by Doctor Science
This fall I've started to find out if I am too old a dog to learn some tricks: I am taking a course at the local Adult School in Elementary Mandarin. I tried a couple of apps, but I was an ignominious failure at reproducing the sounds and never really made it to Lesson Two, so I figured it would be worth seeing if a live teacher would do the trick.
So far it seems to be working, but wow: learning Chinese is not a trivial task, even though we're not learning characters in any systematic way. All the writing is in Hanyu Pinyin, a wonderfully WYSIWYG writing system. To my surprise I'm not having particular problems with tones, they seem to "make sense" to my ears. My biggest problem so far are the initial consonants, which don't map exactly to the Roman letters used to write them and which my ear just scrambles.
This particular class turned out to be especially challenging because of who happens to be taking it. There are four of us: me (over 60, interest in China but no personal connection), a 30ish white man whose wife is Chinese and who wants to be able to speak to his in-laws, and two late-50/early-60s women who are native speakers of Cantonese, but who find that travelling in the PRC really requires Mandarin. One of them is native-born American from New York's Chinatown, the other is a naturalized American who was born in Malaysia as part of the Overseas Chinese community there. Both Cantonese-speakers have some reading knowledge of Simplified Chinese characters but are by no means fluent.
Basically, we two white people are scrambling along, trying to keep up with the Cantonese-speakers. At least they're having to do a lot more work than I expected, which means that by working hard the young man and I can almost keep up.
There was a fifth student, briefly: a native speaker of Hungarian (!) who's married to a Chinese woman, but he missed the first two sessions and it quickly became apparent that he wasn't going to be able to catch up, so he dropped the class.
My only advantages are that I've read about China and the Chinese language for many years. In particular, I've been following Language Log for more than 20 years, where Sinologist Victor Mair frequently posts. It's due to Mair's writing about how hard it is for native Chinese speakers to understand "word" as distinct from "syllable" or "phrase" that I knew why the teacher (who's from Taiwan, btw) said something in the first class about how "each character is a word"--while also teaching us two-character words.
Mair also posts a lot about topolects, regional variation in Chinese (such as the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese), and about character amnesia, the fact that most adults start forgetting how to write some characters after they leave school, so they gradually become secondarily illiterate. The Chinese writing system is simply too difficult for most people to retain without *constant* effort.
Hmmmm, in the comments to that last post people are talking about the Heisig method for remembering Chinese characters--have any of you used it?
The textbook we're using is Experiencing Chinese, which comes with sound files for some parts of the lessons. Now that I have a phone that's not completely dumb, I'm using the ChineseSkill app to give me extra practice. Unfortunately, ChineseSkill doesn't seem to have a "review earlier lesson" function (or at least I can't find it), which is currently frustrating me.
What got me started taking Chinese was that back in February some e-friends (you know who you are) persuaded me to try an episode or two of a Chinese web-TV drama, Guardian. Pretty soon I was hooked, but I couldn't help noticing that the English subtitles, which are clearly written by native speakers of Chinese, are *terrible*. So I got involved in a fan project to write better subtitles, for which I was of course hilariously unqualified.
Meanwhile I also started watching Nirvana in Fire, a historicalesque Chinese palace drama that my whole family soon got caught up in, even though many episodes just involve two characters standing or sitting and talking to each other in front of a static camera. The plot is both complex and logical, and the characters are great: everyone, including the bad guys, is doing things for reasons you can understand and even sympathize with.
Although some of the plot elements in Nirvana in Fire are eye-rollingly implausible, it also has things like: a gripping, edge-of-the-seat episode arc where the issue is--will desperately-needed disaster relief funds get to where they're needed, or will the person picked to oversee the effort embezzle most of the money? As Young Science said, "you want gritty realism? Game of Thrones can't compete."
I'm not watching a Chinese drama right now, because the Good Omens TV series came out and roped me in like a calf at a rodeo. And the Cdrama my friends are currently playing with, The Untamed, hasn't grabbed me--though that may just be a matter of time.
I think I need to decide what my goal is for learning Chinese. What do I want to do? Travel to China isn't it. I don't really want to read, or not enough to do the work to get fluency in reading Chinese characters. I guess I want to be able to watch Chinese dramas with their terrible English subtitles turned off. OK, that's a goal, and worth continuing for next semester.
I know a number of the people reading this have experience learning Chinese, so tell me your tips & tricks! For instance, would it help my ear learn to unscramble Chinese sounds if I had Chinese dramas or other shows going on in the background? What type of show would have the slowest speech? Because holy cow, Chinese goes *fast*, it's really difficult for my ear to separate the stream into recognizable syllables.
I already knew about the Four Arts, but while writing this up I found a list of the Six Arts of pre-Imperial China, which included Mathematics as well as the martial disciplines of Archery and Charioteering. I wonder why math was dropped, and how the history of the world might have changed if the Chinese Imperial Examinations had included a math section.
by Doctor Science
This is a thread for our UK friends. It's going up later than I hoped because I've been watching live-blogs of our own Constitutional crisis. Perhaps the most distressing part is that Republican members of the Judiciary Committee are laughing during the markup hearing. I suppose this is tactical, to convey that they think this impeachment is a farce. But it also conveys that they don't take government seriously in general, which I guess is #onbrand.
I still find Brexit baffling, though I've recently read some good explanations--or at least coherent stories. One is Heroic Failure by Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole. He talks about Brexit as being part of the English (specifically English, not British) tradition of heroic failures: Scott of the Antarctic, the Light Brigade, the Franklin Expedition, General Gordon, Dunkirk, Kipling's "If". The original Heroic Failures were a mis-direction from Empire, a way for the English to center *their* suffering, to distract from noticing the sufferings of their unfree subjects.
They keep going back to WWII as a touchstone, more than the rest of the EU does, because though the UK was on the winning side it wasn't made better off by the War, while Germany and Japan quickly became economic powerhouses.
It's a particularly English problem because since the late 90s the other nations in the UK have devolved assemblies or parliaments to decide local questions, while England's issues are decided by the general Parliament in Westminster.
My father is Irish-American and his mother emigrated due to The Troubles in the early 20s. Like O'Toole, I am gobsmacked that UK leaders and Brexit voters don't realize that the free, open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is a bloody big deal that keeps Ireland (and the UK!) from going back to the status quo ante, which was just bloody. The British in general don't seem to grasp that the core value of the EU is *peace-keeping*, and that the Irish border is not a secondary issue for them.
O'Toole also talks about how Brexitism overlaps with the nihilism of punk, where life is dull and grim and you just want to burn it all down. And how that's connected with the English tradition of masochism (there's a reason French sex workers called flagellation "The English Vice"). Maria Farrell at Crooked Timber writes about Brexitism and England's Ruling Pathology: Boarding School Syndrome, and, like O'Toole, notes that to sustain an Empire you have to grow reliable crops of heartless imperialists.
I have to go to sleep now so I can't really make this a terribly coherent post. Good luck, Britfriends, we're rooting for Team Sanity.
by Doctor Science
I don't seem to have talked about it here before, but last year (5779) I leveled up significantly in my Jewish practice by reading the Torah portion (Parsha) every week, and discussing it on Twitter under the #ParshaChat hashtag (usually on Wednesday evenings, though it was on Thursday last week).
Last week's parsha was Vayeira (Genesis 18:1 - 22:24) , which includes the destruction of Sodom. In thinking about Vayeira last year, I realized that there's an interpretation in which everyone's behavior makes a lot more sense and is more relatable than in the interpretations that have been standard for, um, well, thousands of years. Despite the incredible weight of tradition that's against me, I kind of think I'm right:
The men of Sodom are asking for ID, and Lot replies with a sarcastic pun. Nothing in this is actually about sex, it's about immigration, about how you treat outsiders.
Note: the following includes discussions of rape, abuse, and homophobia. Take care of yourself.
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