Having Fun All The Time

Last year at about this time, I was moving into a friend’s apartment to stay for the month of June while he went back to his home country (Camaroon) to see his family. My friend was another foreign teacher at the college, and he had long paid for his own apartment in the city center, even though the college also provided housing on campus for us foreign teachers.

The place was pretty spartan. He had two bedrooms, a kitchen, a small bathroom with no hot water and a dining room slash living room. He had furnished the apartment with a folding aluminum table in the kitchen, about five blue plastic stools, a more than 10-year-old bed in the bedroom, a typewriter stand with a computer on it next to the bed, a TV on a TV stand in the corner of the bedroom, and a bamboo mat on the floor of the second bedroom. There was a poster of a young Chinese pop-star-looking model half torn off the wall of the second bedroom (left by the previous resident) and a laminated picture of a Chinese woman that a student of his had cut from red paper. Aside from a refrigerator that stood in the kitchen with a bowl sitting on top of it, and built-in closets full of clothes, that was all that he had in the apartment. He had lived there for more than a year.

Despite the black hole of charm that this apartment represented, however, it was an improvement from my previous living situation. The apartment I had on the college campus was old and unclean, and located too far from the city. So I was glad to move into my friend’s apartment in the city.

His apartment quickly proved to be not to my liking, though, mostly due to a serious roach problem. I remember one night in particular that I was spending with my girlfriend at the time, after we entered the apartment I turned on the light, and then quickly turned it off again. “Are you afraid of cockroaches?” I asked her in Chinese.

“Yes,” she said.

“Wait outside for a minute,” I said. She stepped outside, I went back in, turned on the light, killed as many Cheeto-sized roaches as I could before they all scattered out of sight (about three or four), and then poked my head out the door. “OK, you can come in now,” I said.

After that, I simply decided to move into the newest building I could find in the city. This is an urge I have never had before in any place. I’ve always gravitated towards old places, places that I thought had more of an austere look and seemed a bit weathered. But that changed after I dealt for a while with dirt, roaches, rats and bats. I became a lover of new things, and in this way came to understand, to some degree, not to romanticize poverty or to intuitively reject development as an idea.

This is all a rambling way to introduce the place where I now live, which is called “Sunny City”. Before I moved in here the place looked ridiculous to me: about 20 brand-new apartment buildings in a huge cluster, built on top of an underground shopping mall. The buildings are all around 20-stories, which by my reckoning means there are around 2,000 or more apartment units, which is pretty vast. The grounds are all nicely landscaped and well tended. There is at-your-door garbage pickup. There are security cameras. Like most Chinese construction, the buildings are already showing signs of wear and deficient building — there’s a crack in the wall of my bedroom, and for some reason for months all the kitchen fans on this side of the building seemed to blow backwards directly into my apartment through my kitchen fan. So that was awesome. But other than that, it’s mostly OK. I haven’t killed any roaches or wild animals in my home for a year, which has been very nice.

But there is one thing that is maddening about the place — one thing that I realized recently would never be accepted in the U.S.: the noise.

The thing about Sunny City is that the buildings were considered complete before any of the apartments’ interiors had been designed or built. Half of the apartments in the park haven’t been sold or lived in yet. That means that even though there are already a ton of people living here, every time an apartment is sold it must be built on the inside. They are selling these fuckers a la carte. And building an apartment’s interior is, it turns out, very loud.

Last weekend they were resurfacing a wall in a unit just below mine, which mean that there was a guy with a hammer and chisel taking the tiles and the concrete binding agent off the wall, and it took him four days. He started at 7:45 every morning. I know this because the noise sounded like it was right next to my head, and it was impossible to sit in my apartment without feeling like I was going nuts when the chiseling was going on. It lasted about six hours each day. No writing happened on those days. At one point I resorted to picking up a corner of my very heavy bed and slamming it on the floor, in the hope that it might make him stop (yes, clearly illogical).

At one point, I remembered with nostalgia the nice notes the landlady used to put up in the elevator in my apartment in Portland, Ore. when the water was going to be off for 45 minutes on a Tuesday morning at 10:30, when no one was going to be home anyway. Even then the notes seemed absurd. Just turn off the water, lady — do you really think we’re gonna complain? I used to think. Now the elevator note seems like an exotic and incredible fairy tale. Nobody else in this building seemed particularly disturbed by the hammering last week. It just happened, and people accepted it. And this happens all the time. People are much more willing to accept rude and abrupt intrusions into their personal space and nice quiet bubble, to an extent that Americans’ finickiness and insistence that others’ respect their personal space and right to peace and quiet and safety seems completely absurd.

The best example I can think of is that the last time I went home, I was shocked to learn that you’re not allowed to use cell phone on long-range buses in the U.S. I had forgotten this in my time in China. The idea that someone was telling me not to make phone calls to respect others’ who might want to rest seemed laughable when I heard it, but it was great when I wanted to take a nap. You never find that here. It seems a long range bus ride is a license for the loudest imaginable person to start shouting into his cell phone here.

This idea extends to so many things in life, including accepting the decisions of authority. I have been astonished to see the gentle, almost blithe acceptance by people here of decisions from above — decisions that make me bridle as though someone had taken away one of my basic rights, or denied me food, or something. In my first couple of months of teaching there was a sports meet at the university for which all classes would be canceled for a couple days, and I didn’t find out about it two days before. How could they not tell me? I said to myself. Don’t they know that if they had told me a head of time I could have planned some travel, or something? Now I’m just going to sit at home with nothing to do. I was sincerely, unashamedly pissed off. Then the next day, when, because of rain, the sports meet was canceled and class was back on the following day, I was even more pissed. What if I had made plans to travel somewhere?! I chafed.

But people around me just accepted it, as I’ve seen them do time after time here over the past two years. An order comes down from above, and everybody follows it. There is no use complaining. Complaining only makes people upset and angry. You’re better off just going along with it.

The cultural difference was hammered home last week when I was describing to my Chinese teacher an ordeal involving an alum from my college in the U.S., who I had helped the university invite to China to teach. They had strung him along for a month, saying that the position, and then at the last minute, in a mysterious, completely unexplained twist of events, they had changed their minds and said they had enough foreign teachers. He had put off job searching for a month and several people had spent a lot of time communicating to prepare for his trip out, not to mention the Chinese books he bought to get ready, and the kind of mental preparations you have to make for a trip like that. But the word came down from above, and the people who informed him and me of the change passed on the information nonchalantly, as if they couldn’t imagine a world in which another option aside from indifferent acceptance was possible.

When I told my teacher about this, I used the word “disappointment”, cuozhe, and her reaction was confusion.

“No, I think that word is too strong,” she said. “You should use a lighter word.” Her eyes looked straight ahead as she searched for a word, as if the story didn’t even warrant a negative label — really, as if this was actually how things should have gone. Then she came up with a word. “This is just a small trouble,” she said, using xiao (meaning small) and mafan, which is the kind of word you use when you don’t want to put ketchup on your fries because opening the little foil ketchup packet is too mafan. “You can just call it a small trouble.”

By now I could almost expect this reaction, and I felt a weird mix of guilt but also frustration. Guilt because I knew for a fact that she, my teacher, had experienced much worse in her life than I could ever imagine, and therefore really did see the problem as just a small trouble; and frustration, of course, because I am an American, and some part of me — I would even say some slightly spoiled, self-righteous part (characteristics that aren’t necessarily always bad) — wanted to insist. No, this is not just a small trouble, he wanted to say. This is a tragedy!

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.

There are certain comments/observations that I always took literally when I first came to China because I wasn’t used to hearing them and I didn’t know why the person was asking me them. For example:

• Are you tired? Do you want to have a rest?

My response to this question last year was always, “No, I don’t think so…why? Do I look tired? I don’t feel tired. Well, maybe I’m a little tired. I wonder if I’m talking too slowly or something…everyone’s always asking me if I want to have a rest….BUT I’M NOT TIRED SO WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME!!?”

After about six months in-country, though, I stopped having this internal monologue whenever somebody asked me this question, because I realized they asked it because:

1. People actually take 1-hour naps after lunch here, way, way more commonly than in the U.S., especially at college campuses…classes stop for a few hours so that the teachers and students can ALL go to their rooms and sleep
2. Students are nervous to talk to me and don’t know what the hell else to say

A year ago, I wondered what was wrong with me whenever somebody asked me if I wanted to have a rest. No I just decide if I’m tired or not and say “yes” or “no”. Way easier.

• You don’t like to eat very much. You’ve eaten so little.

This one also used to confuse the shit out of me. Usually at lunch/dinner I eat way more than everybody else. I take like three vegetable servings and two meat servings and an egg or a chicken leg and a bowl of rice and soup and pig out, and everybody else takes like one fucking piece of cucumber and a bowl of soup and two pounds of rice. So I used to always think…wait a minute, I just ate a ton of meat and veggies, and this person ate like nothing but rice, why are they telling me I only ate a little, WTF?

And then I realized, again, somewhere after month six-ish, that Chinese people look at eating completely differently from (warning: a few sweeping generalizations are to follow) us foreigners. Essentially, and I don’t think this is an exaggeration, Chinese people, at least here in my area, look at a tray of food and measure the amount of rice on it. And that’s the quantity of food eaten. Foreigners people (I guess meaning westerners in general but maybe just Americans), of course, look at veggies and meats as the food consumed. So when Chinese people look at my tray and see that I at like a normal westerner-person portion of rice, they don’t even see all the veggies and meats I ate. It doesn’t register. So they think I am a starving child, and I look at their meal which basically consisted of white rice and think they are a starving child, and everybody ends up saying, “What is wrong with you? You only ate a little (rice/meat), you are going to die on that diet YOU NEED TO EAT MORE WTF”

• My life is not very interesting. I’m not very good at English.

This one is just about the necessity of modesty. Even if a student or person is super interesting or really good at English, he/she is unlikely to admit it, even after intense questioning. At this point if someone is really modest about something after I’ve given them a compliment, I just let it go and know that they heard the compliment, even if they can never verbally agree.

• Have you eaten?

This one is basic Chinese stuff. If someone asks this, they’re not asking you to eat with them. They’re just being polite. Just like the meaningless English greeting, “how are you?” to which we all reply “good”.

The moral of this story, for me, has been in realizing that a lot of the time, especially here but also in normal life back home, there’s a lot of information I don’t know, a lot of reasons for the stuff that happens on a day to day basis. So there’s no point getting worked up about stuff that may or may not have meaning. No use interpreting things internally unless you’re sure they’re really an issue.

For example, when I ride the bus here, if someone’s sitting next to me, and then a free seat opens somewhere else, they will frequently go sit there. A year ago this made me feel terrible, and I internally assumed it was because they didn’t want to sit next to the laowai. But after a while I realized that it is far more likely that they just see that I am super tall and can’t fit in any seat on the bus and need extra space. I don’t know why/how I realized that, but I did, and for some reason I’m pretty sure it’s true (mostly because I don’t think people really mind sitting next to me…just as many times people have been super happy to sit next to me here).

Likewise, I used to be really bothered by people shouting “hello!” at me all over the place. I used to find it annoying and slightly mocking. But now I’ve actually talked to some of those people, and realized that they just really want to interact but are way too shy to just come up and talk to me. One group of kids who shouted at me like that are now my private students — paying me to teach them English. I just had to break through that barrier of shyness and realized that there was a lot of curiousity and desire to learn about my culture/language behind that somewhat intimidating, shouted greeting.

So there are definitely good things about life in China year 2. Mainly that everything gets easier and makes a hell of a lot more sense (however note the post from a couple weeks ago where I explained that nothing makes sense in China).

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 was just walking home from dinner and I overheard one of the most common forms of greeting in Chinese, only this time it was a little different.

The question, in its full-sentence form, would be, “Ni chi fan le ma?” – “Have you eaten dinner yet?”

This time, though, it was just “Chi fan le”, which, directly translated, means, “Eaten dinner.” (I’m pretty sure it was a greeting, not a response to above greeting.) Not exactly a question, or a statement, just a few words thrown together which, in context, have an obvious intent.

Lots of Chinese phrases are like this – if you took them out of context, or if you knew only the vocabulary but not the everyday speaking habits, getting along in China would be totally bewildering. Well, more bewildering than it is in the first place, anyway.

So it got me thinking. Speaking hones a language down to its barest elements. It simplifies statements or questions that, when written, become overly structured and laden with grammar, but when spoken, are simple, elegant, bearing only the necessary elements.

One of the first things I realized when I stepped into the classroom here to teach English was that I would have to make a choice between teaching the grammatically correct form of the language or teaching it how it is spoken. For example, when teaching students how to express a desire for me to repeat something – something they often, surprisingly, didn’t know how to say (they had always said it in Chinese to their English teachers, when they had to), I started to think: should I teach them the grammatically correct sentence we would use to express this? – “Could you please repeat that?” or “Could you please say that once more?” – or should I teach them something natural, i.e. something we would actually say in English, like the phrase “Come again?”

The problem is that for most English speakers, these kind of slangy, natural expressions arise from almost nowhere. They’re not something we ever study while we are in school (standard language classes in formal education pretty much exclusively focus on grammar, writing, the formal word, and completely ignore all the brilliant little idiosyncracies of speech, except maybe for linguistics classes in college, I guess) but those idiosyncracies are, in a sense, the heart and soul of a language. They are the way we communicate, the way we express ourselves when we are working with others, sharing ideas, problem solving, arbitrating the problems and solutions of our work, school, and whatever lives, but they are totally (as far as I can tell based on my conscious awareness of them and the active mental catalog I had of them when I came here to teach) ignored.

Let me give you an example of an idioscyntratic phrase that is pretty popular in English, and that you will have heard a bunch of times if you’re a fan of the T.V. show “The Wire”.

The example is this: “That’s on me” or “That’s on him/her”

This is a simple expression that would have absolutely no meaning at all to a Chinese mid-level learner of English. To a native speaker, especially when heard in context, the statement obviously has to do with assigning a person who bears the blame/burden for a particular blunder or responsibility. But for someone who is learning/has learned English, it could only possibly mean that something is “on” someone. Like a ketchup stain or a pouncing dog. More likely, it’s just going to look like a meaningless line: article, preposition, pronoun. Wha?

Let me give you another example. Early on in my time here, when I had already started teaching, some students helped me sign up for the Chinese chat client QQ. As I mentioned in my previous post, QQ is the ubiqitous MSN-messenger-like chat client in China. But also, since this is China, everybody’s handle, or identifying name on the service, is in Chinese. Which means I rarely knew, in the beginning, who was messaging me. So, of course, one of the first time I got a message from someone on QQ (probably a “hello” or a smiley face; those are pretty run-of-the-mill), I responded, quite innocently, “Who is this?”

I remember sitting there for about three minutes with no response from the person. Then, finally, the student sent me her response:

“What do you mean?”

At first, I was astonished. But then, after some thought, it made sense. If you didn’t know about the oral English habit of using the article “this” rather than a more direct statement using a pronoun, i.e., “Who are you?” or “I am (blank)” in conversation, it would be impossible to be certain of the meaning of the sentence “Who is this?” So I was one line into an English conversation with one of my students, and she was already totally baffled. Great.

Over time I have managed to become aware enough of these English idiosyncracies or differences from Chinese-language idiosyncracies to know when one is coming out of my mouth, so that when an entire classroom of students suddenly appears dumbstruck after I have said something relatively simple, I know how to slow down, back up, look at the phrase, write it on the blackboard, explain it, without getting frustrated or confused at why they don’t understand. It’s true, they have very broad vocabularies as language learners (I’m surprised at how often they throw out words like “simultaneous”, “inevitable”, or “identical”), but they haven’t had exposure to the authentic spoken language, the real living breathing, burnished and raw thing – the thing that is so rare in text books and teaching materials – to know what I’m talking about when I say something like “after you”, or “slow down”, or “I’ll get it” or “could you please hand me that pen”, or…. “Who is this?”

Which, in a way, is a shame, because if they had got the chance to put half the energy into learning speech that they have put into learning reading, writing, and vocabulary, they would be pretty damn near fluent, I think.

But for me, it’s interesting to learn these pared-down, gritty sayings that only make sense if you understand context, frequency of use, and how simple language can be when you have to say it.

“Have you eaten dinner yet?”

“You eat yet?”

Like Tarzan speak, in a way (and I’m grateful to Chinesepod.com for teaching me these kinds of idiomatic speech patterns in Chinese rather than trying to cram grammar down my throat). But it works. And it’s damn beautiful.

Peace out from China.

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.