Learning Chinese Through English
Learning Chinese while holding a full-time job here can be very difficult, especially if you're an English teacher. Teachers spend their days immersed in their native language and are often too exhausted to bother studying when they get home. Most schools I've encountered hire an English-speaking liaison to arrange everything for their foreign teachers, minimizing the inconvenience of not being able to speak Chinese. For activities outside of class, eager students often volunteer to help teachers accomplish mundane tasks such as getting a haircut or buying a cellphone. In short, quite a few people manage to get by in China without any Chinese at all.
If you're a teacher and are determined to learn Chinese, there's a handy tool you may not have thought of: listen to your students! Chances are, you'll hear more than your fair share of garbled English during your tenure at the school, and while your first instinct will be to correct your students, it pays to ask yourself why they said what they said. In other words, why do Chinese students make certain mistakes and not others? The clue lies in the Chinese equivalent of the English they speak.
English and Chinese have vast differences in grammar and syntax, and so often ideas do not translate well between the two languages. In China, beginning and intermediate students will often only be able to remember English words and phrases with a clear equivalent in Chinese. After a conversation with one, or a day at school, write down these words and phrases, then look them up in your Chinese-English dictionary. You'll likely find something you'll be able to use in Chinese conversation.
In addition, doing this exercise will aid your teaching skills considerably. You'll be able to pinpoint tricky words and phrases that may not have a direct translation in Chinese and thus be able to explain them to your students. Everyone wins.
I remember sitting in my ESL class four years ago and being told that the standard teaching methodology applies to all students, regardless of their mother tongue. In China, I was told that certain schools prefer hiring teachers who speak no Chinese because then the students will be forced to use English in the classroom. Yet the old show-biz line of "know your audience" works for teaching, too. You won't just be teaching English, you'll be teaching English to Chinese students who live in China and (usually) speak only Chinese and possibly their local dialect. The more you can relate to their language struggles, the more your own will be alleviated.
Baseball in China?
China's two biggest team sports are basketball and soccer. As for the former, evidence of the Sinic obsession with the sport are everywhere: young men wear jerseys of their favorite NBA stars, Yao Ming's games are broadcast nationally on CCTV5, and every basketball court you pass by is filled with young Chinese men (and women) shooting hoops. One boy I taught once asked me to supply him with information about "street ball", his latest obsession. I had to confess that my experience playing ball in the concrete jungles of American cities was rather slim. And besides, basketball isn't my favorite sport; that's baseball.
Awhile back a friend and I argued whether baseball will ever take off in China. He was skeptical. Because Chinese cities are so crowded, he couldn't imagine the government clearing enough land to build a baseball diamond. In addition, for a developing country, baseball can be an expensive game: players need bats and gloves and spikes and balls and catcher's gear, none of which are particularly cheap. A basketball game can happen with two hoops, a ball, enough guys, and a good pair of shoes. Baseball? Not so much.
I countered that Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese cities were also quite crowded yet baseball managed to get a foothold in those societies. In America, baseball is now a mainly suburban sport but it wasn't initially- the game developed on the streets of cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Besides, several developing countries around the world are mad about baseball, particularly communist Cuba.
For the Chinese, baseball has several advantages over basketball. For one thing, size isn't as advantageous in baseball as it is in basketball, where few Chinese would be as tall as the average NBA point guard. Several Asian baseball players have succeeded in the US despite being undersized: think no further than the great Japanese outfielder Ichiro Suzuki.
Furthermore, baseball is a sport that emphasizes skill and dexterity over strength. South Korea won the inaugural World Baseball Classic in 2006 due in no small part to their mastery of fundamental baseball skills. The Chinese, with their legendary discipline, would be well suited to a game in which so much emphasis is placed on error prevention.
Finally, evidence is on my side. China has developed a national baseball team, managed and coached by former Major Leaguers. The team entered the World Baseball Classic and will automatically qualify for the 2008 Olympics. While it's entirely possible that the sport will fail to catch on just as soccer never really has in the US, I still think in the next few decades you'll see far more Chinese youths playing catch. It'd make me happy, at least.
Stunning
I usually don't care about the Super Bowl unless the 49ers are playing, and the fact that the game was aired at 7:30 this morning in China my motivation to watch was nil. But...wow: I can't believe the Giants won. I'm of two minds about this. Part of me wanted the Patriots to win, to humble the obnoxious 1972 Dolphins and to finish off what would be the most impressive accomplishment in NFL history. I also don't like the Giants much. Their coach is a jerk and so is their quarterback- I'll never forgive Eli Manning for balking to play for the Chargers (my No. 2 team) when they drafted him a few years back.
But as a 49er partisan, I was getting sick and tired of this Patriot dynasty talk and the beatification of native son Tom Brady, who some reckoned would knock Joe Montana off his pedestal as the greatest quarterback ever. Well sorry Tom, but Joe never lost a Super Bowl.
Plus, this will humble obnoxious Boston sports fans for awhile, which is good news for absolutely everyone outside of New England.
Anyway, the Super Bowl is usually the only time anyone outside of the US ever watches American football, which is a shame. The event seems more like an exhibition game than anything else- it's played inside a dome or at a warm weather site (Arizona this year), the ridiculous and bloated halftime show, the obsession over the ads, the pomp and circumstance of the introductions, and the sheer length of the game all would turn me off if I weren't already a fan of the sport.
For my non-American football following readers, the best time to tune in is for the second and third week of the playoffs, pitting teams from the same conference in cold-weather stadiums filled with screaming partisans. The Super Bowl comes two weeks after the conference championship games and often feels like little more than a formality.
These American sporting events are superior to the Super Bowl:
- The NCAA college basketball tournament
- The World Series (baseball)
- The NCAA college football championship game
- Occasionally the NBA (basketball) finals.
Nciku and Wenlin
Months ago a friend e-mailed me and recommended a new online Chinese-English dictionary called Nciku, suggesting that I use it in tandem with the venerable dictionary software Wenlin. I wisely took his advice and can say that both tools have drastically improved my understanding and appreciation of Chinese characters. In fact, they complement each other rather well: each has its strengths and weaknesses.
With Wenlin, you have the option of pasting Chinese text in a new window and acquiring the meaning of every word or phrase you encounter. Should one character arouse your interest, you can click on it and Wenlin will tell you its definition, origin, use in other words, stroke order, and so on. I often lose myself happily going from character to character in a long chain, not unlike how one Wikipedia article can easily lead to fifteen others. Wenlin, like Wikipedia, is a true intellectual pleasure even aside from its practical uses as a dictionary. Not only do you learn the individual characters themselves, but also the way in which characters and words work in the Chinese language.
However, Wenlin does have its drawbacks. It's English to Chinese database is relatively small, and its recognition of characters "drawn" with a mouse often doesn't work. Also, as a software program, Wenlin isn't flexible- unless you regularly purchase and download upgrades, the software cannot improve upon itself by incorporating new features or expanding its dictionaries. Wenlin works great if you paste an article from a newspaper, but less well if you try to understand what your Chinese friend writes on her blog.
Fortunately, where Wenlin falls short, Nciku pulls through. The latter is a website and so constantly evolves by adding new features, expressions, and words. Better yet: it's completely free. Nciku's English to Chinese dictionary is thorough and modern: recently I searched "PDA" and learned the Chinese terms for both Personal Digital Assistant (个人数å—助ç†) and Public Display of Affection (当众示爱). Nciku also allows users to comment, critique, and correct dictionary entries or set up study guides of their own. And did I mention it's free?
Nciku's best feature is its character recognition. Whenever one begins to write a character in an enclosed box, Nciku immediately comes up with about twenty-five different estimates as you go along. This is convenient because certain multi-stroke characters are difficult to draw with a computer mouse and so often I'll find what I'm looking for even before I finish. For more on this innovative tool, checkout this Sinosplice post from last year .
Alas, with Nciku you can't simply click on a character and learn more about it, so that's where Wenlin comes in. If I encounter an unfamiliar character, I first begin by drawing it with my mouse on Nciku's grid, obtain its meaning and pronunciation, and then plug it into Wenlin to find out its use in other words as well as its stroke order. By the end of this process, which takes less than two minutes, I'll have learned quite a bit about multiple words and am likelier to remember them.
For those of you learning Chinese or even just curious about how Chinese works, Wenlin and Nciku go a long way toward unraveling the language's many mysteries.
China Thought Experiment
Let's imagine that tomorrow Hu Jintao announces that the Communist Party will disband and China will adopt a Canadian-style parliamentary system of government. Henceforth, China will allow multiple political parties to compete in regular elections, with the winners forming a coalition government. Meanwhile, the nation will adopt an American-style bill of rights enshrining press freedom and other individual liberties. An independent judiciary is created and sustained. Immediately, China's political class forms new parties and selects party leaders in advance of nationwide elections.
How would this (extremely far-fetched) scenario play out?
Nobody knows, least of all an amateur China-hand like myself. But here's what seems to me to be a somewhat likely breakdown of the different parties that would emerge from the rubble of the Communist dictatorship.
There would likely be a highly militaristic, nationalistic party led by senior members of the Chinese military. This group would promote a confrontational foreign policy, adopt an aggressive posture toward Taiwan, and beat back Japanese efforts to establish regional hegemony. Ties with both Europe and the US would strain, while efforts to extract material wealth from African nations would accelerate. Domestically, this party would promote Chinese national pride and traditional Confucian values. Party leaders would rail against the liberalization of Chinese culture, as well as creeping Westernization. In economic policy, the party would work toward limiting Chinese unemployment by greatly enhancing the military-industrial complex. In terms of history, the Nationalist party would be staunch defenders of the Communist era and object to revisionism. Let's call them the Nationalist Party
There would also be a party composed of the moderate technocrats who guided the overhauling of China's political system. In many ways, they would govern in the manner of the formerly ruling Communists, balancing robust growth with environmental-protection legislation and attempting to stave off unrest in the countryside. Their foreign policy would be less hawkish than that of the Nationalist Party but they would be loath to make concessions toward Japanese intransigence or Taiwanese independence. While they would continue to forge ties with so-called "rogue" states, they would nonetheless cooperate on international initiatives such as the crisis on the Korean peninsula. Ties would remain cordial, if not warm, with the US and other Western countries. In dealing with China's past, the party would neither oppose nor promote efforts to scrutinize the errors of the Communist Party. In fact, most of the party leaders would have been former Politburo members themselves. Let's call this party the Centrist Party.
The third party to emerge would be a party composed of liberals, led by elites with significant experience overseas and supported heavily by university students. They would be the most aggressive in protecting the newfound individual rights of the Chinese people, and would welcome mixing traditional Chinese values with those from abroad. Their foreign policy would be geared toward achieving rapproachment with the Japanese and Taiwanese, and they would not necessarily intervene if Taiwan were to declare independence. In addition, they would be open toward calls for autonomy and independence with both Tibet and Xinjiang, and would be harshly critical of errors made in the recent Chinese past. In economic terms, the party would promote further integration with the global economy as well oppose efforts to protect Chinese workers from the vagaries of privatization. Let's call them the Liberal Party.
The fourth national party would be composed of representatives of both the rural poor and the urban migrant population. They would support a socialistic economic policy in which full employment would take precedence over growth, and would halt the spread of globalization and privatization within China. On foreign policy, this worker's party would be largely isolationist, believing that China should focus on solving its own problems. They would be socially conservative and nationalistic, yet strongly anti-elitist. Their first act of power would be to implement a highly progressive tax policy and a lofty minimum wage for China's workers. They would have sympathies with Marxism and vociferously denounce China's reform and opening policies. Let's call them the Labor Party.
There would also be a small Green party focused entirely on environmental protection, a Maoist party, and various other fringe national parties on both the left and the right. In addition, there would be many smaller parties organized along ethnic lines, with the most vocal and powerful being a Uighur Party and a Tibetan Party. These two parties, in turn, would have both pro-integration and pro-independence factions that could potentially split into separate parties themselves.
Confusing. How would it play out?
The dominant party would clearly be the Centrist Party, and so the Chinese prime minister would likely be a former Communist official; perhaps Hu himself. They would likely form a stable coalition with the Nationalist Party but would occasionally break and work instead with the Labor Party. Representatives from these three parties would comprise the lion's share of the Chinese parliament, with the Liberal Party remaining a distinct minority and the smaller parties having only token membership. In many ways, the ruling Centrist Party would govern in much the same manner as their Communist predecessors, continuing policies enacted in the Reform and Opening era.
On the surface, a democratized China would likely behave in the same way that the current authoritarian party would, begging the question: why bother with political reform at all? Certainly, a re-organization of China along these lines could have some troublesome consequences. The possibility of a bloody civil war between Uighurs and/or Tibetans and the Han leadership would be high, and there could be other divisions that would disrupt social harmony. Cities could become embroiled in conflict as migrants battle for their rights, and a nascent labor movement could interfere with government plans to liberalize the economy. As many defenders of China's authoritarian government point out, overnight democratization could make things much worse.
Then again, there would be clear benefits to political liberalization. A free press would be better able to expose government corruption and hold China's leaders accountable. Freedom of speech and expression could ignite a burgeoning artistic scene, much as in Spain after Franco's death. Other reforms could make it easier for ordinary Chinese to travel abroad, start up a business, and change professions. Relaxed eminent domain policies would give people more leeway in opposing government plans to appropriate private residences for the purpose of building infrastructure. Environmental and health crises would be handled better in a freer climate.
This is complicated stuff, hence my decision to title this post as a "thought experiment" rather than as a modest proposal. I'd be curious to read criticisms of my interpretation as well as additional thoughts on the matter. Come on fellow political dorks. I know you're out there.
The Two Tony Leungs
OK, OK...not all Chinese people look alike. Yet sometimes it's easy to get confused. For example, when standing in a train station during holiday season you do notice that you're surrounded by an army of short people with black hair all vying for the same ticket window. This isn't unfair, is it? After all, the Chinese often see us whiteys as big-nosed, splotchy-skinned giants. I've often been confused with other laowai who looked only a little like me; once in Fuzhou a girl I hadn't met before screamed at me on the street for not calling her back until she finally realized I wasn't who she thought I was. I was more amused than offended, and from then on reckoned that in the great stereotype race, laowai and Chinese are about even.
The Chinese do, however, have a relative paucity of last names. Scanning through my phone now, I'm reminded that about 3/4ths of my Chinese friends seem to be called 陈 (Chen)ï¼ŒæŽ (Li)， or å¼ (Zhang). Chinese movie stars, at least, often adopt an English name, which alleviates confusion somewhat. But not completely, which brings me to the topic of this post. I am guilty of confusing the two Tony Leungs.
At first glance, I can be forgiven. They're both about the same age. They've appeared in both Chinese and foreign films, a few of which received wide international release. They're both from Hong Kong, and they both have slightly darker skin than the average Chinese. But none of this matters- they're completely different people.
The first Tony Leung, called Tony Leung Chiu Wai, appeared most recently in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, an internationally acclaimed film controversial due to its explicit sex content. The second Tony Leung, called Tony Leung Ka Fai, appeared most recently in Lost in Beijing (苹果), an internationally acclaimed film controversial due to its explicit sexual content. Tony Leung Chiu Wai (hereafter referred to as TLCW) plays a powerful older man who has an extramarital affair with a beautiful young woman. Tony Leung Ka Fai (now re-christened as TLKF) plays a rich older man who has an extramarital affair with a beautiful young woman.
When I saw Lost in Beijing in the cinema, my friend said, "oh, it was Tony Leung". I was initially dubious but didn't think much of it. I mostly was impressed with the (combo) Tony Leung's range: he can go from a coolly elegant Cantonese to a gruff Beijingren without missing a beat. Why, it's as if he wasn't the same person! But how many Tony Leung's can there be?
Then last night, while popping in the early 90s French art-house film L'Amant, I noticed that Tony Leung was featured alongside the nubile British actress Jane March. More Tony! This time, the dashing young Tony speaks fluent French and is a rich Chinese heir living a playboy's life in 1920s Saigon. True to form, he plays an older man who has a forbidden (though not extramarital) affair with a beautiful young woman. Is he the luckiest man in film*, or what?
In came IMDB to the rescue. As you have probably figured out by now, TLCW was the man in Lust, Caution, while TLFK was the star of both Lost in Beijing and L'Amant. Embarrassingly, they don't even really look that much alike. Here they are, respectively:
Something tells me I'm not the only one to have made this mistake.
*The luckiest man in film, incidentally, is Steve Zahn: a good character actor who nonetheless looks like the guy who sold you weed in college. Zahn has the distinction of simultaneously nuzzling the breasts of Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz in the western film Bandidas. In case you don't know what I'm talking about, and to boost my page view:
UPDATE: Chris in the comments points out a rather sizable error in my post: in Lost in Beijing, Tony Leung Ka Fai actually plays a Hong Konger living in Beijing, not a local. I should have known better, especially as I was just in Beijing a week ago! My bad.