Having Fun All The Time

As my spoken Chinese level continues to improve, I’m finding myself engaging in extended conversation with strangers more and more often. Speaking with strangers is something I’ve been doing since my first days in China more than two years ago, of course, but in the past it’s always been a rather stilted, awkward affair. Especially in my first year, it was all I could do to blurt out answers to basic questions, focusing carefully on my tones and grammar and word choice, just praying that I wouldn’t say something horribly unintelligible, awkward, or worse–offensive or embarrassing.

For example, when having dinner with my students in my second semester, I intended to say, “I want to ask you a question” (wǒ xiǎng wèn nǐ yī xià/我想问你一下) but because of a tonal mistake ended up saying, “I want to kiss you” (wǒ xiǎng wěn nǐ yī xià/我想吻你一下）. The operative verb there being wèn/wěn–the classic beginner’s mistake.

In my second year, conversations with strangers picked up a lot, and I started making friends. One of my best friends in China I met on the bus on the way home from work. She sat down next to me and we ended up chatting happily for fifteen minutes, and I was on my toes enough to ask for her number before she got off the bus. That random encounter blossomed into a great friendship, which ended up turning into a lot of friendships with her friends and her boyfriend’s friends. But it was something of a rarity. Usually when strangers spoke to me, or I spoke to them, I tried my best to answer their questions in a friendly way and to show my own curiosity, but oftentimes encounters ended with a fizzle as I lacked the confidence to really engage them enthusiastically, and generally strangers seemed oddly dissatisfied with my answers, although they always complimented me on my Chinese.

Recently I believe I may have discovered one of the reasons: The nǐ versus nín form of address. The first one (你）is the informal word for “you” in Chinese. The second (您）is the polite form–the eqivalent of tu and vous in French, or tú and usted in Spanish. The informal is used for friends or people your own age in Chinese, or for people you’ve met at least once before. The formal, of course, is for older people or people in some position of authority, or for people you’ve just met.

Of course, being a native English speaker, my brain doesn’t work that way. Especially coming from the northeast United States, where the norm is to be chummy and relatively informal with strangers, previously it always felt unnatural and forced, even with my superiors at work, to use the polite form. It always felt like I was sucking up or being a brown-noser. Also, I had gotten used to saying nǐ and it was a struggle for me to twist out the slightly different pronunciation every time I asked a question or used the word for “you,” which was a lot.

Of course, as with anything new, especially in language study, the new thing is hard to do the first few times but then it quickly gets a lot easier. I found as I started introducing nín into my speaking that people seemed to react much more positively to me, and to show more patience and acceptance right away. These things are of course really hard to gauge–you never know why someone reacts the way they do–but since I started using nín I feel that I’ve had much more success in having longer and richer conversations with people I’m meeting for the first time–my own age, older, men, women, everybody.

And it makes sense. If you’re addressing someone in the familiar form and you’re not familiar, they’re gonna think it’s weird. And now that I’ve adapted in this way I notice the rather sudden, unexpressed change in relationship that occurs when the other person starts using nǐ (which usually happens about five to ten minutes into a conversation). This is incredibly important, because when you’re studying a language, pretty much all you want to do is engage other people in that language and it always feels amazing to have involved conversations in that language. Just like having a fantastic conversation in English feels great, but possibly better. Just today I was eating lunch in the dining hall alone, as usual, but I changed one thing: I kept my phone in my pocket and stopped myself from reading the news while I ate. I just sat there and waited for someone to sit down across from me. And when somebody sat down, I waited two minutes, and then started what turned out to be a great conversation: “Nín shì zhèbiān de lǎoshī ma?” Are you a teacher here?

I’ve tried that question many times before, but in the past I usually made the mistake of using nǐ. Now I see that all along I was (maybe) getting things off on the wrong foot, subtly annoying or offending the person across from me rather than flattering them. And of course the rule of conversation with new people is: flatter.

Even with Chinese, who always claim to be modest and not to care about politeness, it turns out it still matters.

Today I was teaching class and had a realization when a student read a sentence from a dialogue we were working on.

The sentence was: “I’ve got two potential applicants for the position in your company.”

A single student read the sentence, because recently whenever I’ve introduced new material to the class I’ve been asking them to read it one-by-one, rather than in the group, so that I would have a chance to listen to the students’ tone and word emphasis carefully.

In this case, when the student read the sentence, she had no pronunciation problems in terms of the individual words. She produced the sounds of each word perfectly, as if the rules of pronunciation of the International Phonetic Alphabet (the IPA) had been hard-coded into her brain (which they pretty much have, by this point).

But I noticed a problem. It was that she wasn’t using tone and emphasis to indicate that the word “two” was in fact the number two, not the word “to”.

For example, take a look at two sentences:

“I know to dance.”

“I know two dances.”

Do me the favor of ignoring for a moment that “I know to dance” is kind of a nonsense sentence, and think about this question: What is the pronunciation difference between these two sentences? Of course, as a native speaker of English, you know that the word “to” is pronounced more like “tuh” in the first sentence, whereas the pronunciation of “two” in sentence two is louder, clearer, and longer, with a long “ooh” sound at the end.

But what is the pronunciation difference between “to” and “two”? Can you explain it?

After teaching English as a second language for a year and a half to age groups from college to primary school and everything in between, I don’t remember anymore if I could have succinctly answered that question before I came to China. But I doubt it.

I certainly had zero familiarity with the IPA, and didn’t even know, at the time, that my soon-to-be students would have been relying on the IPA to learn the pronunciation of words since their childhoods when they first started studying English.

For most of my first year of teaching, in fact, I still had no idea how to write or read the IPA, much less, for that matter, how to teach the individual sounds of English other than standing in front of my students and saying, “It’s thhhhhhh. THHHHHH! Put your tongue between your teeth! Watch me! THHHHHHH!”

But that’s because I hadn’t taken the time to learn the IPA. Every time I looked at it I got a headache. The IPA is that pronunciation coding that you find in some dictionaries when you look up English words. It’s the one that virtually all native English speakers ignore, because they never had to learn it.

I still hate looking at the IPA, but I’ve learned its value. Just to give you a peek at what it looks like, here’s the sentence above that my student read, rendered in the International Phonetic Alphabet:

aiv gat tu: strɔ:ŋ kændədəts fɔ:r ðə markətiŋ pəzɪʃən jʊr lʊkiŋ tu: fɪl

If you put this string of funny looking characters in front of a Chinese student in middle school or above, she can read it. I learned it because last semester I grudgingly taught a course in English pronunciation. I started teaching the class  only knowing a few of the several dozen characters, and by the end I knew all of them, just by bloody in-class repetition of use and by having to teach the students the letters one-by-one.

The necessity of the IPA for language learners is pretty obvious. If you have no inborn knowledge of English, and you reference the dictionary, and it tells you that “pretentious” is pronounced pri-ten-shuhs, how are you supposed to know how to read that any better? Is the i in pri the same as the i in prize? Or is it the i in ship? The IPA solves that kind of problem by giving a character whose pronunciation is always the same.

But the funny thing about it, and the reason I say that your (meaning native English speakers in general) understanding of language is too simple, is that Chinese people are generally shocked and confounded when I tell them that we never learn the IPA in school in the United States, and that most native speakers don’t even know what the IPA is.

How, then, could you learn to read? How could you see a five syllable word on a page and produce it flawlessly, without ever learning a system to explain English’s idiosyncratic, deeply flawed spelling system? (For reference on the “deeply flawed” part see approximately half of the comedian George Carlin’s stand-up material.) The answer is just that when you are born in a language, and are then surrounded by it every day during the formative period of your life, the first 8 to 15 years, you are exposed to so much of that language that you learn it naturally.

But that concept is difficult to understand for someone who grew up in a differently language. Thusly for me and Chinese. When I first started studying Chinese, the fact that every Chinese word has a tone (flat, rising, dipping, or falling) was overwhelmingly frustrating to me. It seemed impossible that anyone could ever speak that way truly comfortably, truly fluently.

Of course, I was wrong, and over the past six months I have been at times surprised to see myself finally expressing Chinese sentences with minimal thought applied to tones but the tones actually coming out right. All it took was constant exposure and a kind of unhealthy obsession.

Even uttering the most basic word in the beginning, “hello” 你好 or nǐ hǎo, was nearly impossible. I could produce the correct tones when sitting alone in my apartment, but I would walk out the door, go to the convenience store outside, open my mouth, and an aberration would come out. Something not even close to the proper tones.

Because foreigners across the board have sucked at Chinese tones since the beginning of time, when I meet people they often greet me with intentionally mangled tones, as though they think it will be easier for me to understand that way. Cab drivers do this the most. I open the cab door and deliver the accurately pronounced “hello” that I’ve worked on for nearly two years, and they give me a very weird sounding hello in response.

My landlord does this, too. At this point I’ve lived in the little apartment that’s adjoined to his and his family’s for eight months, and I’ve had numerous lengthy conversations with everyone in the family throughout which I’m confident nearly all my tones were correct, but every time I see him he still gives me a “hello” with crazy tones, as if he thinks all laowai (foreigners), even ones who can speak Chinese, still can’t tell a wrong tone when they hear it.

Every time he does this, I can’t help thinking of what it would be like if a Chinese person lived in the U.S. for two years, learned OK English, and then every time he ran into his landlord, he received a loud “HERRO!” in greeting.

My Chinese teacher in my first year was a young Psychology teacher in my department named Ms. Li. The reason I got her as a teacher was (as I learned later) because she could speak pretty good English. Ms. Li is just a few months older than me and thin and attractive, with light freckles on her nose and cheeks and a wide, slightly tan face.

One experience I will never forget is her trying to teach me how to pronounce the word “umbrella” 雨伞 or yǔ sǎn. Those little up-side-down triangles over yu and san indicate that each of the characters should be pronounced with the third tone, a slow, low, dipping tone.

But the thing I didn’t know, and Ms. Li didn’t know to tell me, was that when there are two third tones in a row in Chinese, the first one becomes a second tone.

Ms. Li didn’t know that. Of course she knew it, in that she produced beautiful spoken Chinese every day, by dint of a native speaker’s effortless, masterful control of a language. But she didn’t know it consciously in that she could teach it to me. She couldn’t explain it to me. She could only sit there, and say: “Two third tones. Yǔ sǎn. Yǔ sǎn. Yǔ sǎn!”

There are things we don’t know. And there are things we don’t know we don’t know. And then there are things we know, but we don’t know that we know. Those things, maybe more than anything else, consist in language. And that is one of the major things I have learned in my time here.

If you want to learn a language, you must do so in chunks. You must find audio recordings of native speakers conversing at natural or near-natural speeds (forget all of those useless Rosetta Stone tapes. They are all bullshit) and you must push yourself to copy their pronunciation as perfectly as possible.

You must remain flexible. You must remember that there are rules, but every rules has an exception. You must focus on memorizing words, and then stop memorizing words for a while and practice listening, and then practice pronunciation, and then do tongue twisters, and then walk around town talking to anyone who will talk to you, and then go home and memorize more words, and then do the cycle all over again.

You must alter your strategy every month or so and focus on something new, but then you must also have consistency. You must do the same thing every day. You must do things to get yourself in the company of strangers who can’t speak English, you must go on boring trips, go to dinner with people you don’t like, sit for hundreds of hours listening to people talk and not understanding them.

You must slowly, gradually, allow yourself to expand. You must never wonder if it’s worth it. You must understand that you will never speak the language as beautifully as the clumsiest native speaker. You must accept that painful truth. You must keep going anyway. You must gain confidence gradually, and then lose the majority of it in one disastrous encounter in which communication fails completely. You must gradually regather confidence.

You must forget the you who couldn’t communicate at all in the tongue you can now speak. You must realize, now, that you are worse than a child, even in the language that you now speak. You must accept that your skills in your native language have actually become slightly weaker, that there are new words, new concepts, that have actually emerged since you left your native country that you now know nothing about.

You must do all these things to learn, but why? I don’t know why. Because it’s interesting. Because in the beginning every week you realize that you have taken a step forward, and you said something. And then a few weeks later you said something even better and longer, and then a few months later you sort of had a conversation, and then several months later you understood everything she said to you, and then a year later you spent a whole day with someone without uttering a single English word, and then you come to know someone in that language, and then you laugh in that language.

It’s not about thinking in Chinese. It’s not about dreaming in Chinese. Anyone who has studied Chinese seriously for more than a few months has done both, I think. It’s about becoming a person in the language you want to speak. Building yourself up in a new language, a new person, of sorts, but the same person. It’s about all those things. And along the way, you learn that language is a hell of a thing.

Before I thought about coming to China seriously I think that I was faintly aware that Chinese is a “tonal language”, but I didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant.

It took me a solid couple of months to figure out the precise meaning, another three or four months to be able to reliably produce the tones with considerable forethought, and just up until the last couple of months (I’ve been studying Chinese for about 13 months now) to be able to carry a Chinese conversation with reasonable confidence that most of the tones I am uttering are correct.

But what is a tone? And why does it take more than a year of blood, sweat, and tears to be able to use them correctly in speech?

The answer to the first question is simple (of course, there are a thousand complications hiding behind the simplicity, but I’m going to avoid those here). Chinese is made up of five tones (or four, depending on how you count) which combine with the movements within the mouth that make up most English speech, which two components together comprise the bulk of how meaning is conveyed in spoken Chinese.

Take, for example, the Chinese word zhi (pronounced a lot like “jur” in juror). Zhi has dozens of different meanings, depending on the tone and the written character that is used to represent the spoken word.

So depending on the tone with which it is said, zhi has different meanings.

But what the hell is a tone?

We actually have and use pretty close approximations of each of the four main tones of Chinese in English; we just don’t happen to be aware of their use because the tones are not necessarily integral to the meaning of the word.

This is similar to how most native speakers are generally not aware of how important stress is in every English word. For example, do you know which are the stressed syllables in the words economy, economics, economist, and economical? Are you aware of how important it is to stress the correct syllable in each of these words every time you say them? Moreover, are you aware of the rules that govern why the stress syllable is indeed stressed in each of these words?

Of course you’re not familiar with the rules, but you know how to correctly pronounce each of these words. Economy is eCONomy, economics is ecoNOmics, economist is eCONomist and economical is ecoNOmical.

Non-native speakers, of course, don’t know any of this off the bat. And so they have to study the rules and practice. Which is, of course, incredibly difficult. About as difficult as it is for us English speakers to wrap our heads around and master the Chinese tones.

Let me explain the four main tones of Chinese. My explanation will focus on our varying pronunciation of the English word “Yeah”.

Of course, we say “yeah” all the time and, although we are unaware of it, the tone of our voice often indicates the meaning of the word.

For instance, when we are responding to someone and want to express polite disagreement or reserved agreement, we will often say the word “yeah” in what I consider to be a flat tone, as in: “Yeeaah, I guess sooo, but…”

This is the Chinese first tone. The voice is high, flat, inflectionless, like a musical note. “Yeah”. We say it without our voice dropping or rising, as it does sometimes in questions and commands. “Yeah, I guess so, but….” That is the Chinese first tone, also known as the flat tone, the high tone or the singing tone.

The second tone is the rising tone and it is embodied in the English question yeah. As in “yeah, so what?” The voice rises when we say it in English in a way very similar to how it rises in Chinese.

The third tone is the low tone or the dipping tone. The voice goes lower and dips just a little bit, like a downward-dipping parabola. We have a rough approximation of this tone when we say a doubtful, skeptical, almost condescending yeah, as in “yeah, but I don’t think you really understand what I’m saying”. This sound is low and longer in duration than the other tones.

The fourth tone is the falling tone. This is what I think of as the agreement tone in English. It’s friendly, happy, giddy. We use it when we use yeah to express definite agreement, as in, “yeah, I think so too!”

So those are the Chinese tones. And my point in writing this point was originally not actually to explain the tones but to say what I think about the statement “don’t worry about the tones”, which something I have heard from foreigners pretty consistently in China.

Not surprisingly, most of the people who said this to me were not very good at speaking Chinese and were painful to listen to and to understand. And I’m sure that it would be even worse for a Chinese person to listen to. And I draw a parallel between them and many of the English learners out there who we native English speakers won’t even give the time of day to. Because their pronunciation just sounds wrong.

Learning pronunciation in Chinese is mostly about learning tones. Foreigners let themselves off the hook with this “don’t worry about it” statement too often, and I know from experience that it leads to pronunciation problems down the road. And it makes those foreigners more isolated in China, unable to actually talk to Chinese people, only able to practice Chinese with other foreigners, which is not why they started learning Chinese in the first place (I don’t think).

So, if you’re learning Chinese and another foreigner throws this comforting statement your way, don’t grab onto it, don’t buy it. It will be tempting, believe me, because the tones will keep you up at night they’re so damn hard to learn. You will see yourself in your dreams opening your mouth, the tones perfectly clear in your head, but coming out in a disastrous mess as soon as your vocal chords start humming.

But don’t believe what they tell you about the tones. You’ve got to worry about them. Or they’ll never stop being your enemy.

As anybody who has taught English in China for a while knows, there’s a special kind of English spoken here, which has garnered its own term in Chinese and in English. That is Chinglish, or, in Chinese, Zhong1Shi4Ying1Yu3.

What that essentially means is that because students in China largely learn English in a “vacuum”, i.e. without interacting with foreigners, there are certain funny, weird, incorrect or only partly incorrect phrases that pop up a lot.

One of the first ones you hear on coming to China is, of course, “My English is not very well”, which is usually accompanied by a second of squinting and intense thought as the speaker tries to decide if she should say “well” or “good”.

There are others, and I have learned over time that it’s pretty useful in classes to directly explain the Chinese phrase I’m correcting, and then explain how to say it in English. The reality is that most students, when they speak English, will be directly translating from Chinese to English in their heads as they do so; they will not use the most natural or high-frequency English phrase. So it’s more effective teaching to “back in” to teaching oral English here sometimes — that is, start with the extremely common Chinese phrase you know they will one day translate incorrectly in conversation, and explain how to say it right.

For example, the Chinese phrase wo3you3shi4. I have something to do. That is how most students translate wo3you3shi4 (which literally means “I have an event”, but is the Chinese equivalent of “I have a previous commitment” or “something came up that I’ve got to take care of”. Students often say, “sorry, I can’t come to class because I have something to do.” Isn’t my class “something to do?” I have occasionally replied in jest. Confusion. Nobody gets the joke. It’s best just to teach the language and avoid subtle mockery.

Is it delicious? This is the question students ask when they want to know if something (you’re eating) is good or not. Someone, at some point, decided that it would be a good idea to translate the Chinese phrase “hao3chi1″, meaning, literally, “good eat”, into the word “delicious”, when in fact in spoken English we just say “good”, or “tasty”, as in, “how’s your food?” –”it’s good”

I want to play with you. This has been uttered to me by more than one student, and when I first heard it I thought I had somehow stumbled into some kind of twisted seventies softcore skin movie. You want to play with me? What? Unfortunately Chinese students never learn the correct translation of the word “wan2″, which actually means “hang out” or “do something together” but is tragically translated in English textbooks as “play”. So Chinese college students are always “playing” together in English, when they should be hanging out.

It is very fashion. This statement is the result of the words fashion and fashionable being one and the same in Chinese. And since clothes is a topic often mentioned in textbooks and lessons, the mistake pops up with annoying frequency. Yet another weird Chinglish phrase that is hard to kill.

Can you borrow me your book? Again, the result of the words lend and borrow being the same in Chinese, hence the common error.

Of course, just as there are crappy ways of translating Chinese into English, there are awkward and ugly ways of translating English into Chinese, and I utter them every day. So this isn’t a mockery or a critique of Chinese learners of English, just a short list of things that their teachers should correct them on. I’ve devoted a lesson to these four phrases for all of my classes, and the result is always nice. Just learning how to say these five things correctly goes a long way in making their English sound more authentic.

Teaching them how to correctly use the slang word “sucks” really helps, too. As in, I suck at basketball, my shoes are sucky, he is a sucky guy. Telling the students that suck means, po4, jiu4, mei2yi4si5, bu4hao3, lan4, wu2,liao2, all in one word tends to help them grasp it, I find.

Because having authentic English speakers in the classroom makes your ears feel better, and makes your students a little more fun to be around.

I went to Fuzhou this weekend and wanted to share an interesting experience I had going to Starbucks.

We don’t have a Starbucks in my city, and there are few in this province, so whenever I get a chance to go to one I take it. It’s like fucking Christmas every time I go. Suddenly I step from the loud chaotic uncomfortable unfamiliar world of China into an environment that totally sates every base craving I could have as an American: the corporate decor and smooth featureless music and padded overpriced comfort that is Starbucks.

The interesting thing about this trip was that my companion, a Japanese girl who teaches Japanese history in Fuzhou and whose name is Mami, does not speak English and so would have to order in Chinese. And of course I speak English and Chinese but not Japanese. And the tellers at Starbucks usually speak pretty good English and of course Chinese. And whenever I go to Starbucks I order in English because I don’t know the words for “grande black coffee, no room, with a ham and cheese panini” in Chinese (well, I don’t know grande or panini). So I took the lead and tried to order for Mami.

The problem is that when I’m with Mami it confuses everyone, because nobody knows until she starts speaking that she isn’t in fact Chinese. So Chinese people always look at me, scan over my face, and then start speaking in rapid-fire Chinese to Mami.

The only problem is, Mami’s Chinese isn’t as good as mine. So she often doesn’t understand and just nods her head, and then I have to step in and actually answer their question. But I’ve found that people usually still persist in trying to talk to Mami, not me…I’m not sure why; I think they realize pretty fast that she’s not Chinese. Maybe they figure that if this Asian-looking foreigner doesn’t understand them, there’s no way in hell the white guy standing next to her does.

Anyway, on this particular occasion I was in line with Mami and tried to order in English, but the Starbucks girl didn’t understand, so I ordered in Chinese, but there was still confusion. The place was packed. She couldn’t understand what Mami wanted. But she had my order, so I ducked out and ran to the pick-up line. Then Mami stayed there at the order line for like 10 minutes, but I had no idea what she was doing.

It turned out the Starbucks girl spoke Japanese and had lived in Japan for two years, so Mami was chatting with her in Japanese. Finally Mami came back and I started to say in Chinese to her that it seemed like everywhere we went together we confused the hell out of Chinese people, but I couldn’t remember the Chinese word for confused, but Mami happened to know the English word confused, so we stood there wondering out loud what the Chinese word for confused was.

Then a Chinese woman leaned over and told me it was wu4jie3, which actually means something like misunderstand. By this time I had checked my dictionary and found five different words for “confused”. Apparently confusion is an important concept in Chinese since it gets so many different words.

The Chinese woman spoke great English, and after a moment she started talking to Mami in English, asking her a few questions to which Mami responded by nodding and saying yes in English. Of course, Mami didn’t understand what the woman was saying, so when she asked Mami, “are you here in Fuzhou traveling?” and Mami again nodded yes, I said, in Chinese, no, we’re both teachers.

Naturally, the woman never imagined, and I’m not sure she even understood after that point, that Mami and I would be communicating exclusively in Chinese, which is actually true. Why would she? Why the hell would a white guy and a Japanese girl, both of whom have maybe only intermediate Chinese skills, be getting Starbucks together in China and using Chinese to communicate?

The whole thing makes no sense at all, but that’s China. And I surprised myself by actually being surprised when the Starbucks people told me they had run out of covers for their to-go cups. Almost as much as it surprised me the time the people at McDonald’s in Sanming told me they had run out of beef.

Nothing makes any goddamn sense in this country.

I have been wanting to make a post for a while about some of the amazing things about the Chinese language, so here goes.

There are a million things that are totally different about Chinese, basically everything is different, which reflects and emphasizes to me every day how different the culture must be. Sometimes it is a wonder to me that I can speak or understand any of it because of those differences. Here are just a few.

Almost nothing about Chinese is similar to English. It’s like a language spoken by aliens, in my opinion. For instance:

Chinese has no verb tenses. Which is amazingly easy. Run is run is run is run, whether you did it yesterday, whether you have done it over some unspecified period of time, whether you were doing it or are doing it or have been doing it or will do it or are going to do it. It’s just “run”, or, really, pao.

Chinese has no plurals. Instead, it has measure words. So the way we say “a grain of rice”, and can’t say “a rice”, applies to every single noun in Chinese. Which means there are “measure words” for everything. Like, you have to say a wei of person. Or a tou of cow. Or a jian of clothing. Or a pian of area.

Chinese does not share the verb forms that we use in English. There is no past tense. Instead, there is a Chinese syllable that indicates that a verb is either a completed action or a change of state (the syllable is le). That means that if you are talking about something that happened in the past but was not a completed action or a change of state, there is no grammatical differentiation between that thing and something that could be happening now. For instance, if you felt nauseous yesterday, you would say “I feel nauseous”, or if last year was your Zodiac birth year, you would say “last year is my Zodiac birth year”.

The polite way to say go pee in Chinese is go “small convenience”. Poo is, of course, “big convenience”.

The Chinese word “pipi” means butt. This is the same pronunciation as the English kiddy word for urine.

The change of state verb form also makes it possible to say things that seem totally strange when translated into English. For instance, a common way to tell someone that you’d like to get of the phone with them is “bu gen ni shuo le” or, literally, “I’m not talking to you anymore”. This still kind of hurts my feelings when somebody says it, but people say it all the time.

Chinese is incredibly efficient at saying complex ideas. For instance, today one of my students told me that I have to shave in order to be handsome. The sentence she used to express this was just four syllables: “Yao gua cai shuai“.

Chinese is a tonal language. Which means that the “tone” of a word is integral to its meaning. For instance, the word “wen” means different thing depending on the tone. One of the meanings is ask. Another meaning is kiss. So I once said to one of my students, at the dinner table, “I want to kiss you for a second”, when what I meant was “I want to ask you a quick question”. Wo xiang wen ni yi xia. The students laughed, and then explained the embarrassing thing I had just said.

Learning long strings of numbers is much easier in Chinese because the numbers are easier and quicker to say and hear once you learn the tones. So in English, if someone read me a ten-digit number in one breath without stopping, I wouldn’t be able to write it down. But when somebody tells me their eleven-digit number that way in Chinese I can remember it long enough to write it down without any problem. Which is weird.

In Chinese, “wo zai he jiu” — literally, I’m drinking alcohol, is a common response to the question “hey, what are you doing?” that in Chinese requires no extra explanation or detail. If someone calls you up on the phone and says, hey, what are you doing? You can just say “I’m drinking alcohol!” and they will usually take that as an exhaustive description of what you are doing with no need to add any more information.

Likewise, if you have to change or cancel plans in Chinese you can use the handy expression “wo you shi“, which means “I have an obligation/event/some kind of pressing engagement or affair or matter. The word shi doesn’t really translate well into English because in English we have to explain ourselves when we cancel plans or have something we need to do. But in Chinese you can just beautifully say, “I’m not coming to dinner because I have an event.” And everyone will be like, oh, of course, all right, see you later.

Last but not least, in Chinese the word for want, need and to be going to do (i.e. future tense) are all the same. Yao can mean want, need, or to be going to do. There are subtle ways to differentiate between those three different forms that we have in English, through context and also through using different words in Chinese. But a lot of the time there is no clear grammatical marker to tell you if a person means want, need, or to be done in the future.

I realized today when I got a phone call from a Chinese person and took it without really any major communication problems that my Chinese has gotten a lot better in the past two months.

The thing that made me realize it was that the first successful phone conversation I had with a non-English-speaking Chinese person was only two months ago, and at the time, I was totally thrilled.

Obviously, the first conversation was sub-preschool level language use. The converstaion went something like this:

Me: Hello. Is XiaoLu there?

Other person: No. This is his mother.

Me: Oh, his mother. Hello.

Other person: XiaoLu will come back in something something. He went to something something.

Me: Where?

Other person: Something something. Are you that foreigner?

Me: Oh, yeah. I am.

Other person: Something something phone call.

Me: Oh. Can you have him call me later please?

Other person: Yes. Something.

Me: Thank you. Goodbye.

Other person: Bye-bye.

So maybe the word “sucessful” is too strong. But at the time, I thought it was cool that the basic function of a phone call had taken place. I didn’t just have to say “sorry, I don’t understand” and then hang up.

But the conversation today was much better. A guy from the online store where I buy clothes called because I hadn’t put my name on my order. So I gave him my name, and everything was fine. And I realized that I had basically understood everything he had said.

Maybe the reason this stuff is so interesting to me is because even though I studied French for five years before and during high school, I never really got good at it or had the chance to practice it in real-life situations. If you just memorize vocabulary and grammar when you’re learning a language, as a lot of students in the U.S. do (at least in New Hampshire when I was growing up — in cities and in places with more Spanish speakers I guess you could put the language to use) you never get the chance to stand on your feet in the language. You never know that with the sliver of vocabulary you have learned, it is possible to convey meaning.

Also, if you live in an single-language environment like I always did, even if you’re studying another language you’re probably not very likely to be able to speak it easily in the real language environment. For instance, when I studied French in high school we did go to Quebec on a field trip once. But the minute people opened their mouths, the language spilled out so fast and was pronounced so differently from how I pronounced it (meaning badly) that I didn’t really understand anything. Except hello.

Also, there is a lot of work to be done in between saying hello in a language and then actually speaking it. When I went to France in college for a week my pronounciation of “bonjour” was good enough at times to make people on the street think I actually spoke French. Which I didn’t really.

My point is basically that learning another language is totally interesting in itself, especially when you can walk out the door and talk to people who couldn’t speak English even if you wanted them to. And also that semi-off-the-beaten-path China has got to be the best place anywhere for learning another language, because even if you don’t feel like talking to strangers, strangers definitely want to talk to you.

Talking to cab drivers is another great way for me to measure my progress in learning the language. It’s about a 35-minute cab ride from downtown to my door, and cab drivers love to ask questions and talk (last week, one cab driver who I had apparently ridden with before actually offered me a cigarette and we both smoked as we headed back to the college). Of course, when I first got here, small talk with cab drivers was impossible. I felt lucky just to be able to make my destination clear to them verbally. But that has slowly changed.  First I was able to chat with them for 30 seconds, then a few minutes, then more like 10 minutes, and now, if I am reasonably creative, I can go almost 20 minutes without the conversation breaking down and the driver just chatting away with me no longer understanding. Basically, as long as I don’t get lost in the skein as words, they will keep conversing with me (it’s kind of like a mini-Chinese lesson that I get as a free bonus for riding in a taxi).

The other good thing about talking to taxi drivers is the repetition. The conversation basically always starts the same way. Here’s what the driver almost always says/asks, in order:

Where are you from?

Are you a student or a teacher?

Oh, you’re Chinese is great. Very standard. (This after me saying the words “America” and “teacher”; people here are very nice.)

Why did you come to China — for work or to learn Chinese?

I have a cousin/brother/friend who lives in Canada/the U.S./Hong Kong. He speaks English very well.

How much money do you make?

Oh, that’s pretty good. But it’s not much in America, right?

How much money does a cab driver make in America?

From here the conversation could go anywhere, and as the time grows longer it becomes less and less likely that I will understand what he is saying. But it’s becoming easier as I get better at knowing and recognizing the structure of words and sentences, the basic vocabulary, which then allows me to recognize and isolate the words I don’t know from everything else. Which in turn lets me think about the words I don’t know and either try to put together their meaning or infer their meaning from the context. That’s a big shift from where I was at a couple of months ago — basically grasping for straws and recognizing a word or phrase here or there, but everything else being a big mush pit where I didn’t know what was going on.

This all tells me that the initial hump of learning Chinese might be receding a bit. There’s a good post by John Pasden at Sinosplice.com that looks at the difficulty level of learning Chinese versus other languages (namely Japanese), and basically he points out that people tend to think Chinese is super hard to learn…but it’s actually just hard to learn how to learn – meaning that there’s a huge hump of stuff you’ve got to learn in the beginning, and then it gets easier from there. Basically, to first start learning Chinese, you’ve got to bend your brain around this concept that the meaning of words is totally dependant on the tone of their prononciation — which for an English speaker is really pretty damn far out — and then you’ve got to actually learn what those tones are, how to say them and then how to parse them in rapid-fire speech.

Those things are now becoming less difficult for me (I don’t want to jinx myself by saying anything more pronounced than that. It’s still all pretty damn difficult.) I think that basically started to happen (the decrease in difficulty) when I started obsessively listening to Chinesepod.com lessons and practicing pronouncing sentences in bed and in the shower (I think now my listening has gotten better than my speaking…because my vocabulary still sucks but listening to Chinesepod has made me more comfortable hearing normal-speed speech and exposed me to the sounds of lots of words). I still have a long way to go…and I am hoping and praying that things will continue to go smoothly (enough) here so that I can stay and learn more.

Especially now that forming the sentence “Can you please bring me a glass of water” is no longer a small miracle.

Other language landmarks…

Learning how to say the names of all the delicious stuff at my favorite restaurant

Teaching someone how to play poker in Chinese

Actually understanding what my Chinese teacher is saying some of the time

Translating an English word for some confused students into Chinese during class (note: extreme aberration)

Traveling to another city (for snacks…yeah, weird) with someone who speaks no English  and then back again and having fun

Learning how to lift weights in Chinese (fairly extensive use of pantomime)

Understanding an Upper-Intermediate lesson on Chinesepod.com

That’s all for today.

: )

There are few things more humbling than looking at a Chinese college English exam.

Thursday night I spent two hours with some students, helping them prepare for the CET-6 English exam, which they took on Saturday. The CET-6 is a test that (apparently) almost all college students here take to measure their proficiency in English.

The test is extremely advanced for a second language test and yet contains quite a lot of grammatical errors and yet is U.S./Euro-centric and is the kind of thing that would make anyone who espoused progressive education in the United States scream bloody murder. The exam tests English reading, writing and listening by using fill-in-the-blank excercises/multiple choice and standard reading comprehension tests like you’d find on the SAT or GRE.

The thing is, though, that the test is almost unimaginably difficult for any non-native speaker. To pass, the students have to get something like 60 percent of the answers correct; but most of them don’t know I would say probably 30 percent of the vocabulary (I read somewhere that a reading passage is technically “illegible” to a reader if he/she doesn’t know 20 percent of the words).

An example of a test question (from memory):

One of the fill-in-the-blank excercises is a long passage about Germany’s response to the success of the U.S. economy in the 90’s. Random words are blanked out and the students answer by multiple-choice. One of the early sentences says something like

“Germany’s response came about after seeing the U.S. economy _______ in the 90’s.”

A.) Soar B.) Amplify C.)       Hover D.) Extend

I think, maybe, without a dictionary, some of my more advanced students might know the meaning of “Soar” and “Extend”. Amplify and hover I think they wouldn’t know. Maybe they would have seen them before. But, nonetheless, they are expected to know these words, and to somehow understand why “soar” is preferable to “expand” in this context. Although, without living in a Western culture or having some idea of what happened in the U.S. economy in the 90’s, I don’t know why they would be expected to know the answer at all.

The reading level is, I think, somewhere around the reading level on the pre-SAT you take in junior high-school. So around the level where native speakers are at the age of 16. Except the subject matter is all about Western culture. So they’re being tested on the use of the language in the context of Western culture, when most of the students have met less than a handful of foreigners. Most of them have not traveled far from home. I don’t think any of them have left the country. It’s not like they have English-language newspapers in the library, either. Considering all that, they know an amazing amount about the West. But they don’t know things like what the U.S. economy did in the 90’s, and they certainly don’t know the word “amplify”.

The only analogue I can imagine would be if you took a 14-year-old in the U.S. and expected him to be able to score a 1200 on the GRE. Even if the kid had studied every day since he was six years old, only the occasionally lucky or brilliant student would pass. Most of my students won’t pass the CET-6. That would be incredible. Of about 200-some students who I know, three of them have passed it already. And those three, I think, worked incredibly hard. And they also, I suspect, got incredibly lucky on the day they took the test.

That is what most of these students will be relying on Saturday when they take the test–luck. The tests are timed and there is not enough time even for a native speaker (read: me) to comfortably read the material and answer the questions with total confidence. I am sure that if everyone in the U.S. had to take the test, a good portion of the population would fail. I can’t really guess at the number, but I bet it would be in the teens at least. So my students will basically go into the test room, read frantically, guess on most of the answers, and if they are lucky (stats say that someone always passes by guessing) a few of them will pass.

The rest will go on thinking that they are no good at English, even though they are. And who knows how not passing the CET-6 will affect their chances at getting a job (some say that they won’t be able to get a teaching job without passing it).

So Thurday night, after two hours of trying to explain to the students things like the difference between “soar” and “extend”, and why we typically use “soar” and “crash” when we talk about the economy in English, I threw up my hands and told them that the test was unfair, that it was criminally difficult for them and that it also included a bunch of grammatical errors, typos, unclear questions/answers and some multiple-choice questions with no single logically correct answer. I told them that I knew that they had all worked incredibly hard, and that whatever happened on Saturday, they should feel good about how hard they had worked and how much they had learned.

And I walked home thinking: sometimes you can be frustrated at the students’ limitations, and then sometimes you can be frustrated at your own.

When I flew to China, the first Chinese person that I actually spoke to was, of course, in America. He was waiting with me in the check-in line, in the JFK Airport.

The flight from New York to Shanghai was, understandably, populated mostly by Chinese people (there were a few Westerners, but I could count them on one hand). This guy was standing in line in front of me with his wife. I heard him say, “He has a nice backpack; that’s a very special backpack,” and realized he was talking about me (I was wearing a big North Face overnight pack that was not particularly special but was out of place among the travel gear of everybody else).

So, I said hello and we talked for a minute. I told him that I was going to Fujian Province.

“Oh, they speak a lot of crazy dialects there,” he said. “I do not understand those people.”

In my bags, I had two books on Chinese and three audiobooks on learning Chinese (Mandarin). One of the things I wanted to do while in China was/is learn Chinese. So that was not terrific news for me.

Since then, I have come to realize that he was right, but not totally (it is possible to understand people here in Fujian, because they do speak Mandarin, if with a very heavy southern accent), and also in more ways than he intended (it’s not just that people in Fujian don’t speak standard Mandarin, but that a good chunk of Chinese people in general do not seem to speak standard Mandarin).

Which all leads to the title of this post, which is, there is no Chinese.

Officially, I guess, that statement is incorrect. Mandarin is the official language of China and is what is primarily spoken in Beijing, apparently. So people from the northern/Beijing area tend to speak fairly standard Mandarin. But go elsewhere in the country and you could come across any number of dialects, heavy accents (like way more prohibitive than just a southern v. northeastern accent in the U.S.), and sometimes just flat out different languages, which is what some of the dialects are (different languages).

Mandarin and Cantonese, for example, are two major dialects/languages in China. Mandarin is the standard language spoken here in the university. So classes are taught in Mandarin (or the case of my classes, English). But all of the students speak their own local dialects.

Some students explained this to me over lunch a week ago. There were about five of them eating with me, and they told me that among them they spoke two different local dialects. One was called Min Nan Yu (Fujian Southern Language) and the other one I didn’t catch the name of. These were just two dialects of Fujian. There are others. The students speak these languages among each other in their dorms, and often can’t understand the students from two doors down, because they have a different local dialect. These students are all from Fujian. Fujian is just one relatively small province in a much, much bigger country. See the image below — Fujian is the red blotch in the SEern section of China.

Fujian, China - Thanks to Wikipedia

Yeah. So if there are multiple dialects spoken in that small red spot, how many languages do you think are spoken throughout China? Lots. I haven’t found an exact number in any reliable source, but apparently there are about 7-ish dialect groups in China, including Mandarin and Cantonese, and any number of permutations of those dialects.

Which means that even if a person knew Mandarin and Cantonese, there is a good chance that in parts of China he/she still wouldn’t be able to communicate with people.

Thankfully, most of my students primarily speak Mandarin and English around me, so I can communicate with them now in English, and there is a distant, snowball-in-hell chance that one day I will be able to understand what they are saying in Mandarin.

But, the catch is, I can’t really learn Mandarin from them. Because…they all have heavy southern accents, and their Mandarin is influenced by their local dialects. Which means that they all say words differently, some correctly, some incorrectly.

The word “water” is a good example. In Mandarin, water is shuǐ (pronounced like “shway”). But some students pronounce it like “sway”, which is incorrect (accented), but which they would correct me on if I tried to learn “water” from them and pronounced it “shway” (which is correct). I ran into this problem over and over again my first two weeks here, before I started taking lessons. I would learn a word one way, and the next day, a different group of students would teach me the same word, pronounced differently.

And that is only one tiny pronounciation difference…the students, because of their accents/dialects, also pronounce their r’s as zh’s and l’s differently, and there are other differences…

On top of all that (all the speaking differences), it turned out that the Chinese writing book that I brought with me to Chinese is also useless. Mainland China now uses a simplified form of Chinese characters for writing, while Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the Chinatowns in America, use an older and more complex version of Chinese writing. So, I might as well line hamster cages with the writing book I got in the U.S.

All of this is to say that I am really glad I am taking Chinese lessons now, because learning Chinese from random students in Fujian, it turns out, is close to impossible.

I have them for 4 hours a week, and each lesson is a small disaster, because I really can’t pronounce the words, but I think I might be learning something. That’s good enough for now.

Naptime. Peace out.