Having Fun All The Time

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.