw into brush strokes and practicing their stroke order with my finger on my palm or thigh.

And speaking of writing, I have to note the absence of pencils and erasers. The Chinese didn’t write with them (not that, in America, pencils are preferred over pens for writing purposes, but they are more common in my observation). So whenever the students made a mistake, they would pull out a thin wheel of tape, run it over the section they wanted to remove, and peel away a thin layer of paper from their sheet. This mandatory school supply could be spotted on most desks, and during a written test the tape wheels would be passed back and forth as students nervously tore away at their paper.

These weren’t for white correction tape. They had clear tape meant to pull off the top layers of ink and paper.

One unsightly thing I could not help but notice was the soft black hairs on a few girls’ upper lip, and my occasional glimpses of coarse leg hairs and underarm hair. I hesitate to mention it, I don’t mean to shame any of the young women, but body hair was a not uncommon part of real life in China. Most of the Chinese I saw grew hardly any body hair, but when it did sprout up, it was obvious against their light skin. I don’t know how the Chinese view it, but it always startled me whenever I saw girls with leg and armpit hair. Please note, this was not the norm I saw, and on average I would say that most had fair features and smooth skin.

But the truly disgusting thing I observed among my students, the feature that both sickened and infuriated me, was the sight of red, purplish, puffy hands. I’m sensitive to the shape of hands, and by that I mean that I notice the look and character of individuals’ hands, which probably began from my love of drawing, so when I first saw a girl with fat, square fingers instead of slender curves, I passed it off as a physical anomaly that I would not want to hold hands with. But then I saw it again, and then again on another girl: the skin was past red and now had the deep purple color of a contusion. What was wrong with these girls’ hands? I had never seen this before. Skinny girls with fat, square hands.

The question had an obvious answer. Just as my face was sore and red from constant exposure to the cold, these girls had chilblains on their hands from sitting in unheated classrooms throughout the winter, taking notes with un-gloved hands. Yes, because we were south of the Huaihe River (the geographic dividing line), the Chinese government did not allow central heating in buildings, except for department stores and some hotels and restaurants. Because we were right on the southern edge of the Huaihe River, that meant our city was as far north as one could get in China and still not have central heating. So, all winter long, from dormitory to dining hall (or “canteen”), from the classroom to the library or anywhere else, everyone had to wear layers of winter clothing, but either finding it superfluous or an unnecessary expense, most students went without hats and gloves. Perhaps the circumstances could not be helped, but seeing how inflamed those girls hands became, and seeing how normal they thought it, how overlooked it was, how assumed it was, was a small detail that swelled my indignation.

We’re wearing coats because there was no heat in our classroom. Side note: my student, John, in the purple coat in the upper left, wore glasses just for show. They either had no lenses or non-corrective lenses

The Real China: “No! This is not a potato!”

November 10, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Either to make conversation or as a language quiz, Uncle Jiang would often ask me, “Dustin, what is this?” He was not the only one.

Usually, he asked it when we sat down for dinner. He would pick something up with his chopsticks and ask for its English name. I didn’t know who was supposed to be “the grasshopper” and who the old sage in this situation. Many times, my answer was simple. “Porridge. This is porridge.” In America, we would probably call it Chinese porridge or just use the Chinese name, as we do for Kung Bao chicken and all the other mainstays on a Chinese menu, but the basic vocabulary word Uncle Jiang was looking for was porridge.

Other times, I was surprised when he asked me for an English word and then disagreed (!) with my answer. I held a piece of sweet potato in my chopsticks once, and Uncle Jiang asked me, pointing at the purple tuber, “Dustin, what are you eating?”

“This is a sweet potato,” I replied without thinking twice.

“No!” he said, “This is not a potato!”

He looked indignant, even shocked. I had no idea what to tell him. Maybe appease him by calling it a yam? I stumbled, trying to explain in simple English that a potato is a potato and a sweet potato is a sweet potato, two different things. I supposed he thought I meant it was a sweet-tasting (normal) potato, and I had to infer that the two vegetables do not have similar names in Chinese or occupy similar categories in Chinese thought. Well, why not? I cannot imagine any object more similar to a potato than a sweet potato.

The source of the controversy. I don’t know what else to call it besides “purple sweet potato.”

When I brought one of the boiled purple sweet potatoes to have as my breakfast before class, it was the same routine. My students were surprised by my breakfast, a vegetable grown in their own soil, and asked me, “What is that?”

“A sweet potato,” I told them.

“No! It is not a potato!” they argued, as adamant as Uncle Jiang.

Then why did you ask me? I wanted to counter. Or Fine. You tell me what it is. It’s your vegetable. I have never seen a purple sweet potato like that in my neighborhood of the US.

I was befuddled that they could disagree with me on a term from my native language. How was that possible? I was considered the expert, so they would ask me questions about English vocabulary and acceptable grammar, but they wouldn’t accept my answer if it conflicted with their understanding of what a “sweet potato” should be in Chinese terms.

At the dining hall (or “canteen”, as the students called it) I had a plate of silver noodles once. Or so I thought they were called from reading labels at Chinese buffets. Once again, my students asked me for the name of the mystery item I was eating.

I took a breath. “These are noodles.”

“No! It is not noodles!”

This time I vigorously tried explaining myself. I told them that anything that fits the shape- long, stringy, and noodle-like – is a noodle. If it looks like a noodle, if it tastes like a noodle, it is a noodle. I think they disagreed because this noodle was made from a different flour than the noodles they knew as “noodles.”

Even the rainbow-colored Funnoodle is a member of the noodle family. (Sorry, no silver.)

“It may be a rice noodle,” I bargained, “But this is a carbohydrate in a long, thin shape. IT IS a noodle.” I don’t think I had them convinced. Really, the English language did not have appropriately nuanced food categories to satisfy them.

Besides noodles, Chinese cuisine is big on dumplings, each type with its own name, and so they were crestfallen when, one after one, I would answer my questioners, “Dumpling. Dumpling. That is also a dumpling. Yes, this is a dumpling, too.”

Their furrowed brow seemed to say, “But this one is sweet and is made by rolling a ball of rice flour! That one is pork inside a boiled wrapper. This one has shrimp and is fried in oil. They are different!”

One time, Uncle Jiang changed the game on me. He wasn’t going to wait for me to give him a none-too-specific vocabulary word, he would supply it himself. Over breakfast, he called the golden sweetener “bee honey.” I gave him a doubtful look. He held out for a second, then asked, “Bee honey, or honey?” As I told him it was the latter, I wondered what kind of honey these Chinese had been keeping secret from the outside world that they would need to specify “bee” honey. Surely, Marco Polo would have reported on a non-bee creature also capable of producing honey. And, if this mystical being could do it without regurgitating nectar, it would outsell the “bee honey” tenfold.

I guessed that the Chinese word for honey was a typical Chinese compound word, probably combining “bee” plus a word to indicate the fluid product of honey. (Yes, the Chinese word for honey is a compound word that translates literally “bee honey.”) China did have a multitude of honey varieties (hardly any peanut butter on their shelves but ample honey sections in every grocery store), and canvas roadside tents where a vendor would hang out all day napping and apparently selling jars of honey he had supposedly harvested himself, from bees.

(Here’s an interesting link from a beekeeper with insight into Chinese honey and an encounter with a street beekeeper… er, a beekeeper selling honey on the streets.)

The most egregious battle over appellation came after dinner at my friend Ma Chao’s house. (Ma Chao’s family name means “horse.” I would like to meet an American named Tom Horse or Tom Yellow, two common Chinese surnames, instead of Tom Butler or Tom Cooper.) At the dinner were Ma Chao, Aunt Fong, a kung fu teacher, an English-speaking Director of Foreign Relations at a local university who went by Mike for his English name, one of Aunt Fong’s friends, and me. We made it through dinner without arguing over potatoes, dumplings, or noodles. Then, after dinner, when everyone was all liquored up (as Chinese dinner guests are wont to be), Ma Chao brought out his weapons (as a few of my Chinese friends were wont to do).

Like many kung fu enthusiasts, Ma Chao was a collector of swords and polearms. Ma Chao, Mike, and Aunt Fong’s friend, Lily all wanted to handle them and pose for pictures. I thought that the inebriated swinging blades at each other was a stupid idea, but as the saying goes, when in Rome, disregard personal safety. At their urging, I came over to the living room to take some pictures with them.

Ma Chao and me, handling his weapons.

Ma Chao handed me his sword, and Mike, as my translator, informed me, “That is a knife.The Chinese name is dao.”

The sword I held required both hands on the hilt, and the blade was around three feet long.

“No,” I told him flatly, “this is a sword.”

“No!” Mike riposted, “It is a knife.” He pointed to the cutting edge and said, “See? It is only sharp on one side.”

I explained, “It doesn’t matter if the other side is dull, that only means it is a single-edged sword. But it is a sword!” In my flustered state, I rushed my words, not caring if I lost my listeners over technical details.

“No,” Mike insisted, “sword is for a different word. This is a dao, it is a knife.”

“A knife?” I exclaimed, “Look how long it is!”

That sword could have severed limbs in one stroke. “If it uses two hands and the blade is longer than my forearm, it is a sword!”

I wanted to ask him how he would classify a pointed rapier without a cutting edge. Or, hand him a dictionary and have him look up broadsword. I’m sure it would have been of no use.

Lily pretends to behead me with a Chinese “knife.”

His stance, like that of all my vocabulary quiz masters, was fixed and intractable. I had experienced the same stubborn reaction by enough people that I could tell it was a phenomenon of culture and language, not a personal idiosyncrasy. Somehow, a people that had been raised in rigid classrooms, taught to copy and repeat everything they heard, became skeptical and as combative as a wild donkey when my foreign authority told them what was what in English.

I was left to question what kind of argument would persuade them of a vocabulary word’s legitimacy. What I wouldn’t give to see Uncle Jiang and Mike on a Webster’s usage panel. “No! It is not a transitive verb! It is a noun.”

Mike’s opinion would carry a lot of weight at Webster’s so long as he was carrying this Chinese pole weapon (guandao) with him.

No, they didn't have a tree planted by either Gallagher or his brother (whom he sold his comedy act to). I checked.

The Real China: Chinglish

October 30, 2015 / the.mantis@outlook.com / 0 Comments

Asia is famous, at least on the internet, for garbled translations of English (or should I say the Orient is famous since nobody knows about Kyrgyzstan). T-shirts and street signs mash up text that is ostensibly English, but grammar, word order, and especially coherency are completely off. The result of Chinese people using English in conversation and signage- Chinglish- is often bizarrely meaningless or outrageously vulgar.

Aunt Fong is here. Where are you?

I did see a fair share of pathway markers with Chinglish cautions in Chinese tourist sports. Next to a scenic stream, visitors were warned “Water depth! don’t near.” In a wooded area a sign minded onlookers “Experienced vicissitudes. No ravages undergone,” which I tried to follow, but failed. I got stuck halfway experiencing things when I realized I didn’t know what a vicissitude was.

These signs were good for a chuckle, as were the t-shirts I saw on young people that had everything from random words strung together, to letters mashed from a keyboard, to outright curse words that made my jaw drop. The kids wearing these clothes had no idea what they said; they only liked the “cool” style of English words. I was there to witness one college student’s embarrassment when my Foreign Affairs Officer at the university where I taught, Amy Hu, told the girl that the English text on her shirt was a description of breast feeding. Sometimes the naïve students’ t-shirts left me mortified, other times I just laughed, but I couldn’t really fault them since I come from a nation of gullible tattoo freaks who willingly and illiterately ink awkward Chinese characters onto their skin.

More common than the phenomenon of Chinglish text, sometimes more interesting but often only frustrating, were the spoken English sentences made by Chinese who were trying to transliterate typical Chinese phrases using English words.

Here are the most common Chinese-to-English phrases I heard during my stay:

“No, thank you.” (Instead of “You’re welcome.”)
In Chinese, it is standard to reply to thanks by saying bie keqi (sounds like “bee-yeh kutch”), which means roughly “Don’t be polite,” or bu yong xie (boo yowng shee-ay): “No need to thank me,” equivalent to “You’re welcome.” So a polite Chinese person, after hearing me say “Thank you,” was tripped up by the similarity of the Chinese phrases and would tell me “No, thank you,” sometimes being corrected by a classmate: “It’s ‘You’re welcome!’”

Pronounced, by Chinese speakers unused to that tricky th- sound, as “Sank you.”

“He/She” Confusion
In China, the men are men and the women are women, but you could never trust who was which if you heard them spoken of by another person. For example, someone might begin talking about his mother, but then he would make a switch and say, “He lived in the south as a girl.” If the contradiction were ever as glaring as that, I would give my friend an obvious hint. “He lived?” They would pick up on my playful disbelief right away: “I mean she!” But I learned to be skeptical and expect conflation between “he” and “she.” In Chinese, “he” and “she” are pronounced the same (“ta” for both) and written not all that differently. It amazed me that these simple pronouns could be a stumbling stone for so many errors. That is, until I noticed myself switching pronouns when I tried to rush out a sentence in their language.

“My brother/My sister”
These terms weren’t confused with each other; they were often substituted for “my cousin” or “my friend.” I heard quite a few young people mention their brother or sister and I started to become suspicious. “Don’t you all have a One-Child Policy?”

Many of the young people I met in my semi-rural province did have siblings because- I assumed- they were out of the government’s iron grip, probably because they lived in the country where enforcement was lax and it was an open secret that there were ways around the One-Child Policy. Some had parents who must have been wealthy enough to pay the fines and exorbitant extra costs of raising and educating a second child.

Once, I asked a young lady why she called her cousin her “brother.” She told me there wasn’t a good word for “cousin” in Chinese. Moreover, she grew up as an only child and so did her cousin, and because they were frequently around each other at every family gathering, they felt close like siblings and naturally called each other “brother” and “sister.”

One thing to note: having China’s One-Child Policy in mind will confuse you if you ever meet the people in China. There were many single-child households, sure, but there were also many young people with a (real) brother or sister. I would ask them, “What about the One-Child Policy? Are your parents in trouble with the government? Is your little brother a secret?” I never got a satisfactory response to my question. It was either a flat yes or no, or a “Yes, but we do” or “No, we can.” They had a hard time explaining it. Actually, none elected to give me a worthy explanation. Probably not unlike explaining the allowances granted by Freedom of Speech laws to a man from a state-controlled culture, or American gun laws and the Right to Bear Arms to a novice foreign visitor.

China’s version of the Fountain of Youth, the Immortal Bed.

“I very like it.”
Grammatically, the sentence could be “I really like it,” or “I like it very much,” or even “I very much like it.” This is a fine distinction, easily unknown or forgotten by my congenial Chinese friends. It is easy to understand how someone learning English would say “I very like it” after they learned that “very” is an intensifying adverb to turn a word like “good” into the superlative “very good.”

“I know.”
I was not so charitable toward this phrase. No, I almost lost my temper and made a classroom outburst the first time I heard a middle school student say, “We know.” It was when I went to the chalkboard to make a distinction about two similar phrases. Maybe I was explaining the difference between replying, “I’m sorry?” and “Say again” to the Chinese students who thought that the latter was the preferred way to ask someone to repeat themselves. I don’t remember for sure. But as I was writing and explaining myself, a student said, “We know.” I immediately snapped over my shoulder and eyed the students to try and identify who said it. It sounded like an openly condescending remark, made by a student rolling their eyes at the redundant teacher. Being very green and lacking confidence in my authority as a foreign teacher, I held my peace and went on with the lesson. I wanted to scold them, “You know? Then why did you make the mistake?! Don’t stop me when I’m teaching you, you little smart alecks!”

When I saw this sign, I thought there had better be monkeys.

When I saw this sign, I thought there had better be wild monkeys.

I heard “I know” or “We know” replies a few other times, in class and in conversation, and it started to make me suspicious. It was spoken with a flat tone at times, not with a sarcastic edge, and it was spoken politely in friendly conversation with a smiling student. Something was amiss. Finally, after learning enough Chinese to become familiar with everyday phrases, I learned that a common response used to indicate understanding is, literally translated, “I know.” In English, if someone tells me news and I tell them, “I know,” of course it usually means “I already knew that.” In Chinese, “I know” (“Wo zhidao”, said “Wuh jih-dao”) means the English equivalent of “I see.” Or, the difference between telling someone you understand them and telling them they’re behind the curve because you understood that already.

The sign delivered as promised.

“Read. Follow me.”
It was either this or “Look. Follow me.” Or “Watch me.” Chinese is a language of simple commands, having no use for spare words to make a sentence flow or sound more polite. Chinese speakers, steeped in this straightforward grammar structure, naturally adapted it to English sentences.

The robotic commands I heard in China sounded very abrupt to my ears, conditioned to catch the subtle differences in tone between English words. A Chinese speaker with beginning or intermediate English skills might use Tarzan talk or baby talk, but I always gave them credit. I knew what they meant and I knew they had put forth a lot of effort to learn to speak English. Also, I knew firsthand how difficult and time-consuming it was to acquire a foreign language, and English was such a foreign language compared to Chinese.

Besides, once the students of English had worked with the language for a few years and been exposed to enough American movies, they started to phrase things naturally.

Sound advice.

“Good, good study. Day, day up.”
This is a literal translation, I understood, from a motto of Chairman Mao. The very first time I heard someone use this cheer, the group of Chinese friends I was with laughed at the “Chinglish,” but I understood it perfectly, immediately. It seemed like a clever way to use English; the simplicity streamlined the words’ meaning. I heard this phrase fairly often, usually as a rallying cry after group exercise or spoken by students in discussions on difficult homework assignments.

Perhaps this is the finest example for English speakers, using the building blocks of our own language, of how Chinese works. Super simple, with no inflection or function words in between the main thoughts.

This one almost makes sense.

“Have a good sleep.”
Whenever I went out to lunch with someone (usually students I met in the cafeteria) they would bid me farewell by wishing me a good sleep. Naptime was assumed, a part of the culture built into work and school schedules. So it was expected that after our lunch was over, I would go back to my apartment and sleep. My friends were only being polite. This phrase is fine grammatically; it stood out to me only because I have never heard an American wish me a good nap and in China I heard it every time I went off to my after lunch rest.

“Wish you happy every day.”
My friendly well-wishers would also end conversations, text messages, greeting cards, and online chats with “Wish you happy every day.” I’ve never heard an American say this, either, and I doubt it was part of the Chinese English language textbooks. I had to assume that people were transliterating a standard Chinese phrase.

“I’m fine, thank you.”

Speaking of English textbooks, in China (and all over eastern Asia) the students are taught to respond to the basic greeting, “Hello. How are you?” with “I’m fine, thank you.” It sounds as wooden and forced as you might imagine an uncomfortable Chinese student would sound when reciting strange, foreign sounds.

My fellow foreign English teacher, Grant (the Australian), and I would always tell students on the campus, “You don’t have to say, ‘I’m fine, thank you.’ You can say, ‘I’m good. How are you?’ or anything you want.” Grant would add a “mate” in there. It would have been a sweet dream for me to see a Chinese student referring to his friends as “blokes” or “mates.”

“What a pity.”
The other stock phrase that was over-used to perplexing effect was “What a pity.” I heard this one tossed out hundreds of times over every mild disappointment. In America, the standard reaction I’ve heard to bad news is “That’s too bad” or “I’m sorry (to hear that).” Among my peers, I’m sorry to report, the popular reply is “That sucks.” My generation is no longer aware that this phrase is vulgar, and the Chinese were unaware that “What a pity” is thought quaint by contemporary Americans.

It sounds, I don’t know, British? There is something overly refined about “What a pity” that strikes Americans as something that might be spoken by a Gibson girl or white-gloved old matron. Americans are far too proud of their middle class-ness and informality to casually say, “What a pity.”

In my mind, I thought of the James Bond arch-villain, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and his more famous parody, Dr. Evil from the Austin Powers’ movies.

By the time I saw the sign, somebody or bodies hadn’t obeyed the sign, since the smiling flower was gone and not saying hello to anybody.

One time, I missed a Chinese lesson with my very strict teacher, Uncle Jiang. Aunt Fong had taken me out on an errand and told me it would be all right to postpone the lesson, but soon her husband called her up and chattered some harsh vibrations over the cell phone. Then, Aunt Fong handed the phone to me, stupefied. My first phone conversation in China with someone whose English skills were quite limited. What was I supposed to say?

“Hello?” I said.

“What a pity…” Uncle Jiang slowly growled. His voice was low; angry emotion seethed inside but he restrained it, I imagined, through clenched teeth and flared nostrils.

It was the first time I had heard “What a pity” in this kind of a context. I didn’t pick up on his meaning, and I tried to relay the explanation that Aunt Fong had told me in the clearest bullet points. “I’m with Aunt Fong. We are near your home. She is taking me to dinner. We will eat dinner.”

Uncle Jiang wasn’t interested in listening. “What a pity…” he breathily said again. I was confused at first, then taken aback. I could feel his rage through the phone. He went on and lectured me that when we agree to a meeting time, we have to commit to it. This happened during week 2 or 3 of our Chinese-English study, and up till that point I thought we intended to work hard but had mutually agreed to meet together as friends. Uncle Jiang didn’t take a casual interpretation.

“Okay… Okay… Okay,” I replied to him. It was my first brush with Chinese temper tantrums. While in China, I would witness a few other occasions where a man would become moody as a little boy and expect everyone to cater to him. This behavior was contemptible when I saw it in husbands or young adults, but it was worst in government officials and media spokesmen. I figured that Confucian social structure and the pampering of male children resulted in self-centered men who abused the attention they were entitled. Let me qualify this statement though: I saw Chinese men in private life on limited occasions. Mostly, in public, I saw standard behavior that I would expect from men anywhere, but with Chinese characteristics: joviality, conviviality, excitability, boisterousness, slovenliness, loudness. I am not saying that temper tantrums were typical, only that there were more than a couple conspicuous instances where I was shocked to see a man acting babyish, and disgusted to see the people around him having to accommodate him. Of course, American men lose their tempers too, just not with the same pouting I saw in China.

In the media, Chinese government spokesmen act contemptuous and high-handed when dismissing U.S. claims of computer hacking, for example, and they are outright bullies when denying claims in South China Seas territorial disputes with their Asian neighbors. When I see it, I have to soothe my indignation by humorously imagining them delicately stroking a white cat and haughtily saying, “What a pity.”

This blog, like this “world” in China, is non-smoking.

“What are you doing?” “Where are you going?”
Moving on to a lighter topic, “What are you doing?” was a typical Chinese greeting. Another traditional greeting was “Have you eaten?” I was told that this became common in China’s impoverished past, when people were many and food was scarce. Asking your neighbor if he had eaten showed your concern and indicated you were willing to feed him if he were hungry.

In the same way, friends and acquaintances meant to show concern and polite interest by asking me “Where are you going?” whenever I left my campus apartment. It could feel very direct and intrusive, as if I were being interrogated over suspicious activity. After righting my balance, I was able to rattle off a casual answer. In a way, I had to admit that it was a better information-gathering question than “How are you?” If someone replies, “Good,” then what is there to work with? In my experience the reply to that reply is “That’s good” and the dialogue is over. But if someone tells you what they are up to, then that might be enough to open a small conversational door. At least it’s better than the dead-end of “How are you?” “I’m good.” “That’s good.”

For once the English is perfectly proper. A good minder, too.

“Eat medicine”
This one was minor, but instead of pairing “medicine” with the verb “take,” the Chinese transliterated their own verb-noun pairing and said, in English, “eat medicine.”

I mention this because “eat medicine” sounded odd to my ear (you don’t eat medicine- that would involve chewing- you swallow it or drink it), and because it serves as a representative example of the many minor discrepancies in language and conceptual thinking between Chinese and English. (These minor phrasal discrepancies can be found in any language compared with another.)

Think about this one: why do we say “take medicine” but the Chinese say “eat medicine”? It is essentially describing the same thing, but the words “take” and “eat” have different usages and associations. In one language, “eat” can mean the intake of something like medicine, in the other it involves food and insults, but not medicine, and chewing and swallowing.

“Where are you come from?”
This phrase was the main offender while I was in China. Other Chinglish transliterations or mistranslations could be funny, confusing, awkward, charming, strange, nonsensical, off-putting, or just plain incorrect, but “Where are you come from?” annoyed me harshly and persistently.

Whenever a curious stranger approached me and asked me this question, my spine shivered, my hair rose on the back of my neck, and my jaw stiffened. Its sound was as pleasant to me as the screeches of an engine run without oil.

Most times, when speaking with a Chinese friend, student, or new acquaintance, I was very gracious with them and appreciative that they were trying to speak English with me. It took courage. So I had patience and I tried to build them up, only seldom correcting a language error when they were having difficulty. With “Where are you come from?” though, I insisted on slipping in “It’s ‘Where do you come from?’” in the snippy tone of a grammar pedant. I could not let it pass. It I could have, I would have rounded up all the attempted English speakers in China and conducted a one-hour class to drill “Where do you come from?” until no one could forget it.

You may ask what was so bad about this grammar error in particular. Well, I would have to answer its prevalence- sprouting up everywhere like an invasive weed- and more so its ugliness. It takes the brain along one path: “Where are you…” and then startles it with the jarring contradiction “…come from.” Plus, it was often blurted out with a glib smile, as if an enemy were insulting my injury with a grin.

This sign definitely wasn't minded by native Chinese speakers, a few of whom I saw carving their name into the Great Wall with car keys.

Signs aren’t always worth much to native speakers anyways. I saw a few of them carving their names into the Great Wall with car keys.

There were other common confusions I tried to clarify when I could, when necessary. The most prevalent item was the difference between “What’s the matter?” and “What’s the matter with you?” a significant tonal distinction in English but a similar meaning if the words are analyzed by a Chinese student. In these cases I was calm and I picked my battles- an English class I would correct, but a casual acquaintance I would not. I knew my place.

Any grammar ire was reserved for “Where are you come from?” which I immediately corrected before giving them my answer. Perhaps I gave them the impression that most Americans are difficult and sharp. Maybe I should have told them “I am come from France.”

Translates fine, but I thought it was funny that this amusement park was called “China Dinosaurs Park” and not just “Dinosaurs’ Park.”

Tag: Chinese language

The Real China: Conclusion

Mantis vs. Chinese

Plumbing and Blocks: A Metaphor for Language

The Basics of the Chinese Language

Why I Stopped Learning Chinese

The Real China: The Chinese Classroom

The Real China: “No! This is not a potato!”

The Real China: Chinglish

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