cogitoergosum
2010-09-12 14:25:08 UTC
Shi, sHi, shI, Shit, SHit, SHIt, shiT, shIT, sHIT
http://cogitoergosum.co.cc/2010/09/12/shi-shi-shi-shit-shit-shit-shit-shit-shit/
To Speak, Perchance To ‘Dream In Chinese’
August 31, 2010
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All Things Considered
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August 31, 2010 When Deborah Fallows went to live in China with her
husband, she was armed with a few semesters of Mandarin lessons. But
when she got to Shanghai, she found she couldn’t recognize or speak a
single word of what she’d been studying.
Fallows writes about her journey through the Chinese language — and
her many missteps along the way — in her new book, Dreaming in
Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language.
Fallows — who has a Ph.D. in linguistics and speaks six languages —
knew that learning Chinese as an adult wouldn’t be easy. “Chinese is
considered one of the world’s difficult languages,” she tells NPR’s
Melissa Block, “along with Japanese and Arabic and Russian.”
Even with her background in languages, Fallows says learning Chinese
was particularly challenging because it was so dissimilar from all
other languages she had studied.
“I didn’t feel like I had anything to hang my hat on with this
language,” Fallows explains. “It just bore no resemblance to romance
languages, Germanic languages, Japanese — anything that I’d ever
approached before.”
Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons In Life, Love, And Language
By Deborah Fallows
Hardcover, 208 pages
Walker & Company
List price: $22
Read An Excerpt Shi, Shi, Shi And Shi
Chinese only has 400 unique syllables — that’s 1/10th of the number of
the unique syllables in the English language. That means a lot of
Chinese words sound alike to the untrained ear.
“Homonyms run rampant,” Fallows says. (Think: “seal” the animal and
“seal” as in “to securely close”.) “In Chinese, you have just a
plethora of things like that,” she says.
The English language clusters consonants together, which results in a
variety of complex syllables such as “stretch” and “plump.” But
Chinese syllables don’t combine that way, so the only way to tell the
difference between two otherwise identical syllables is by listening
to the tone and the context.
To illustrate the many possible meanings of a single syllable, Fallows
points to a playful, Chinese tongue twister called “The Lion-Eating
Poet in the Stone Den.” On the page, the poem is made up of many
different Chinese characters, but when read aloud in Mandarin, all of
the syllables are different tonal variations of the syllable shi.
“The amazing thing … is that you can tell this entire story using one
syllable,” Fallows says. “It’s a real challenge to listen to —
especially if your ear is not accustomed to listening [for] and using
tones.”
In “The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den,” shi — spoken in varying
tones — means: lions, market, the number 10, eat, stone — and more. It
makes for a fun tongue twister, but mastering a tonal language can be
a frustrating experience for a non-native speaker.
Fallows recounts an embarrassing experience she had one day in
Shanghai — that all started with an inexplicable craving for cheese.
Wanting something — anything — with cheese, Fallows went to the local
Shanghai Taco Bell, where she was greeted by a young Chinese man
wearing a sombrero and a velvet vest.
“I had practiced very hard what I was going to ask him,” Fallows said.
“I wanted to do takeout.”
Her tones weren’t very good at that point, though, so Fallows’ request
for “takeout” — dabao — was met with a blank stare from the Taco Bell
employee. Fallows tried saying dabao with every combination of tones
she could think of — rising tones, falling tones — and when that
didn’t work, she started pointing at the menu, and then miming the
action of walking out the door with a bag of food. After a
consultation with several other employees, finally — eureka! Yes,
dabao! Yes, of course, they did takeout.
It’s hard to say what Fallows was actually saying to the Chinese men
if not the word for “takeout”; she says there are a number of
possibilities — “some of them more embarrassing than others.” The word
for “hug” is close, as is the word for “newspaper.” No wonder the
blank stares.
Courtesy of Walker and Company
Deborah Fallows has lived and traveled in China for several years with
her husband, journalist James Fallows. She is also the author of A
Mother’s Work.
Courtesy of Walker and Company Deborah Fallows has lived and traveled
in China for several years with her husband, journalist James Fallows.
She is also the author of A Mother’s Work.
Forget Your ‘Please’ And ‘Thank Yous’
To someone who grew up learning all the “pleases” and “thank yous” of
polite English, Chinese as it is spoken between family and friends can
sound extremely terse and direct.
“I felt I was being very blunt, very abrupt and even often very rude,”
Fallows says. Chinese, when spoken between two people who are close
with one another, leaves out what Fallows calls the “grace notes” —
please, thank you, no thank you.
For example, if a friend offers you a glass of water, and you don’t
want a glass of water, the proper response translates as: “Don’t need”
or “Don’t want.”
There is a lot of “padding and softness” that Fallows says is woven
into our everyday English, even when addressing people we know well.
But in Chinese, “pleases” and “thank yous” are reserved for people
with whom a degree of formality is expected.
“If you’re inserting these niceties, these softeners … the Chinese
will see that as actually setting up a distance between you and the
person you’re talking to,” Fallows explains. Trying to be polite can
actually come off as offensive.
These are just a few of the many cultural and linguistic puzzles
Fallows describes in Dreaming in Chinese, as she recounts her struggle
to master the countless nuances of communication in another culture.
The few times Fallows actually dreamt in Chinese, she said it was a
frustrating and “odd dictionary dream” in which she was looking for a
word — trying to communicate, but unable to make others understand.
Basically, “the story of my life in China,” she says with a laugh.
Excerpt: ‘Dreaming In Chinese’
by Deborah Fallows
I first saw China in the summer of 1986. My husband and I had packed
up our then small children, left our home in Washington, DC, and gone
to live in Japan and Southeast Asia for four years. We jumped at a
chance that came our way to visit China for several weeks, after
living in Tokyo and before heading for Kuala Lumpur.
The China we visited then was still emerging from the Cultural
Revolution. Most of the young people, dressed in their drab Mao suits
or simple, cheap clothes, were seeing Westerners for the first time.
They would race to scoop up our blond children in their arms for
pictures and to practice “Hello! Hello!” in English. The Chinese who
greeted us were light and playful; we felt their high-spirited
welcome, especially after the constraints of living in traditional,
culture-bound Japan.
My recollections of that brief time are in snapshots: I bought bottles
of bright orange soda that lay cooling on slabs of ice in vendors’
carts. We went to the Beijing zoo, which was dreary and untidy, to
look for pandas. The skies in Beijing and Shanghai and Hangzhou were
clear and blue. We guessed that the cheerless Stalinist government
rest houses where we stayed were probably bugged. On our domestic
airliner flying to the south of China, we sat toward the front of the
plane in big overstuffed armchairs and held our collective breath on
take off, peering through gaps in the floorboards to see the tarmac
racing by below.
Almost 20 years later, my husband and I set off to return to China for
three years, where he would be reporting and writing long stories for
the Atlantic. I would be working on my research for the Pew Internet
Project, looking at Internet use in China. This excursion fit into the
pattern of our life, alternating several years at home in Washington,
DC, with several years out exploring the world.
We knew before we headed to China again that our old memories would
seem quaint and charming, and that we would be in for a different kind
of adventure this time in a modern, booming China. We did what we
could to prepare: went to movies, read books, looked online, studied
maps, talked to people who had been there before us. We got a glimpse
here and an insight there, but we knew it wasn’t adding up to much of
anything. In the end we took a leap of faith and boarded the plane for
Shanghai.
I did one other thing to prepare: I studied Mandarin a few nights a
week for a few terms at Georgetown University in DC, figuring that a
jump-start on the language could only help as we tried to set up some
kind of normal life in China. I have been studying languages and
linguistics for almost all my life, and at least the process of
studying the language felt comfortable to me, even if the language did
not.
Our entry to China was rough. The first month went by in a daze, but
our first impressions and experiences remain perfectly vivid to me: I
could not recognize or utter a single word of the Chinese I had been
studying, and I even wondered if my teacher had been teaching us
Cantonese instead of Mandarin.1 My husband said, in an anxious sweat,
“I will never learn enough about China to write anything.”
The hot Shanghai wind blew at 40 knots for many days, like the famous
Santa Anas in California. My husband was very, very sick for ten days
from drinking the water. We wondered if we were being followed, or if
our phones were tapped.
Slowly, of course, everything began to change. My teacher had indeed
been teaching me Mandarin, although without the heavy Shanghai accent
I heard all around me and later sorted out. My husband went on to
write many, many articles about China and had the journalistic time of
his life. We became immune to every germ we ran into and were never
really sick again in China. The weather changed, although we grew
never to expect the skies to be clear or the air to be fresh. We know
people were indeed watching us, but far from being a bother, they
would invite us out to lunch to keep an eye on us and were friendly.
As for the language, the longer we were in China, the more engaged I
became with Chinese. Part of that experience was true tribulation: I
worked and studied hard but felt like I was only inching forward, my
progress barely measurable. Eventually, finally, I marked a few
milestones, cause for much self-congratulation that was generally
noted only by me: the first day I ventured out without my dictionary
and did OK; my first complete phone conversation in Chinese; the first
time I followed the entire plot of a soap opera episode on TV; and my
pièce de résistance, the day I chewed out a Shanghai taxi driver in
Chinese for an egregious overcharge, and got a refund of 100 rénmínbì
(then about twelve US dollars).
The language paid me back in ways I hadn’t fully anticipated. It was
my lifeline to our everyday survival in China. My language foibles,
many of which I have recounted in this book, taught me as much as my
rare and random successes. The language also unexpectedly became my
way of making some sense of China, my telescope into the country.
Foreigners I met and knew in China used their different passions to
help them interpret China: artists used China’s art world, as others
used Chinese cooking, or traditional medicine, or business, or music,
or any number of things they knew about. I used the language, or more
precisely, the study of the language.
As I tried to learn to speak Mandarin, I also learned about how the
language works — its words, its sounds, its grammar and its history. I
often found a connection between some point of the language — a
particular word or the use of a phrase, for example — and how that
point could elucidate something very “Chinese” I would encounter in my
everyday life in China. The language helped me understand what I saw
on the streets or on our travels around the country — how people made
their livings, their habits, their behavior toward each other, how
they dealt with adversity, and how they celebrated.
This book is the story of what I learned about the Chinese language,
and what the language taught me about China.
Excerpted from Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons In Life, Love,
And Language by Deborah Fallows. Copyright 2010 by Deborah Fallows.
Excerpted by permission of Walker & Company.
To Speak, Perchance To ‘Dream In Chinese’
Copyright ©2010 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial
use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
Heard on All Things Considered
August 31, 2010 – ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I’m Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I’m Melissa Block.
When Deborah Fallows went to live in China with her husband, the
journalist James Fallows, she was armed with a few semesters of
Mandarin study. Then she got to Shanghai and found she couldn’t
recognize or speak a single word of what she’d been studying.
She writes about her journey through the Chinese language – and her
many missteps along the way – in her new book “Dreaming in Chinese.”
Deborah Fallows has a Ph.D. in linguistics and speaks half a dozen
languages, but Chinese was another story.
Ms. DEBORAH FALLOWS (Author, “Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in
Life, Love, and Language”): I didn’t feel like I had anything to hang
my hat on with this language. It just bore no resemblance to Romance
languages, Germanic languages, Japanese, anything that I’d ever
approached before. And there are some things about Chinese that are
easy, and then there are a lot of things about Chinese that are hard.
BLOCK: Well, let’s talk about that. You point out that Chinese has
only 400 syllables, unique syllables, one-tenth of the number that
there are in English, which means that there are many, many, many
words that sound exactly alike.
Ms. FALLOWS: Homonyms…
BLOCK: And that can get you in a lot of trouble, right?
Ms. FALLOWS: It’s homonyms run rampant, yes.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. FALLOWS: Like in English, if you have, say, the word seal – seal,
the animal; you have seal a letter; but in Chinese, you have just a
plethora of things like that.
The issue with Chinese is that they have these very few syllables. You
don’t -words like mah(ph), tah(ph), huh(ph), shi, you don’t get a lot
of long complicated syllables like stretch or plump, where you get
consonants clustered together to give you all kinds of varieties. So
there’s very little to work with. And that actually connects directly
to the tone system of Chinese. Since you have so few syllables to work
with, one of the ways out of that and distinguishing one syllable for
another to make one word or another is to slap a tone onto it. So you
can say shi. Shi. Shi. Shi. And you get…
BLOCK: And the meaning will change.
Ms. FALLOWS: …(unintelligible) and the meaning will change with each
of those.
BLOCK: You print a short little story in your book, written in
Chinese, called “The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den.”
Ms. FALLOWS: That’s right.
BLOCK: Which looks like a whole bunch of different Chinese characters
on the page. But if you were to read it, what would it sound like?
Ms. FALLOWS: It would sound all like shi.
BLOCK: Every word.
Ms. FALLOWS: Every word is shi. The tones might change, but the
amazing thing about this poem is that you can tell this entire story
using one syllable. It’s a real challenge to listen to, especially if
your ear is not accustomed to listening and using tones.
BLOCK: And the shi in this poem, you’re saying, means lions, market,
10, eat, and stone, among other words.
Ms. FALLOWS: Right, among other things. It’s a little fable, and it’s
not a great story.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. FALLOWS: It doesn’t tell a wonderful myth, but it is kind of
interesting that you can tell a whole story using one syllable.
BLOCK: You write about something that happened to you one day when you
had a craving, an inexplicable craving for cheese when you were living
in Shanghai, and you went to Taco Bell. And you were trying to order
takeout and just ran into a buzz saw of lack of understanding. What
happened?
Ms. FALLOWS: Right. I went in the door and was greeted by this young
Chinese guy in a sombrero and little velvet vest and had practiced
very hard what I was going to ask him. I wanted to do takeout. The
word in Chinese for takeout is dabao. So I wasn’t very good at tones
at that point and trying to ask him, do you have dabao? A complete
blank look on his face.
So I thought, okay, I’m obviously using the tones wrong here, so I’ll
try dabao with other kinds of tones. So I was trying rising tones,
falling tones, falling and rising tones, any combination of tones I
could get for the word dabao. Then, I got the menu. I started
mimicking – pointing on the menu, pointing to the door as though I
were taking a bag out the door…
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. FALLOWS: …you know, and thinking all this, well, come on. How hard
can this be? Finally, he went into the back room, into the kitchen and
came out with three or four other guys. I went through the routine
again with dabao. Dabao. Dabao. Anything I can think of.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. FALLOWS: And one of them had this look of eureka on his face, and
he said, oh, dabao.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. FALLOWS: And then they all laughed and went into the other room
and said, yes, they do, you know, yes, they do. Yo(ph), they do have
dabao.
BLOCK: And when you were asking in that Taco Bell for takeout, they
might have been thinking what? What would have sounded similar to what
you were asking for?
Ms. FALLOWS: There are a number of things, some of them more
embarrassing than others. I was maybe asking for a hug. And I…
BLOCK: These crazy Westerners.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. FALLOWS: Yeah. You just never know what they’ll want.
BLOCK: You point one other thing that – well, many other things, but
you do point to one glimmer you have into Chinese culture, which has
to do with the notion that it can be a very blunt language. To an
American, it might seem impolite that there aren’t sort of these grace
notes, I think you call them, of please and thank yous that are added
to things.
Ms. FALLOWS: Right. When people ask you if you want something, like,
would you like a glass of water? You’d say, bu yao(ph), which just
means don’t want or don’t need, instead of saying, oh, no, thanks. I’m
not really thirsty. Maybe I’ll have something later.
BLOCK: Right.
Ms. FALLOWS: With all this padding and softness that you use to
communicate in what you think is a polite way in English, you strip
all of that away in Chinese. And it’s just bu yao(ph). Bu keqi(ph),
don’t want, cannot. Bu shi(ph), isn’t, do not. And I did feel very
rude.
But then I noticed this funny thing that was going on, for example, if
you’re in a restaurant watching a group of close friends eating or
maybe it’s a family eating, you see this very delicate choreography.
For example, you have a common pot of chicken and maybe the mom in the
family has got her chopstick and she’s very delicately picking out the
best little chunks of chicken to put on her child’s plate. And you see
the dad pouring tea or pouring beer for everybody else in the family,
as is appropriate, before pouring it for yourself. So you think: This
is very polite, normal, standard behavior.
And then in the midst of all this, one of the kids will say, gei wo
yan(ph), give me the salt. It’s like, what’s going on? Why this point
of difference between what you see as polite and what you hear as
being really rude?
So I started to look into this a little bit and found that if you’re
inserting these niceties, these softeners like pleases and thank yous,
the Chinese will see that as actually setting up a distance between
you and the person you’re talking to.
So if I say, please pass the salt, your understanding that I have a
certain degree of formality between you and me, which you don’t want
to insert in that case. So in a family or between and among friends,
putting in the pleases and thank yous actually is setting up a
distance between you. There’s a degree of formality and even can be
kind of offensive rather than saying, hey, what’s going on here? You
know, you’re my buddy. You’re my friend. You don’t need to say please
and thank you.
That’s what’s polite is when you strip away that kind of formality of
please and thank you.
BLOCK: I’m wondering if you got to the point where you were in fact
dreaming in Chinese…
(Soundbite of laughter)
BLOCK: …such as the title of your book. Were you seeing characters?
Was that the language in your sleep?
Ms. FALLOWS: I dreamed a little in Chinese but not a lot in Chinese.
It was more like this odd dictionary dream where I was looking for a
word. It was more like this frustrating experience with the tones
where I was trying to say something and get it across and someone not
understanding me.
BLOCK: Pretty much the story of your time there.
Ms. FALLOWS: The story of my life in China.
BLOCK: Deborah Fallows, thanks for coming in.
Ms. FALLOWS: Thanks, Melissa.
BLOCK: Deborah Fallows’ book is “Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons
in Life, Love, and Language.” You can read an excerpt at npr.org.
(Soundbite of music)
SIEGEL: You are listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
Comments on:
To Speak, Perchance To ‘Dream In Chinese’
John Selig (Becksmasher) wrote:
Right, Andy. Many years ago I learned to write Korean, which is very
efficient and easy to learn. A foreigner can pronounce any word he
reads — albeit for me, not too well — even though he might not know
the meaning of what he’s reading. Korean is another fascinating
language, but very different from Chinese.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 5:30:00 PM
Recommend (4)
Andy Cheong (andycheong10) wrote:
John is correct that Chinese character is not an efficient writing
system. Learning is done through writing repetitively. The character
form currently known as Traditional had actually gone through multiple
evolutions over the centuries. So you may imagine that it was even
more complex at one time. To address the character’s inefficiency and
difficulties and to promote literacy, the simplified system, Hangul,
and Hiragana/Katakana were devloped by mainland China, Korea, and
Japan respectively.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 5:09:45 PM
Recommend (1)
Jeremy Hsu (JHsu) wrote:
As a mainland Chinese, I partially agree with what people from Hong
Kong or Taiwan may say about the “please” “thank you” part if you
consider the recent history and culture changes in mainland China. But
it is quite curious to me that no one seems to remember that we often
use “Ma2 Fan2″ or “Lao2 Jia4″ instead of “Qing3 (please)”, which
literaly means “bother you to…”. Anyway, most of us prefer to more
subtle ways to achieve the same effects as the more formal “please”
“thank you”.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 5:07:14 PM
Recommend (11)
John Selig (Becksmasher) wrote:
I haven’t read all of the many comments here, but maybe someone has
mentioned that although the basic Chinese word is monosyllabic, many
words are made up of two syllables, even three syllables. And then
there is a vast number of four syllable “proverbs” that are
fascinating and rich in meaning.
I studied Chinese for a couple of years and lived in Taiwan for one
year. I loved learning Chinese characters, especially the traditional
characters, which although more complicated than simplified Chinese
used on the mainland, are more beautiful. I can’t say Chinese is a
very “practical” writing system, but it is a cultural and aesthetic
treasure.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 3:48:10 PM
Recommend (17)
Wes Cheng (IndianaWes) wrote:
When I heard “…saying dabao with every combination of tones…there are
a number of possibilities — some of them more embarrassing than
others…”, I said to myself, Oh boy, Ms Fallows, I hope you didn’t slip
the B (in dabao)into P . It would have been really really embarrassing
if you did.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 2:15:41 PM
Recommend (4)
Letty Griffin (Guapa) wrote:
I just have to share my experience while learning English. I was
talking about taking piano lessons. they asked what kind of lessons?
PIANO – still a blank, it did not make sense .. then someone asked me
to spell it. I said P I A N O – ohhhh – you mean PIANO!!!
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 2:13:39 PM
Recommend (2)
Wes Cheng (IndianaWes) wrote:
What an interesting story. It kept me staying in my car in my garage
until the end of the story. However, I was shocked when I heard the
thank you, please section. Growing up in Taiwan, we were taught to say
thank you, please, sorry, you are welcome. Not saying them was
considered rude not close. There were even campaigns on TV by the
government for that. There is a very common Chinese saying: “One will
never be blamed for being too polite” (禮多人不怪). Opposite is definitely
not true.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 1:19:49 PM
Recommend (17)
Mike Baker (Unlettered_and_Ordinary) wrote:
What a great segment!
My family and I are are just four pastey-white people of Irish-German
descent, who also happen to also be active in community outreach and
volunteering. For quite a while we had been meeting more and more
people who spoke Arabic as their native language. We wanted to be able
to comfortably converse with these folks, so about 3 years ago my wife
and I (along with our two children) started taking weekly Arabic
language classes. I figured we were pretty smart people, so this
should be no problem. How hard could it possibly be, right?
I have found that, after 3 years, my ability to chat in this language
is *almost* on par with a native-speaking 5 year-old child. When I
heard Deborah speaking of her experience in the Chinese Taco Bell, I
nearly wept. I was just so wonderful to hear that another person had
many encounters with native Chinese speakers, as we were having with
native Arabic speakers. And her abilit to take it all in stride, with
a smile and a laugh, is a great example for anyone making such an
endeavor.
Thank you so much!
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 12:55:09 PM
Recommend (5)
Yvette Madany (YvetteHoMadany) wrote:
While it’s true that many Chinese do not say Please or Thank You as
often as Caucasians, it is false to say that these words are not used
in ordinary daily living. My family has lived in Shanghai for three
generations, and we routinely say Thank You and sometimes even Please!
Our friends and relatives say them, too. Both Ms. Fallows and the NPR
reporter showed a lack of true understanding by categorically dismiss
this polite notion from Chinese culture.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 12:45:50 PM
Recommend (7)
Kevin Liu (FindthisFunny) wrote:
Thank you NPR for a wonderful story. I truly enjoyed it. I wanted to
share a bit of my experience with the Chinese language. I’m what you
call a banana. I’m the first in my family born in the US, but grew up
speaking Mandarin at home and English in school. I can speak “day to
day” Mandarin but there is a more “formal” Mandarin that I have
trouble understanding. The formal version is what the news reporters,
comparable to Shakespearean English. Difficult as it is to learn it is
a beautiful language, deep in meaning. Thank you NPR for conjuring up
such wonderful thoughts.
A comment about the “da bao” word. Many other suggested alternative
and better words to convey take-out and like others have said
literally means to “wrap it up” (verb). But she had asked the workers
“you mei you da bao?” Literally translated to “do you have wrap it
up?” If she had asked “che bu che yi da bao?” (can you or can you not
wrap it up) I think the workers would have understood her meaning
immediately.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 11:07:06 AM
Recommend (3)
Xiao Qin (xgbb) wrote:
I am a native Chinese born in mainland. What Mrs. Fallows experienced
is only a small part of Chinese culture/life. The words like “please”,
“thank you” and “you are welcome” are considered polite and nice
everywhere. But we have more ways to convey politeness and kindness.
When people with close relationship (family members or close friends)
sometimes don’t say “please” and “thank you”, a soft, pleasing and
comfortable speaking tone, accent, gesture and facial motion will be a
counterbalance. Also, dialects play a major role on Chinese’s culture.
Cantonese is spoken differently from Mandarin for almost every Chinese
word. Shanghai dialect is not easy to follow if you are not a native
Shanghainese. People from northeast of China are another exclusive
dialect group. There are many local languages spoken in some small and
remote areas. To the end, what I really want to say is, thanks to Mrs.
Fallows for opening horizon for many Americans to understand Chinese
and its culture and tradition. If she has chances to travel to China’s
cities/towns/rural in different areas, I bet she will see and sense a
lot more.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 10:46:14 AM
Recommend (21)
Heidi Woeller (Karen05) wrote:
There are quite a number of languages that are tonal. There have been
studies about people who speak with tonal languages may, in fact, do
better at studying music (they’re primed to hear the sound nuances).
Even in the US, we certainly have dialects, and asking a question v.
making a statement is a different inflection (tone). Although it’s not
a strict tonal language.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100709180659AAYiUL0
a sample list of tonal languages
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 9:57:24 AM
Recommend (2)
Eric Yip (MonkeyKing) wrote:
Oops, having now read the rest of the comments, I should also credit
the many other posters who commented on “da bao.”
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 9:47:40 AM
Eric Yip (MonkeyKing) wrote:
Thank you Nicole T for clarifying the “da bao” incident. From my
experience studying elementary Chinese in Shanghai, using a word I
thought was correct (based on a very simple dictionary translation) in
the wrong context was much more of a problem than tones.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 9:41:29 AM
Nicole T (huhu) wrote:
I have to clarify her misconception of Chinese culture. There are so
many different cultures in the broad use of the word “Chinese.” People
in different region act differently, due to different educational
upbringings. For instance, education in Taiwan emphasizes politeness
and modesty, so if you encounter people in Taiwan, you’d think that it
is a society of utter politeness. But in the eyes of a person from
Taiwan, a Chinese from China is also often received as rude.
And also the word she used for take-out “da3bao1″ is actually normally
used to say “pack it up” (when you couldn’t finish something) not take-
out. “wai4dai4″ is the correct word for it.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 5:55:04 AM
Recommend (18)
John Dwyer (JohnStephenDwyer) wrote:
The Wikipedia article “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” has an audio
file of the poem.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 4:14:47 AM
Recommend (3)
John Dwyer (JohnStephenDwyer) wrote:
This was an interesting article. I enjoyed the concise review of a few
of the Chinese language’s distinctive characteristics and examples of
how a “tonal language” really functions compared to English.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 4:06:53 AM
Recommend (3)
Randy Paulsaint (rpaulsaint) wrote:
I’ve always been interested in learning Mandarin Chinese this has
inspired me to continue my studies again.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 2:44:36 AM
Bill Kerney (bkerney) wrote:
Uh, not necessarily. There’s a LOT of softeners in Chinese that people
use even in casual conversation among friends. She’s probably not
aware of these things.
For example, reduplicating a verb (“go go”), using yi xia (a little),
lots of ways of indicating thanks (knocking on a table with your
knuckles), are all ways Chinese people in casual settings soften their
sentences. We studied these extensively in my college Mandarin
classes. I’m surprised (well, maybe not surprised – Chinese is a big
language) that a PhD in linguistics wouldn’t know about them.
But then again, if she couldn’t bother to learn the tones before
travelling, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for her.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 2:37:47 AM
Recommend (22)
jean chen (JC6) wrote:
I’m also a native Madarin Chinese speaker born in Taiwan. Both my
parents were mainland Chinese and fled from China to Taiwan during
late 1940′s. We use “please” and “thank you” all the time. And most of
my friends and relatives too. I think maybe Ms. Fallows encountered
some Chinese who have no manners. Or maybe the mainland Chinese were
“deprived of learning them during cultural revolution” as Andy Cheong
said.
There must be some Americans not saying “please” or “thank you”. But I
won’t judge all Americans by those few.
I also would like to point out that when we said “No” with a smile or
an explaination, the meaning of “No” is soften. Most of the time, we
said “No, please don’t bother.” which I think it is similiar to “No,
thank you.”
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 2:37:04 AM
Recommend (15)
Guy DeRome (Badger1492) wrote:
Great story. Ms Fallow’s experience pretty much paralleled my own
except that I am not a linguist. I have studied many languages,
though, and Mandarin is my most recent focus. I travel to China on
business 2 or 3 times a year and continue to try and learn as much as
I can. Thanks for this great story. I plan on reading her book.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 1:05:34 AM
Jeremy Tai (ygtai) wrote:
I’m a native Madarin Chinese speaker born in Taiwan. In my family
we’re very used to saying ‘please’, ‘thank you’, and ‘sorry’ in daily
life to close family members and friends. I recall only after I left
home for college did I find that not everybody did that. Sometimes it
went far enough that I could clearly feel the distance. I’m no culture
expert, but I guess it’s very different even among native Chinese
speaking people.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 12:55:21 AM
Recommend (9)
Mye Flatley (P_U_Wallpaper) wrote:
Written Chinese is a manmade language. As such, it is fairly simple,
and not difficult to learn and read. It is spoken Chinese that is
difficult. There were hundreds of languages in China before the
introduction of the written Chinese. Each local language then adapted
to the written. The result was a plethora of spoken dialects of the
one written Chinese, with much confusion. But, the written is the
easiest language I have encountered. I recommend learning the written
if you are curious about Chinese and China. ♪♫~~☼~~♫♪
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 12:22:13 AM
Recommend (4)
Dianne Karp (DianneK) wrote:
What a magnificent story. A fine example of why I listen to public
radio
Dianne K
Reno, Nv
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 11:07:52 PM
Recommend (1)
Andy Cheong (andycheong10) wrote:
In response to Thomas G and Lei Jia’s comments, both my maternal and
paternal grandparents were mainland Chinese and fled from China to
Hong Kong and Macau during war times. They were not Mandarin speakers
and the use of ‘ma’ and ‘ba’ are not common in Cantonese. The use of
‘Thank you’ and ‘Please’ were commonly used by my grandparents and
heavily enforced during their upbringing and mine as well, so I am not
sure whether the British colonial influence played a part in the
Cantonese speaking language to such extent. Though I would say that
with Hong Kong’s stable economy and quality education system,
mannerism and etiquette were well preserved and practiced, which is an
observation you would find in cities with similar attributes around
the world. From this perspective, I guess the British did contribute
through economic development. One last comment to keep in mind is,
words such as ‘Thank You’ and ‘Please’ are not Chinese words that were
created during the western occupation era but existed in Chinese
literature for over thousands of years and many mainland Chinese were
deprived of learning them during cultural revolution and war times.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 10:36:45 PM
Recommend (18)
Thomas G (TAG69) wrote:
Lei Jia is correct, there are a number of “words” such as ma and ba
that are added to the end of sentences that “soften” the tone/meaning.
For someone who doesn’t speak Chinese or doesn’t speak it well enough,
these would go unappreciated and the “tone” of the sentence
misunderstood.
And, as s/he suggests, I wonder if the “politeness” and use of words
like please and thank you in Hong Kong is not due to England’s
influence there.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 10:05:43 PM
Recommend (1)
Thomas G (TAG69) wrote:
oops, dai zhou should be dai zou….sorry for the confusion.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 9:59:26 PM
Thomas G (TAG69) wrote:
I agree that da bao (打包) is not the best way to ask for take out,
although it should probably get the meaning across. Here in Beijing
the most common way to ask for it in person would be dai zhou (带走) but
when ordering over the phone wai mai (外卖) is pretty much always used.
It is very true that there is a lot of difference from province to
province. I have traveled through most of the country and when I go to
places in the South, especially, I really struggle when talking to
older or not-well-educated people, it is usually pretty easy with
younger people because they have all studied standard Mandarin in
school.
Anyway, sounds like a great book and definitely worth a read.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 9:58:29 PM
Recommend (7)
Lei Jia (Krow) wrote:
In Mandarin Chinese, we use auxiliary words such as “ma” to
semantically express politeness and willingness or to mitigate
rudeness. As the author of the book mentions, politeness exists more
tacitly among the Chinese people. “Please” and “Thank you” do not even
exist in some dialects, but they are encouraged to be used in at least
formal occasions. In the increasingly westernized mainland China,
these terms will be expressed more overtly than covertly, just like
what they were in the colonized Hong Kong decades and decades ago.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 9:57:03 PM
Recommend (2)
John McConahy (Peacefullartist) wrote:
EUREKA!! A light bulb exploded in my thought bubble towards the end of
this interview, when Deborah described how Chinese folks interact with
one another. It may seem rude to us but now it all makes sense! In the
past I worked in a popular Japanese hibachi restaurant in Pittsburgh
that employed people from a variety of Asian backgrounds. Japanese,
Korean, Thai, and mostly Vietnamese people surrounded me in my
workday. I observed many interactions that might have come across as a
little rude to Westerners. I made many friends and learned a deep
appreciation for their tight knit family structure.I now work for a
client that Chinese, and because of this interview, I have a deeper
understanding of how in the Eastern cultures the curt way that she
speaks to me, is actually the norm.
Thanks “All Things Considered” for another insightful piece.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 9:15:35 PM
Recommend (6)
Andy Cheong (andycheong10) wrote:
I enjoyed the interview and the author deserved a lot of credit for
learning such a difficult language. One comment on the section ‘Forget
Your ‘Please’ And ‘Thank Yous”, I personally want to clarify that this
might have been the result of cultural revolution, decades of foreign
invasion China suffered from, and large population without proper
education that affected two generations or more. I was born in Hong
Kong and the use of, ‘Please’, ‘Thank You’, and ‘No, Thank You’ are
common part of daily dialogue. It is something that parents teach
their children. Of course, we will always find exceptions anywhere in
the world. I do agree with the author’s observation as many Hong Kong
people do find some visitors from mainland China to be impolite and at
times rude. As China continues to develop itself economically, many of
the mannerism and etiquette will improve through education. At least
this is what many non-mainland Chinese hope for.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 9:15:29 PM
Recommend (12)
Mark Pachankis (KarlPopperFan) wrote:
we should all learn esperanto
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 8:15:19 PM
Recommend (1)
Sheila Michaels (SheMichaels) wrote:
You might want to credit the author of the little story of the
“scholar in the Lion Stone Den”. It was the eminent linguist Yuen Ren
Chao. He was the husband of the physician, Buwei Yang Chao who wrote
the early best seller _How to Cook & Eat In Chinese_, & invented the
term “stir fry”. She also suggested that “Hse” be the neutral term for
“he, she, it”, when gender is not indicated. So neat & useful, but
never adopted.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 7:58:36 PM
Recommend (7)
Peter Wang (Rationalize) wrote:
I find it quite fascinating that the human mind has such plasticity to
allow for dreams in a different language. As an immigrant myself,
experiencing that process first hand had almost an ethereal feel to
it.
I’m losing the touch of my local dialect, now i can barely understand
it. At least mandarin still comes rather naturally, though I do find
myself struggling to find a particular word sometimes.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 7:26:57 PM
Recommend (8)
Thanh Lim (tlim) wrote:
There’s also another slang for take out (Dai Zhou). That’s the one
that I generally use. Da Bao, I usually use when I need things wrapped
up that I’ve not finished. Let’s also not forget, Mandarin has 4
tones. Cantonese has 8 (although for the life of me, I can’t think of
all of them. I’m missing one somewhere.)
Finally, China is a little like India but not as bad. Going from
province to province, the language is a bit different. And for
Shanghai, they have Shanghainese. I do not understand a single word of
that dialect. I just stare and go huh?
Now if only more people could speak my native tongue (Hokkien) for me
to practice. Only one I speak with in that language is my dad these
days and I’m getting insanely rusty.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 7:06:42 PM
Recommend (2)
Lorenzo H (rakuchina) wrote:
Learning a language well takes a lifetime of immersion in that
particular culture. A few semesters of Chinese is hardly enough
preparation for one to get “up to speed” prior to visiting China.
After listening to the story of Deborah Fallows, I could see why she
would have problems ordering take-out at a Taco Bell in China. The
words she used for take-out, “Da Bao” (打包), mean “to wrap leftover in
a bag”, and is normally used at the end of a meal at a restaurant to
inform servers to pack up the leftover to take home; it is never used
to mean “ordering take-out”. The most common words to use when
ordering take-outs in China are “Wàimài”(外賣), which literally mean
“outside+sell”. Try that next time you’re at a Chinese restaurant!
Have fun learning Chinese, and happy journies!
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 6:36:16 PM
Recommend (12)
John Stansel (Tobasco) wrote:
What an interesting interview. Although I have never studied Chinese,
I did study the Thai language for a year. Much of what the author says
applies to Thai as well. The one syllable words that you can’t sink
your teeth into (so to speak) and the fact that much of the language
sounds the same. Also the homonyms…the thai word Ma has 4 different
meanings depending on the tone – it can mean, dog, horse, mother or
come here.
Also, unlike English which can be very, very precise, Thai, and I
assume Chinese as well, is much less specific and conveys a lot of the
meaning through context. I’ve often wondered if this makes the
speakers of these languages more intuitive.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 6:27:49 PM
Recommend (3)
m moore (1900) wrote:
A great place to learn a foreign language is http://www.livemocha.com/
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 5:56:17 PM
Recommend (2)
nicoline smits (Domela) wrote:
I’m an immigrant in this country, but I knew enough English to make
myself understood (most of the time, anyway). Still, having learned it
as a second language, speaking English all the time, from chatting
with the grocery store cashier to explaining to the pediatrician that
my child had “a touch of fever,” or whatever else needed taling about,
is quite, quite different. It’s an experience that’s hard to explain
to people who’ve never lived abroad. I’ve long wondered what it must
be like to go to a country where you’re illiterate. I’d love to visit
Asia, but not speaking any Asian languages, I’d hesitate to live
there. The writer of course did not go there as an illiterate, but she
still had enough trouble with the language. Should make for
fascinating reading.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 5:31:44 PM
Recommend (4)
…and I am Sid Harth
News, Views and Reviews
12/09/2010
« To Do ListLikeBe the first
http://cogitoergosum.co.cc/2010/09/12/shi-shi-shi-shit-shit-shit-shit-shit-shit/
To Speak, Perchance To ‘Dream In Chinese’
August 31, 2010
Listen to the Story
All Things Considered
[8 min 19 sec] Add to Playlist
August 31, 2010 When Deborah Fallows went to live in China with her
husband, she was armed with a few semesters of Mandarin lessons. But
when she got to Shanghai, she found she couldn’t recognize or speak a
single word of what she’d been studying.
Fallows writes about her journey through the Chinese language — and
her many missteps along the way — in her new book, Dreaming in
Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language.
Fallows — who has a Ph.D. in linguistics and speaks six languages —
knew that learning Chinese as an adult wouldn’t be easy. “Chinese is
considered one of the world’s difficult languages,” she tells NPR’s
Melissa Block, “along with Japanese and Arabic and Russian.”
Even with her background in languages, Fallows says learning Chinese
was particularly challenging because it was so dissimilar from all
other languages she had studied.
“I didn’t feel like I had anything to hang my hat on with this
language,” Fallows explains. “It just bore no resemblance to romance
languages, Germanic languages, Japanese — anything that I’d ever
approached before.”
Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons In Life, Love, And Language
By Deborah Fallows
Hardcover, 208 pages
Walker & Company
List price: $22
Read An Excerpt Shi, Shi, Shi And Shi
Chinese only has 400 unique syllables — that’s 1/10th of the number of
the unique syllables in the English language. That means a lot of
Chinese words sound alike to the untrained ear.
“Homonyms run rampant,” Fallows says. (Think: “seal” the animal and
“seal” as in “to securely close”.) “In Chinese, you have just a
plethora of things like that,” she says.
The English language clusters consonants together, which results in a
variety of complex syllables such as “stretch” and “plump.” But
Chinese syllables don’t combine that way, so the only way to tell the
difference between two otherwise identical syllables is by listening
to the tone and the context.
To illustrate the many possible meanings of a single syllable, Fallows
points to a playful, Chinese tongue twister called “The Lion-Eating
Poet in the Stone Den.” On the page, the poem is made up of many
different Chinese characters, but when read aloud in Mandarin, all of
the syllables are different tonal variations of the syllable shi.
“The amazing thing … is that you can tell this entire story using one
syllable,” Fallows says. “It’s a real challenge to listen to —
especially if your ear is not accustomed to listening [for] and using
tones.”
In “The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den,” shi — spoken in varying
tones — means: lions, market, the number 10, eat, stone — and more. It
makes for a fun tongue twister, but mastering a tonal language can be
a frustrating experience for a non-native speaker.
Fallows recounts an embarrassing experience she had one day in
Shanghai — that all started with an inexplicable craving for cheese.
Wanting something — anything — with cheese, Fallows went to the local
Shanghai Taco Bell, where she was greeted by a young Chinese man
wearing a sombrero and a velvet vest.
“I had practiced very hard what I was going to ask him,” Fallows said.
“I wanted to do takeout.”
Her tones weren’t very good at that point, though, so Fallows’ request
for “takeout” — dabao — was met with a blank stare from the Taco Bell
employee. Fallows tried saying dabao with every combination of tones
she could think of — rising tones, falling tones — and when that
didn’t work, she started pointing at the menu, and then miming the
action of walking out the door with a bag of food. After a
consultation with several other employees, finally — eureka! Yes,
dabao! Yes, of course, they did takeout.
It’s hard to say what Fallows was actually saying to the Chinese men
if not the word for “takeout”; she says there are a number of
possibilities — “some of them more embarrassing than others.” The word
for “hug” is close, as is the word for “newspaper.” No wonder the
blank stares.
Courtesy of Walker and Company
Deborah Fallows has lived and traveled in China for several years with
her husband, journalist James Fallows. She is also the author of A
Mother’s Work.
Courtesy of Walker and Company Deborah Fallows has lived and traveled
in China for several years with her husband, journalist James Fallows.
She is also the author of A Mother’s Work.
Forget Your ‘Please’ And ‘Thank Yous’
To someone who grew up learning all the “pleases” and “thank yous” of
polite English, Chinese as it is spoken between family and friends can
sound extremely terse and direct.
“I felt I was being very blunt, very abrupt and even often very rude,”
Fallows says. Chinese, when spoken between two people who are close
with one another, leaves out what Fallows calls the “grace notes” —
please, thank you, no thank you.
For example, if a friend offers you a glass of water, and you don’t
want a glass of water, the proper response translates as: “Don’t need”
or “Don’t want.”
There is a lot of “padding and softness” that Fallows says is woven
into our everyday English, even when addressing people we know well.
But in Chinese, “pleases” and “thank yous” are reserved for people
with whom a degree of formality is expected.
“If you’re inserting these niceties, these softeners … the Chinese
will see that as actually setting up a distance between you and the
person you’re talking to,” Fallows explains. Trying to be polite can
actually come off as offensive.
These are just a few of the many cultural and linguistic puzzles
Fallows describes in Dreaming in Chinese, as she recounts her struggle
to master the countless nuances of communication in another culture.
The few times Fallows actually dreamt in Chinese, she said it was a
frustrating and “odd dictionary dream” in which she was looking for a
word — trying to communicate, but unable to make others understand.
Basically, “the story of my life in China,” she says with a laugh.
Excerpt: ‘Dreaming In Chinese’
by Deborah Fallows
I first saw China in the summer of 1986. My husband and I had packed
up our then small children, left our home in Washington, DC, and gone
to live in Japan and Southeast Asia for four years. We jumped at a
chance that came our way to visit China for several weeks, after
living in Tokyo and before heading for Kuala Lumpur.
The China we visited then was still emerging from the Cultural
Revolution. Most of the young people, dressed in their drab Mao suits
or simple, cheap clothes, were seeing Westerners for the first time.
They would race to scoop up our blond children in their arms for
pictures and to practice “Hello! Hello!” in English. The Chinese who
greeted us were light and playful; we felt their high-spirited
welcome, especially after the constraints of living in traditional,
culture-bound Japan.
My recollections of that brief time are in snapshots: I bought bottles
of bright orange soda that lay cooling on slabs of ice in vendors’
carts. We went to the Beijing zoo, which was dreary and untidy, to
look for pandas. The skies in Beijing and Shanghai and Hangzhou were
clear and blue. We guessed that the cheerless Stalinist government
rest houses where we stayed were probably bugged. On our domestic
airliner flying to the south of China, we sat toward the front of the
plane in big overstuffed armchairs and held our collective breath on
take off, peering through gaps in the floorboards to see the tarmac
racing by below.
Almost 20 years later, my husband and I set off to return to China for
three years, where he would be reporting and writing long stories for
the Atlantic. I would be working on my research for the Pew Internet
Project, looking at Internet use in China. This excursion fit into the
pattern of our life, alternating several years at home in Washington,
DC, with several years out exploring the world.
We knew before we headed to China again that our old memories would
seem quaint and charming, and that we would be in for a different kind
of adventure this time in a modern, booming China. We did what we
could to prepare: went to movies, read books, looked online, studied
maps, talked to people who had been there before us. We got a glimpse
here and an insight there, but we knew it wasn’t adding up to much of
anything. In the end we took a leap of faith and boarded the plane for
Shanghai.
I did one other thing to prepare: I studied Mandarin a few nights a
week for a few terms at Georgetown University in DC, figuring that a
jump-start on the language could only help as we tried to set up some
kind of normal life in China. I have been studying languages and
linguistics for almost all my life, and at least the process of
studying the language felt comfortable to me, even if the language did
not.
Our entry to China was rough. The first month went by in a daze, but
our first impressions and experiences remain perfectly vivid to me: I
could not recognize or utter a single word of the Chinese I had been
studying, and I even wondered if my teacher had been teaching us
Cantonese instead of Mandarin.1 My husband said, in an anxious sweat,
“I will never learn enough about China to write anything.”
The hot Shanghai wind blew at 40 knots for many days, like the famous
Santa Anas in California. My husband was very, very sick for ten days
from drinking the water. We wondered if we were being followed, or if
our phones were tapped.
Slowly, of course, everything began to change. My teacher had indeed
been teaching me Mandarin, although without the heavy Shanghai accent
I heard all around me and later sorted out. My husband went on to
write many, many articles about China and had the journalistic time of
his life. We became immune to every germ we ran into and were never
really sick again in China. The weather changed, although we grew
never to expect the skies to be clear or the air to be fresh. We know
people were indeed watching us, but far from being a bother, they
would invite us out to lunch to keep an eye on us and were friendly.
As for the language, the longer we were in China, the more engaged I
became with Chinese. Part of that experience was true tribulation: I
worked and studied hard but felt like I was only inching forward, my
progress barely measurable. Eventually, finally, I marked a few
milestones, cause for much self-congratulation that was generally
noted only by me: the first day I ventured out without my dictionary
and did OK; my first complete phone conversation in Chinese; the first
time I followed the entire plot of a soap opera episode on TV; and my
pièce de résistance, the day I chewed out a Shanghai taxi driver in
Chinese for an egregious overcharge, and got a refund of 100 rénmínbì
(then about twelve US dollars).
The language paid me back in ways I hadn’t fully anticipated. It was
my lifeline to our everyday survival in China. My language foibles,
many of which I have recounted in this book, taught me as much as my
rare and random successes. The language also unexpectedly became my
way of making some sense of China, my telescope into the country.
Foreigners I met and knew in China used their different passions to
help them interpret China: artists used China’s art world, as others
used Chinese cooking, or traditional medicine, or business, or music,
or any number of things they knew about. I used the language, or more
precisely, the study of the language.
As I tried to learn to speak Mandarin, I also learned about how the
language works — its words, its sounds, its grammar and its history. I
often found a connection between some point of the language — a
particular word or the use of a phrase, for example — and how that
point could elucidate something very “Chinese” I would encounter in my
everyday life in China. The language helped me understand what I saw
on the streets or on our travels around the country — how people made
their livings, their habits, their behavior toward each other, how
they dealt with adversity, and how they celebrated.
This book is the story of what I learned about the Chinese language,
and what the language taught me about China.
Excerpted from Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons In Life, Love,
And Language by Deborah Fallows. Copyright 2010 by Deborah Fallows.
Excerpted by permission of Walker & Company.
To Speak, Perchance To ‘Dream In Chinese’
Copyright ©2010 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial
use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.
Heard on All Things Considered
August 31, 2010 – ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I’m Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I’m Melissa Block.
When Deborah Fallows went to live in China with her husband, the
journalist James Fallows, she was armed with a few semesters of
Mandarin study. Then she got to Shanghai and found she couldn’t
recognize or speak a single word of what she’d been studying.
She writes about her journey through the Chinese language – and her
many missteps along the way – in her new book “Dreaming in Chinese.”
Deborah Fallows has a Ph.D. in linguistics and speaks half a dozen
languages, but Chinese was another story.
Ms. DEBORAH FALLOWS (Author, “Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in
Life, Love, and Language”): I didn’t feel like I had anything to hang
my hat on with this language. It just bore no resemblance to Romance
languages, Germanic languages, Japanese, anything that I’d ever
approached before. And there are some things about Chinese that are
easy, and then there are a lot of things about Chinese that are hard.
BLOCK: Well, let’s talk about that. You point out that Chinese has
only 400 syllables, unique syllables, one-tenth of the number that
there are in English, which means that there are many, many, many
words that sound exactly alike.
Ms. FALLOWS: Homonyms…
BLOCK: And that can get you in a lot of trouble, right?
Ms. FALLOWS: It’s homonyms run rampant, yes.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. FALLOWS: Like in English, if you have, say, the word seal – seal,
the animal; you have seal a letter; but in Chinese, you have just a
plethora of things like that.
The issue with Chinese is that they have these very few syllables. You
don’t -words like mah(ph), tah(ph), huh(ph), shi, you don’t get a lot
of long complicated syllables like stretch or plump, where you get
consonants clustered together to give you all kinds of varieties. So
there’s very little to work with. And that actually connects directly
to the tone system of Chinese. Since you have so few syllables to work
with, one of the ways out of that and distinguishing one syllable for
another to make one word or another is to slap a tone onto it. So you
can say shi. Shi. Shi. Shi. And you get…
BLOCK: And the meaning will change.
Ms. FALLOWS: …(unintelligible) and the meaning will change with each
of those.
BLOCK: You print a short little story in your book, written in
Chinese, called “The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den.”
Ms. FALLOWS: That’s right.
BLOCK: Which looks like a whole bunch of different Chinese characters
on the page. But if you were to read it, what would it sound like?
Ms. FALLOWS: It would sound all like shi.
BLOCK: Every word.
Ms. FALLOWS: Every word is shi. The tones might change, but the
amazing thing about this poem is that you can tell this entire story
using one syllable. It’s a real challenge to listen to, especially if
your ear is not accustomed to listening and using tones.
BLOCK: And the shi in this poem, you’re saying, means lions, market,
10, eat, and stone, among other words.
Ms. FALLOWS: Right, among other things. It’s a little fable, and it’s
not a great story.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. FALLOWS: It doesn’t tell a wonderful myth, but it is kind of
interesting that you can tell a whole story using one syllable.
BLOCK: You write about something that happened to you one day when you
had a craving, an inexplicable craving for cheese when you were living
in Shanghai, and you went to Taco Bell. And you were trying to order
takeout and just ran into a buzz saw of lack of understanding. What
happened?
Ms. FALLOWS: Right. I went in the door and was greeted by this young
Chinese guy in a sombrero and little velvet vest and had practiced
very hard what I was going to ask him. I wanted to do takeout. The
word in Chinese for takeout is dabao. So I wasn’t very good at tones
at that point and trying to ask him, do you have dabao? A complete
blank look on his face.
So I thought, okay, I’m obviously using the tones wrong here, so I’ll
try dabao with other kinds of tones. So I was trying rising tones,
falling tones, falling and rising tones, any combination of tones I
could get for the word dabao. Then, I got the menu. I started
mimicking – pointing on the menu, pointing to the door as though I
were taking a bag out the door…
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. FALLOWS: …you know, and thinking all this, well, come on. How hard
can this be? Finally, he went into the back room, into the kitchen and
came out with three or four other guys. I went through the routine
again with dabao. Dabao. Dabao. Anything I can think of.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. FALLOWS: And one of them had this look of eureka on his face, and
he said, oh, dabao.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. FALLOWS: And then they all laughed and went into the other room
and said, yes, they do, you know, yes, they do. Yo(ph), they do have
dabao.
BLOCK: And when you were asking in that Taco Bell for takeout, they
might have been thinking what? What would have sounded similar to what
you were asking for?
Ms. FALLOWS: There are a number of things, some of them more
embarrassing than others. I was maybe asking for a hug. And I…
BLOCK: These crazy Westerners.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. FALLOWS: Yeah. You just never know what they’ll want.
BLOCK: You point one other thing that – well, many other things, but
you do point to one glimmer you have into Chinese culture, which has
to do with the notion that it can be a very blunt language. To an
American, it might seem impolite that there aren’t sort of these grace
notes, I think you call them, of please and thank yous that are added
to things.
Ms. FALLOWS: Right. When people ask you if you want something, like,
would you like a glass of water? You’d say, bu yao(ph), which just
means don’t want or don’t need, instead of saying, oh, no, thanks. I’m
not really thirsty. Maybe I’ll have something later.
BLOCK: Right.
Ms. FALLOWS: With all this padding and softness that you use to
communicate in what you think is a polite way in English, you strip
all of that away in Chinese. And it’s just bu yao(ph). Bu keqi(ph),
don’t want, cannot. Bu shi(ph), isn’t, do not. And I did feel very
rude.
But then I noticed this funny thing that was going on, for example, if
you’re in a restaurant watching a group of close friends eating or
maybe it’s a family eating, you see this very delicate choreography.
For example, you have a common pot of chicken and maybe the mom in the
family has got her chopstick and she’s very delicately picking out the
best little chunks of chicken to put on her child’s plate. And you see
the dad pouring tea or pouring beer for everybody else in the family,
as is appropriate, before pouring it for yourself. So you think: This
is very polite, normal, standard behavior.
And then in the midst of all this, one of the kids will say, gei wo
yan(ph), give me the salt. It’s like, what’s going on? Why this point
of difference between what you see as polite and what you hear as
being really rude?
So I started to look into this a little bit and found that if you’re
inserting these niceties, these softeners like pleases and thank yous,
the Chinese will see that as actually setting up a distance between
you and the person you’re talking to.
So if I say, please pass the salt, your understanding that I have a
certain degree of formality between you and me, which you don’t want
to insert in that case. So in a family or between and among friends,
putting in the pleases and thank yous actually is setting up a
distance between you. There’s a degree of formality and even can be
kind of offensive rather than saying, hey, what’s going on here? You
know, you’re my buddy. You’re my friend. You don’t need to say please
and thank you.
That’s what’s polite is when you strip away that kind of formality of
please and thank you.
BLOCK: I’m wondering if you got to the point where you were in fact
dreaming in Chinese…
(Soundbite of laughter)
BLOCK: …such as the title of your book. Were you seeing characters?
Was that the language in your sleep?
Ms. FALLOWS: I dreamed a little in Chinese but not a lot in Chinese.
It was more like this odd dictionary dream where I was looking for a
word. It was more like this frustrating experience with the tones
where I was trying to say something and get it across and someone not
understanding me.
BLOCK: Pretty much the story of your time there.
Ms. FALLOWS: The story of my life in China.
BLOCK: Deborah Fallows, thanks for coming in.
Ms. FALLOWS: Thanks, Melissa.
BLOCK: Deborah Fallows’ book is “Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons
in Life, Love, and Language.” You can read an excerpt at npr.org.
(Soundbite of music)
SIEGEL: You are listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
Comments on:
To Speak, Perchance To ‘Dream In Chinese’
John Selig (Becksmasher) wrote:
Right, Andy. Many years ago I learned to write Korean, which is very
efficient and easy to learn. A foreigner can pronounce any word he
reads — albeit for me, not too well — even though he might not know
the meaning of what he’s reading. Korean is another fascinating
language, but very different from Chinese.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 5:30:00 PM
Recommend (4)
Andy Cheong (andycheong10) wrote:
John is correct that Chinese character is not an efficient writing
system. Learning is done through writing repetitively. The character
form currently known as Traditional had actually gone through multiple
evolutions over the centuries. So you may imagine that it was even
more complex at one time. To address the character’s inefficiency and
difficulties and to promote literacy, the simplified system, Hangul,
and Hiragana/Katakana were devloped by mainland China, Korea, and
Japan respectively.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 5:09:45 PM
Recommend (1)
Jeremy Hsu (JHsu) wrote:
As a mainland Chinese, I partially agree with what people from Hong
Kong or Taiwan may say about the “please” “thank you” part if you
consider the recent history and culture changes in mainland China. But
it is quite curious to me that no one seems to remember that we often
use “Ma2 Fan2″ or “Lao2 Jia4″ instead of “Qing3 (please)”, which
literaly means “bother you to…”. Anyway, most of us prefer to more
subtle ways to achieve the same effects as the more formal “please”
“thank you”.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 5:07:14 PM
Recommend (11)
John Selig (Becksmasher) wrote:
I haven’t read all of the many comments here, but maybe someone has
mentioned that although the basic Chinese word is monosyllabic, many
words are made up of two syllables, even three syllables. And then
there is a vast number of four syllable “proverbs” that are
fascinating and rich in meaning.
I studied Chinese for a couple of years and lived in Taiwan for one
year. I loved learning Chinese characters, especially the traditional
characters, which although more complicated than simplified Chinese
used on the mainland, are more beautiful. I can’t say Chinese is a
very “practical” writing system, but it is a cultural and aesthetic
treasure.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 3:48:10 PM
Recommend (17)
Wes Cheng (IndianaWes) wrote:
When I heard “…saying dabao with every combination of tones…there are
a number of possibilities — some of them more embarrassing than
others…”, I said to myself, Oh boy, Ms Fallows, I hope you didn’t slip
the B (in dabao)into P . It would have been really really embarrassing
if you did.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 2:15:41 PM
Recommend (4)
Letty Griffin (Guapa) wrote:
I just have to share my experience while learning English. I was
talking about taking piano lessons. they asked what kind of lessons?
PIANO – still a blank, it did not make sense .. then someone asked me
to spell it. I said P I A N O – ohhhh – you mean PIANO!!!
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 2:13:39 PM
Recommend (2)
Wes Cheng (IndianaWes) wrote:
What an interesting story. It kept me staying in my car in my garage
until the end of the story. However, I was shocked when I heard the
thank you, please section. Growing up in Taiwan, we were taught to say
thank you, please, sorry, you are welcome. Not saying them was
considered rude not close. There were even campaigns on TV by the
government for that. There is a very common Chinese saying: “One will
never be blamed for being too polite” (禮多人不怪). Opposite is definitely
not true.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 1:19:49 PM
Recommend (17)
Mike Baker (Unlettered_and_Ordinary) wrote:
What a great segment!
My family and I are are just four pastey-white people of Irish-German
descent, who also happen to also be active in community outreach and
volunteering. For quite a while we had been meeting more and more
people who spoke Arabic as their native language. We wanted to be able
to comfortably converse with these folks, so about 3 years ago my wife
and I (along with our two children) started taking weekly Arabic
language classes. I figured we were pretty smart people, so this
should be no problem. How hard could it possibly be, right?
I have found that, after 3 years, my ability to chat in this language
is *almost* on par with a native-speaking 5 year-old child. When I
heard Deborah speaking of her experience in the Chinese Taco Bell, I
nearly wept. I was just so wonderful to hear that another person had
many encounters with native Chinese speakers, as we were having with
native Arabic speakers. And her abilit to take it all in stride, with
a smile and a laugh, is a great example for anyone making such an
endeavor.
Thank you so much!
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 12:55:09 PM
Recommend (5)
Yvette Madany (YvetteHoMadany) wrote:
While it’s true that many Chinese do not say Please or Thank You as
often as Caucasians, it is false to say that these words are not used
in ordinary daily living. My family has lived in Shanghai for three
generations, and we routinely say Thank You and sometimes even Please!
Our friends and relatives say them, too. Both Ms. Fallows and the NPR
reporter showed a lack of true understanding by categorically dismiss
this polite notion from Chinese culture.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 12:45:50 PM
Recommend (7)
Kevin Liu (FindthisFunny) wrote:
Thank you NPR for a wonderful story. I truly enjoyed it. I wanted to
share a bit of my experience with the Chinese language. I’m what you
call a banana. I’m the first in my family born in the US, but grew up
speaking Mandarin at home and English in school. I can speak “day to
day” Mandarin but there is a more “formal” Mandarin that I have
trouble understanding. The formal version is what the news reporters,
comparable to Shakespearean English. Difficult as it is to learn it is
a beautiful language, deep in meaning. Thank you NPR for conjuring up
such wonderful thoughts.
A comment about the “da bao” word. Many other suggested alternative
and better words to convey take-out and like others have said
literally means to “wrap it up” (verb). But she had asked the workers
“you mei you da bao?” Literally translated to “do you have wrap it
up?” If she had asked “che bu che yi da bao?” (can you or can you not
wrap it up) I think the workers would have understood her meaning
immediately.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 11:07:06 AM
Recommend (3)
Xiao Qin (xgbb) wrote:
I am a native Chinese born in mainland. What Mrs. Fallows experienced
is only a small part of Chinese culture/life. The words like “please”,
“thank you” and “you are welcome” are considered polite and nice
everywhere. But we have more ways to convey politeness and kindness.
When people with close relationship (family members or close friends)
sometimes don’t say “please” and “thank you”, a soft, pleasing and
comfortable speaking tone, accent, gesture and facial motion will be a
counterbalance. Also, dialects play a major role on Chinese’s culture.
Cantonese is spoken differently from Mandarin for almost every Chinese
word. Shanghai dialect is not easy to follow if you are not a native
Shanghainese. People from northeast of China are another exclusive
dialect group. There are many local languages spoken in some small and
remote areas. To the end, what I really want to say is, thanks to Mrs.
Fallows for opening horizon for many Americans to understand Chinese
and its culture and tradition. If she has chances to travel to China’s
cities/towns/rural in different areas, I bet she will see and sense a
lot more.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 10:46:14 AM
Recommend (21)
Heidi Woeller (Karen05) wrote:
There are quite a number of languages that are tonal. There have been
studies about people who speak with tonal languages may, in fact, do
better at studying music (they’re primed to hear the sound nuances).
Even in the US, we certainly have dialects, and asking a question v.
making a statement is a different inflection (tone). Although it’s not
a strict tonal language.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100709180659AAYiUL0
a sample list of tonal languages
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 9:57:24 AM
Recommend (2)
Eric Yip (MonkeyKing) wrote:
Oops, having now read the rest of the comments, I should also credit
the many other posters who commented on “da bao.”
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 9:47:40 AM
Eric Yip (MonkeyKing) wrote:
Thank you Nicole T for clarifying the “da bao” incident. From my
experience studying elementary Chinese in Shanghai, using a word I
thought was correct (based on a very simple dictionary translation) in
the wrong context was much more of a problem than tones.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 9:41:29 AM
Nicole T (huhu) wrote:
I have to clarify her misconception of Chinese culture. There are so
many different cultures in the broad use of the word “Chinese.” People
in different region act differently, due to different educational
upbringings. For instance, education in Taiwan emphasizes politeness
and modesty, so if you encounter people in Taiwan, you’d think that it
is a society of utter politeness. But in the eyes of a person from
Taiwan, a Chinese from China is also often received as rude.
And also the word she used for take-out “da3bao1″ is actually normally
used to say “pack it up” (when you couldn’t finish something) not take-
out. “wai4dai4″ is the correct word for it.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 5:55:04 AM
Recommend (18)
John Dwyer (JohnStephenDwyer) wrote:
The Wikipedia article “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” has an audio
file of the poem.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 4:14:47 AM
Recommend (3)
John Dwyer (JohnStephenDwyer) wrote:
This was an interesting article. I enjoyed the concise review of a few
of the Chinese language’s distinctive characteristics and examples of
how a “tonal language” really functions compared to English.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 4:06:53 AM
Recommend (3)
Randy Paulsaint (rpaulsaint) wrote:
I’ve always been interested in learning Mandarin Chinese this has
inspired me to continue my studies again.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 2:44:36 AM
Bill Kerney (bkerney) wrote:
Uh, not necessarily. There’s a LOT of softeners in Chinese that people
use even in casual conversation among friends. She’s probably not
aware of these things.
For example, reduplicating a verb (“go go”), using yi xia (a little),
lots of ways of indicating thanks (knocking on a table with your
knuckles), are all ways Chinese people in casual settings soften their
sentences. We studied these extensively in my college Mandarin
classes. I’m surprised (well, maybe not surprised – Chinese is a big
language) that a PhD in linguistics wouldn’t know about them.
But then again, if she couldn’t bother to learn the tones before
travelling, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for her.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 2:37:47 AM
Recommend (22)
jean chen (JC6) wrote:
I’m also a native Madarin Chinese speaker born in Taiwan. Both my
parents were mainland Chinese and fled from China to Taiwan during
late 1940′s. We use “please” and “thank you” all the time. And most of
my friends and relatives too. I think maybe Ms. Fallows encountered
some Chinese who have no manners. Or maybe the mainland Chinese were
“deprived of learning them during cultural revolution” as Andy Cheong
said.
There must be some Americans not saying “please” or “thank you”. But I
won’t judge all Americans by those few.
I also would like to point out that when we said “No” with a smile or
an explaination, the meaning of “No” is soften. Most of the time, we
said “No, please don’t bother.” which I think it is similiar to “No,
thank you.”
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 2:37:04 AM
Recommend (15)
Guy DeRome (Badger1492) wrote:
Great story. Ms Fallow’s experience pretty much paralleled my own
except that I am not a linguist. I have studied many languages,
though, and Mandarin is my most recent focus. I travel to China on
business 2 or 3 times a year and continue to try and learn as much as
I can. Thanks for this great story. I plan on reading her book.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 1:05:34 AM
Jeremy Tai (ygtai) wrote:
I’m a native Madarin Chinese speaker born in Taiwan. In my family
we’re very used to saying ‘please’, ‘thank you’, and ‘sorry’ in daily
life to close family members and friends. I recall only after I left
home for college did I find that not everybody did that. Sometimes it
went far enough that I could clearly feel the distance. I’m no culture
expert, but I guess it’s very different even among native Chinese
speaking people.
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 12:55:21 AM
Recommend (9)
Mye Flatley (P_U_Wallpaper) wrote:
Written Chinese is a manmade language. As such, it is fairly simple,
and not difficult to learn and read. It is spoken Chinese that is
difficult. There were hundreds of languages in China before the
introduction of the written Chinese. Each local language then adapted
to the written. The result was a plethora of spoken dialects of the
one written Chinese, with much confusion. But, the written is the
easiest language I have encountered. I recommend learning the written
if you are curious about Chinese and China. ♪♫~~☼~~♫♪
Wednesday, September 01, 2010 12:22:13 AM
Recommend (4)
Dianne Karp (DianneK) wrote:
What a magnificent story. A fine example of why I listen to public
radio
Dianne K
Reno, Nv
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 11:07:52 PM
Recommend (1)
Andy Cheong (andycheong10) wrote:
In response to Thomas G and Lei Jia’s comments, both my maternal and
paternal grandparents were mainland Chinese and fled from China to
Hong Kong and Macau during war times. They were not Mandarin speakers
and the use of ‘ma’ and ‘ba’ are not common in Cantonese. The use of
‘Thank you’ and ‘Please’ were commonly used by my grandparents and
heavily enforced during their upbringing and mine as well, so I am not
sure whether the British colonial influence played a part in the
Cantonese speaking language to such extent. Though I would say that
with Hong Kong’s stable economy and quality education system,
mannerism and etiquette were well preserved and practiced, which is an
observation you would find in cities with similar attributes around
the world. From this perspective, I guess the British did contribute
through economic development. One last comment to keep in mind is,
words such as ‘Thank You’ and ‘Please’ are not Chinese words that were
created during the western occupation era but existed in Chinese
literature for over thousands of years and many mainland Chinese were
deprived of learning them during cultural revolution and war times.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 10:36:45 PM
Recommend (18)
Thomas G (TAG69) wrote:
Lei Jia is correct, there are a number of “words” such as ma and ba
that are added to the end of sentences that “soften” the tone/meaning.
For someone who doesn’t speak Chinese or doesn’t speak it well enough,
these would go unappreciated and the “tone” of the sentence
misunderstood.
And, as s/he suggests, I wonder if the “politeness” and use of words
like please and thank you in Hong Kong is not due to England’s
influence there.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 10:05:43 PM
Recommend (1)
Thomas G (TAG69) wrote:
oops, dai zhou should be dai zou….sorry for the confusion.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 9:59:26 PM
Thomas G (TAG69) wrote:
I agree that da bao (打包) is not the best way to ask for take out,
although it should probably get the meaning across. Here in Beijing
the most common way to ask for it in person would be dai zhou (带走) but
when ordering over the phone wai mai (外卖) is pretty much always used.
It is very true that there is a lot of difference from province to
province. I have traveled through most of the country and when I go to
places in the South, especially, I really struggle when talking to
older or not-well-educated people, it is usually pretty easy with
younger people because they have all studied standard Mandarin in
school.
Anyway, sounds like a great book and definitely worth a read.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 9:58:29 PM
Recommend (7)
Lei Jia (Krow) wrote:
In Mandarin Chinese, we use auxiliary words such as “ma” to
semantically express politeness and willingness or to mitigate
rudeness. As the author of the book mentions, politeness exists more
tacitly among the Chinese people. “Please” and “Thank you” do not even
exist in some dialects, but they are encouraged to be used in at least
formal occasions. In the increasingly westernized mainland China,
these terms will be expressed more overtly than covertly, just like
what they were in the colonized Hong Kong decades and decades ago.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 9:57:03 PM
Recommend (2)
John McConahy (Peacefullartist) wrote:
EUREKA!! A light bulb exploded in my thought bubble towards the end of
this interview, when Deborah described how Chinese folks interact with
one another. It may seem rude to us but now it all makes sense! In the
past I worked in a popular Japanese hibachi restaurant in Pittsburgh
that employed people from a variety of Asian backgrounds. Japanese,
Korean, Thai, and mostly Vietnamese people surrounded me in my
workday. I observed many interactions that might have come across as a
little rude to Westerners. I made many friends and learned a deep
appreciation for their tight knit family structure.I now work for a
client that Chinese, and because of this interview, I have a deeper
understanding of how in the Eastern cultures the curt way that she
speaks to me, is actually the norm.
Thanks “All Things Considered” for another insightful piece.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 9:15:35 PM
Recommend (6)
Andy Cheong (andycheong10) wrote:
I enjoyed the interview and the author deserved a lot of credit for
learning such a difficult language. One comment on the section ‘Forget
Your ‘Please’ And ‘Thank Yous”, I personally want to clarify that this
might have been the result of cultural revolution, decades of foreign
invasion China suffered from, and large population without proper
education that affected two generations or more. I was born in Hong
Kong and the use of, ‘Please’, ‘Thank You’, and ‘No, Thank You’ are
common part of daily dialogue. It is something that parents teach
their children. Of course, we will always find exceptions anywhere in
the world. I do agree with the author’s observation as many Hong Kong
people do find some visitors from mainland China to be impolite and at
times rude. As China continues to develop itself economically, many of
the mannerism and etiquette will improve through education. At least
this is what many non-mainland Chinese hope for.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 9:15:29 PM
Recommend (12)
Mark Pachankis (KarlPopperFan) wrote:
we should all learn esperanto
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 8:15:19 PM
Recommend (1)
Sheila Michaels (SheMichaels) wrote:
You might want to credit the author of the little story of the
“scholar in the Lion Stone Den”. It was the eminent linguist Yuen Ren
Chao. He was the husband of the physician, Buwei Yang Chao who wrote
the early best seller _How to Cook & Eat In Chinese_, & invented the
term “stir fry”. She also suggested that “Hse” be the neutral term for
“he, she, it”, when gender is not indicated. So neat & useful, but
never adopted.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 7:58:36 PM
Recommend (7)
Peter Wang (Rationalize) wrote:
I find it quite fascinating that the human mind has such plasticity to
allow for dreams in a different language. As an immigrant myself,
experiencing that process first hand had almost an ethereal feel to
it.
I’m losing the touch of my local dialect, now i can barely understand
it. At least mandarin still comes rather naturally, though I do find
myself struggling to find a particular word sometimes.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 7:26:57 PM
Recommend (8)
Thanh Lim (tlim) wrote:
There’s also another slang for take out (Dai Zhou). That’s the one
that I generally use. Da Bao, I usually use when I need things wrapped
up that I’ve not finished. Let’s also not forget, Mandarin has 4
tones. Cantonese has 8 (although for the life of me, I can’t think of
all of them. I’m missing one somewhere.)
Finally, China is a little like India but not as bad. Going from
province to province, the language is a bit different. And for
Shanghai, they have Shanghainese. I do not understand a single word of
that dialect. I just stare and go huh?
Now if only more people could speak my native tongue (Hokkien) for me
to practice. Only one I speak with in that language is my dad these
days and I’m getting insanely rusty.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 7:06:42 PM
Recommend (2)
Lorenzo H (rakuchina) wrote:
Learning a language well takes a lifetime of immersion in that
particular culture. A few semesters of Chinese is hardly enough
preparation for one to get “up to speed” prior to visiting China.
After listening to the story of Deborah Fallows, I could see why she
would have problems ordering take-out at a Taco Bell in China. The
words she used for take-out, “Da Bao” (打包), mean “to wrap leftover in
a bag”, and is normally used at the end of a meal at a restaurant to
inform servers to pack up the leftover to take home; it is never used
to mean “ordering take-out”. The most common words to use when
ordering take-outs in China are “Wàimài”(外賣), which literally mean
“outside+sell”. Try that next time you’re at a Chinese restaurant!
Have fun learning Chinese, and happy journies!
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 6:36:16 PM
Recommend (12)
John Stansel (Tobasco) wrote:
What an interesting interview. Although I have never studied Chinese,
I did study the Thai language for a year. Much of what the author says
applies to Thai as well. The one syllable words that you can’t sink
your teeth into (so to speak) and the fact that much of the language
sounds the same. Also the homonyms…the thai word Ma has 4 different
meanings depending on the tone – it can mean, dog, horse, mother or
come here.
Also, unlike English which can be very, very precise, Thai, and I
assume Chinese as well, is much less specific and conveys a lot of the
meaning through context. I’ve often wondered if this makes the
speakers of these languages more intuitive.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 6:27:49 PM
Recommend (3)
m moore (1900) wrote:
A great place to learn a foreign language is http://www.livemocha.com/
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 5:56:17 PM
Recommend (2)
nicoline smits (Domela) wrote:
I’m an immigrant in this country, but I knew enough English to make
myself understood (most of the time, anyway). Still, having learned it
as a second language, speaking English all the time, from chatting
with the grocery store cashier to explaining to the pediatrician that
my child had “a touch of fever,” or whatever else needed taling about,
is quite, quite different. It’s an experience that’s hard to explain
to people who’ve never lived abroad. I’ve long wondered what it must
be like to go to a country where you’re illiterate. I’d love to visit
Asia, but not speaking any Asian languages, I’d hesitate to live
there. The writer of course did not go there as an illiterate, but she
still had enough trouble with the language. Should make for
fascinating reading.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 5:31:44 PM
Recommend (4)
…and I am Sid Harth
News, Views and Reviews
12/09/2010
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