Clever Banners
ESWN flagged this funny banner, hoisted by Nigerian soccer fans at the Olympics
It says: "Our gymnastics are no good. Our ping pong is no good. But our soccer is good!"
Counting Characters and Such
Praxis, the company behind the LanguagePod series, has started a cool new blog called Learning on Your Terms. It's written by John Biesnecker, a veteran of the China expat blogging scene and a Praxis employee. For insight into learning a foreign language (not just Chinese), there's a lot of interesting material there.
Through a link on this post I found a list of all Chinese characters by frequency, all the way up to 10,000 or so.
As I mentioned in my first ever post for Lost Laowai, there isn't a magical number of characters one has to know to achieve "fluency", and in any case few people actually can quantify their own personal "character count". I've always been morbidly curious, anyway, so for fun I read through the list.
Characters 1-1,250- no problem.
1,250-2,250- iffy. Know some, don't know others
2,250-3,000- few and far between
3,000-10,000- nada
John guesses 3,500 characters are necessary to achieve proficiency, though as we know characters don't really matter, words do. So while I was feeling sorry for myself a bit, I remembered that about a year ago I'd probably be limited to 200, and a year before that no more than 40. So hey- progress is progress!
Loan Words and Language Needs
I came across an interesting thread at the excellent Marginal Revolution blog that wonders how "loan words", or foreign words inserted into conversation for particular effect, are used in various languages.
In English, the majority of our borrowed words and phrases come from French. Some are more useful than others. For instance, the term "faux pas" is far more succinct than its English meaning "social blunder", and as a result its application in English conversation has proven quite durable. Others, though, like "je ne sais pas" to describe an undefinable yet existent quality, tend to reek of snobbery.
Quite a few foreigners like to joke that the Chinese borrowed "humor" (幽默) and "logic" (逻辑) from English because neither concept exists in China. This, of course, is untrue (unless you're dealing with government bureaucracy), but it is rather curious. Young Chinese will use "cool" but leave off the "l", which can be confusing because you're never sure if they're saying "very cool" or "very bitter (苦)".
Then, of course, are those phrases in Chinese that foreigners here use. Some time ago, I wrote that everyone says the Chinese term for loose bowels "la duzi" rather than diarrhea, mostly because the condition occurs far more frequently here than in our home countries. Another term I use often is "厉害", which can mean fierce, terrible, awful, awesome, excellent, or skilled.
My level of Chinese isn't advanced enough to comment on the language's inherent deficiencies, but it seems to me that there are few concepts that cannot be adequately expressed in Mandarin.
English, on the other hand, has a major grammatical deficiency: the lack of second-person plural. Technically, one is supposed to just say "you" and the meaning will be clear through context, but hardly anyone uses it this way. In California, where I grew up, the awkward "you guys" is most common, while of course in the American south "y'all" is the term of choice. Friends of mine in the UK seem to tend toward "youse", which I like but doubt I'll be using anytime soon.
One would think we'd figure out how to address more than one person before worrying about importing foreign words, but I suppose language evolution occasionally lacks logic.
More on Chinese vs. Japanese
Six weeks ago, I wondered which language was more difficult to learn for the English native speaker- Japanese or Chinese. A friend in Kunming told me that getting "OK" at Japanese didn't require that much effort or time but at more advanced levels the language starts to get really difficult. Meanwhile, in Chinese it's very difficult just to get the hang of it, but at more advanced levels the language becomes easier and easier (in terms of understanding the grammar, etc.).
At Sinosplice, John has produced a couple of nifty charts analyzing acquisition of pronunciation and grammar within the languages. His conclusions seem to dovetail with mine, though John has studied Japanese before while I haven't.
A Joke (or Two)
Here's a joke my Chinese friend taught me:
A stutterer (结巴) walks into a shop to buy a bottle of beer. When he asks the merchant how much one costs, he is told "20 yuan"
Shocked at the high price, the stutterer says "开开开开开开开。。。"
Hearing this word, the merchant does as he's told and opens the bottle.
Then, the stutterer finishes his sentence: "开玩笑"
Explanation:
In Chinese, 开 means "open". The verb to open is usually rendered 打开, but 开 gets the job done. "开玩笑" means, in this case, "you're joking". A bottle of beer in a shop should cost around 3 or 4 yuan, so 20 is a ridiculous price. So, translated into English, the stutterer meant to say "you're joking" but instead said "open", forcing him to pay for the beer.
Here's another one:
Deng Xiaoping plans to travel to the United States on a state visit. Embarrassed by his non-existent English, Deng asks an aide to help him prepare for a press conference. The aide says, "OK. The first question they're going to ask you is "What's your last name?". The second question will be 'What's your first name?'. The third question will be, "Where do you want to go in America?". Deng nods and prepares his answers.
Upon arriving at the press conference, a reporter asks Deng: "Where will you be staying in the United States?". Deng, not understanding, remembers that the first question would ask him for his last name. So he says: "我姓邓" (Wo sheeng dung). "Ah, Washington!" someone cries, and the reporters dutifully record his answer in their notebooks.
Then, a reporter asks Deng: "What would you like to do during your stay in America?" Deng again doesn't understand, but remembers that the second question would ask him for his first name. He says, "å°å¹³" (Sheeow Ping). "Ah, shopping!" someone says, and the reporters write his response down.
The third journalist asks Deng: "In your opinion, what will be the most pressing internal matter for China during the first years of the 21st century?" Deng is startled by the length of the question, and forgets his aide's words that the third question would ask him where he'd like to go in the US. So, in his native Sichuan dialect, Deng says "什么？(sar zuh?). "Ah, SARS!" someone cries, and so Deng managed to impress the reporters without ever understanding a word they said.
There's actually a fourth part to this joke involving a president of Taiwan, but I've forgotten it.
And finally, here's an aphorism a Chinese guy told me months ago:
"å–酒对è‚å处， 抽烟对肺å处，ä¸å–é…’ä¸æŠ½çƒŸå¯¹å¿ƒå处"
(Drinking is bad for your liver, smoking is bad for your lungs, but not drinking and not smoking is bad for your heart)
What’s Hard About Languages?
I met an interesting Canadian guy the other day who has studied both Chinese and Japanese. I asked him which language he considered more difficult, and he said that it depended. "On what?" I asked. He replied:
"Well, in Chinese it's difficult to get even decent at the language. But once you've reached a certain level of competence, getting very good isn't all that difficult, because the grammar is relatively easy. In Japanese, getting decent is pretty easy, but if you try to get really good, it takes an enormous amount of time and effort mastering complex grammar rules."
I've never studied Japanese, but what he said about Chinese strikes me as plausible. In the beginning, learning Chinese is a nightmare. The characters are inscrutable. The vocabulary has few cognates with English or other European languages. Learning to write well takes a lot of practice and maintenance. And even when you think you say the right words in the right order, using the wrong tones can make it impossible for others to understand you.
Eventually, though, you get the hang of the characters, and the tones, and the grammar. For me, as an intermediate student, the biggest challenges are vocabulary, idioms and other expressions, and dealing with regional accent variations. These have and will continue to take up a lot of my time. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. I know it's only a matter of time before my vocabulary and command of the language improves to an extent that I can express pretty much anything I want.
Romance languages are different. Vocabulary isn't really a problem, since so many words are related to English. Pronunciation (particularly in Italian) is very straight-forward. The grammar, though, can be difficult to master. In this way, perhaps learning Italian or Spanish is similar to learning Japanese.
What about other languages? I'd be interested to hear from those of you who have studied Slavic, Germanic, or other tongues. How does the learning curve compare to Chinese?
Crazy English
A few years ago in Fuzhou, I arrived in class and discovered my students whipped into a frenzy. "What's going on?" I asked. "Oh, the Crazy English guy is speaking at our school!" Crazy English? I had no idea what that meant, and gave the matter no further thought. Later that day, when walking past the soccer field on my way home, I heard a booming voice yell "persistence!" followed by thousands of others chiming back in unison. I've never thought much of mass rallies, and this Crazy English meeting certainly seemed like one to me. No thanks.
Last year, while in the northern Yunnan town of Zhongdian, I walked into a China Mobile store to add money to my phone. The clerk, a tall young man, began speaking to me in an unusually loud voice. "I have been told the best way to meet foreigners is to talk to them so I want to talk to you how are you my name is Michael are you well good well welcome to our city this is beautiful isn't it well what kind of phone card you want to buy?"
When I mentioned the incident to a laowai resident I met later that evening, he knew of the clerk. "He's just one of these Crazy English followers." Ah ha.
I knew Crazy English was popular, if scanning the English-learning textbooks at my local Xinhua bookstore is any indication. But in this New Yorker profile, "popular" isn't the right word for it. Crazy English is huge.
The profile is interesting and well-written, and goes into the odd relationship between mastering a foreign language and fervent patriotism. For those of you too busy or disinclined to read a seven-page magazine article, here's a brief description of Crazy English:
The movement was begun about fifteen years ago by a failed engineering student in western China who discovered he could only learn English well by shouting it aloud. He managed to improve so rapidly that soon he was completely fluent in the language, placing second in a provincial competition. His success sparked adherents, and sensing an opportunity, the student (named Li Yun) set up a business that has grown into a nationwide phenomenon. If you teach English somewhere in China, chances are one of your students either uses or has experimented with Li's method.
What's interesting about Crazy English is that it challenges the classically East Asian notion of "losing face". When learning a language, the only practical method is to make a lot of mistakes and learn from them. In Chinese society, students are often reluctant to speak up because they fear embarrassing themselves with their poor English.* Whatever else one may think of his methods (or his ego, or political beliefs), Li Yun corrects this flaw and it is not difficult to see why he has been so successful.
*To clarify, adults everywhere have trouble learning foreign languages for the exact same reason, but the difficulty is amplified in East Asia for largely cultural reasons.
A Very Important Post About La Duzi
In River Town, his account of spending two years teaching English in a small Sichuanese city, Peter Hessler recalled that he and his Peace Corps site mate began speaking an English/Chinese patois called "Fuling English". The logic was simple: the two would converse in English but would liberally sprinkle Chinese words into their conversation out of convenience. Far from pretension, this habit occurs among every foreigner in China who speaks even a little Mandarin. Some words, phrases, and expressions simply spring to mind faster in an adopted tongue.
For instance, the term 麻烦 (ma fan) in Chinese loosely means "trouble" but is used to describe any situation that might be difficult or irritating. (Come to think of it, 麻烦 and the Italian term "casino" mean roughly the same and are both better than any English equivalent). Often, conversations between foreigners will go like this:
"Should we take the bus?"
"Nah, too 麻烦. Let's grab a cab".
Another, of course, is 拉肚å (la duzi). Even foreigners fresh off the boat know this expression- I learned it in Lianyungang even before I could speak enough Chinese to order food in a restaurant. La duzi literally means "loose bowels" and rolls easily off the tongue of everyone in China, given its unfortunate prevalence in daily life. For such an unpleasant experience, "la duzi" is a rather pretty word- it could be the name of a fancy Italian coffee you buy at Whole Foods. Its efficacy is undeniable: say "la duzi", and no further explanation is needed. Why didn't you come into work this morning? "La duzi". Ah.
There just isn't any good way to express "la duzi" in English. There's diarrhea, of course, a disgusting word that makes even the coarsest among us recoil in horror. Then there's "the shits", which, in addition to containing an expletive, rather inelegantly describes the condition. "The runs" is slightly better but not particularly evocative. From 11th grade English I recall John Steinbeck referring to "the skitters" in The Grapes of Wrath, but the reference is too obscure for modern usage. Bashful Americans typically use a roundabout way to refer to "la duzi", offering something like "Well, my stomach isn't happy and so punished me a bit" or "a bit of a tummy bug".
Fortunately, in the US and other developed countries, "la duzi" doesn't happen very often, and when it does, there's usually a direct cause. Most sufferers can identify a glass of spoiled milk or a moldy bagel as the culprit, thus remedying the situation. Yet in China, and in other developing countries, "la duzi" can strike at any time and for any reason. Even those foreigners who avoid street food and brush their teeth with filtered water cannot evade it. Most simply accept "la duzi" as a fact of life, an almost monthly occurrence that must be endured.
An English friend of mine recalled a conversation he had with his newly-arrived English boss, a teacher at the school.
M: "Hello Robert, I won't be coming in to teach today, I'm very sorry."
R: "What's the matter?"
M: "拉肚å"
R: "What?"
M: "Oh, I've got diarrhea pretty bad..don't think I can leave home".
R: "Come on. That's your excuse?"
M: (getting annoyed), "Look, I've been on the toilet six times in the past half-hour. I can't risk anything happening during class."
R: "Well, this is bloody inconvenient".
M: "Can you put Mr. Li (Chinese boss) on?"
R: "Fine"
Mr Li: "ä½ å¥½ Mark. What's the matter."
M: "拉肚å. I can't come in today"
Mr Li: "Yes, fine, I understand. See you tomorrow."
(hangs up)
Pretty much sums it up.
(For obvious reasons, I deemed it prudent not to include any photos with this post).
Perhaps Vocabulary Is Important After All
I spent my first two years in China teaching high school English in a particular course dedicated to preparing students for the IELTS exam. The purpose of the exam was to allow my students to go to English-language universities abroad, something several of my past students managed to accomplish.
Teaching IELTS (or any test prep course) is different from teaching "general English", which the vast majority of foreign teachers in China do. While we were of course concerned with helping our students improve their overall competency in the language, a large part of our job was teaching them exam strategy, such as ways to obtain correct answers in situations when they did not know much of the vocabulary.
For our students, taking a course based on strategy rather than pure language learning was a new experience. Rather than going over grammar or vocabulary, we emphasized the acquisition of skills such as scanning, skimming, context, and paraphrasing. I often had to remind my students not to worry too much about vocabulary, and that seemingly impossible questions could be answered should they apply the correct strategy.
My more diligent students quickly got on board and began applying the strategy, enthusiastically doing the exercises I prepared for them in class. The weaker students mostly went through the motions, as they didn't care how they did on the exam anyway. After all, not every student who passes IELTS has the means and opportunity to study abroad, and most of my students understood this fact.
One girl, Sarah, was an exception. She was extremely motivated to learn English and worked hard, but strongly disagreed with both our program's philosophy and my teaching methods in particular. Often, while the others were gamely doing whatever exercise I assigned them, she would sit with her dictionary and rigorously write down new word after new word. When I asked her why she wasn't engaged with the class, she replied that none of my skill-based lessons would do any good if she simply couldn't read or understand the content. I repeatedly insisted that test-taking skills were very important, and that vocabulary was an overrated aspect to the exam, but she refused to budge. At the time, I wrote her off as a student too stubborn for her own good and concentrated on others who were more willing to cooperate.
Two years later, I find myself enrolled in an HSK* prep course at my Chinese language school- essentially the Chinese version of the class I used to teach. My teacher, like I once did, goes to great lengths to teach us test-taking skills while telling us not to worry too much about vocabulary. Just yesterday, we took a practice exam that lasted nearly three hours. Most of the content was extremely difficult for an intermediate student like myself. And while I tried applying the strategies that my teacher taught me, I found that certain passages were just impenetrable simply because I didn't know enough vocabulary.
Suddenly, I found myself sympathizing with Sarah, my old student, a girl I often criticized for her refusal to go along with the program. And while I'm a 26 year old adult rather than a 17 year old high school student, I could sense the exact same frustration that she felt. If I could only read more, I thought throughout the test, then this wouldn't be nearly as difficult.
I still believe that it would be a mistake for a test-prep course to focus too much on vocabulary. In the end, learning a language depends on how much individual effort you put in, and vocabulary cannot be imparted from one mind to another. Teaching test-taking skills is a far better use of class time, and I'm pleased that this wisdom translates across cultures.
But I doubt I'll ever patronize a student obsessed over vocabulary again.
*HSK, by the way, is a Chinese language exam intended for students who wish to apply their Chinese skills in either an academic or professional setting. It is similar but not identical to English-language exams such as IELTS or TOEFL.
Be an Amateur Translator
At the risk of converting this blog into a poor man's Sinosplice, here are a couple of other tips for the Chinese language learner. If you, like me, find the dialogues and passages in your Chinese textbook dull and uninspiring, hit the web. Chinese newspaper articles often aren't much better, but there are plenty of other sites with interesting essays and articles on a variety of subjects. This happens to be one I like- a site devoted to cultural issues in China.
First, choose an article, regardless of length. You won't be reading all of it at once anyway, so give yourself plenty of time to delve into the text. If you're a beginning or intermediate student, focus on one paragraph per day. Give yourself the following two tasks: first, use your dictionaries to translate the paragraph into modern, idiomatic English. This entails not only learning the meaning of each word or phrase you encounter but also rendering them into something resembling decent prose. Should you be unable to understand a particular sentence, leave it in question marks and ask a tutor or friend to explain it for you.
Second, write down the pinyin (with tone marks) for each character you encounter. Having done this, read the paragraph out loud (while looking at the characters), preferably with a Chinese friend there to guide you. Insist on perfection- remember, speaking with incorrect tones means speaking incorrectly. Since you'll only be working on one paragraph per day, don't worry if it takes you several repetitions before you're able to read the passage fluently. Most likely, your brain will attach a tone to a particular character and you'll be able to remember it in the future.
If this process seems slow and interminable, don't worry- after a few weeks you'll find that you need to check your dictionary less and less often, and at that point you can increase your daily study to two or three paragraphs.
Finding a suitable article shouldn't be hard: if you're a sports nut, read about sports. If you're a politics junkie, crack open a newspaper. If you're into movies, then read about them in Chinese. This will give you the vocabulary and phrasing you need to talk about subjects that interest you in Chinese.
If you're an advanced student, you probably won't need to go about this process so methodically. Nevertheless, you can never be "too good" at Chinese.
I'd be curious to see if anyone else has tried this method and can add to or refine some of the points I've made. It works for me!
UPDATE: A friend of mine who works as a Chinese/English interpreter came up with another good tip: watch 5 minutes of TV (preferably the news or another program in which proper Chinese is spoken) and actually repeat, word for word, what the commentator says, even if you have no idea what the words mean. Doing this will do wonders for your ability to separate what seems like an endless stream of rapidly spoken Chinese into discrete words and tones. After 5 minutes, you'll probably be too exhausted to continue or will have to explain to your roommate why you were just talking to the television set.