If you travelled around the World 100 years ago

如果你可以在一百年前就进行环球自助旅行, 那你肯定是幸福的，因为那时还没有“全球化”，所有国家的建筑都具有浓厚的本民族特色。譬如你到了越南的河内，看到的就是越式风情；到东京，看到的就是和式建筑。不论到哪一个国家与民族，他们穿的衣服和城市的建筑都有着很鲜明的民族特色。这时你看到的是一个完整的、承传自身文化的国家，没有外来文化的杂质，整座城市，不论是传统建筑，还是人民身上的服饰，其文化的协调性都很强，可以想象那真是一种属于本民族的极致美学的画面。

The above is quoted from a magazine article 《做有质感的民族》. Unfortunately, even 100 years ago, you would not be able to see a pure culture. All the cultures are connected with one another in one way or another.

What is Business Chinese?

I have seen some Business Chinese books. They all talk about trading, buying, selling and bargaining. What happened to other businesses? My guess is that people in other businesses do not need to learn Chinese. Or, those Business Chinese books should be tossed to the nearest waste basket.

There is no so called Business Chinese. There is Chinese and some business terms.

Can't Find Chinese Fortune Cookies in a Chinese Restaurant in China

Things can be so different after traveling overseas. For example, Chinese food.

So many people living outside of China think that fortune cookies are an essential part of Chinese food. But when they come to China and eat in a Chinese restaurant, they never find them.

The question is: Where can you taste the most authentic Chinese food? In Chinese restaurants outside of China, or in Chinese restaurants in China? They are quite different things, mind you!

Writing is an Idea

Quote from Ideas A History From Fire To Freud by Peter Watson:

Writing is an idea, a very important idea, which was invented before 3000 BC. Today, however, we tend not to regard letters or words as inventions, as we do computers or mobile phones, because they have been so long with us. But inventions are evidence of ideas. I have treated language an an idea, because language reflects the way that people think, and the ways in which languages differ characterize the social and intellectual history of different populations. In addition, most ideas are conceived in language. Thus I consider th history and structure of the world's most intellectually influential languages: Chinese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Latin, French and English.

Do you know why people don't understand you

After said something about the possible reasons of why you don't understand other people, it's time to say the other way: why people don't understand you.

Successful communications take two ways. For a Mandarin Chinese learner, it's not uncommon that they tried so hard to say something, and that something didn't get across to the other end at all. I have witnessed countless times when this happened. It's very discouraging to any learners indeed.

Most people will naturally point it out that it's the pronunciation that fails the learners. Especially Mandarin, a radically different language, has so many different sounds, and so tonal. However, from my observation, this is the last thing between you and your listeners. There are other things far more important. Here are my three points listed in order of importance:

1) Language structure and habit
2) How to use the vocab you know to say something you don't know
3) Your accent (pronunciation)

Most people get tumbled on the first point when they think it's everything but. For instance, one person wanted to order water in a restaurant. He learned that water is "shui" with the third tone. So he told the waitress: "shui3." And the waitress looked all confused and didn't understand what he wanted. It's not that he said anything wrong. It's that he didn't know when Chinese people order water they wouldn't only say "shui3" as a westerner would do in a western restaurant. Chinese people tend to say a bit more like: "yi ping kuang quan shui", or "yi bei shui", or "yi bei re shui", or something shui.

The second point baffled so many people. One common complain is that "I don't have enough vocab." Probably nobody will ever have enough vocab even for native speakers. The trick is that as a second language speaker one needs to change some speaking patterns that he is so used to as a first language speaker. If you don't know how to say "Don't hurry.", you can say "We have time" (wo men you shi jian.) instead. For those diligent students, they will look up a dictionary and find hurry as "gan jin 赶紧", or "cang cu 仓促", etc. But then they tend to fall in the first catch of neglecting structure or habit and say something like: bu cang cu. And that will not get your meaning across.

The last part that may hinder people understand you is your accent (pronunciation). If you have taken care of the first and second points, you are fine most of the time. If you know "don't hurry" is "bie zhao ji 别着急", you can assure that people will understand you even you say the phrase in a quite different accent. A person from Qing Dao will say "bie zhao ji" quite differently from a person from Luo Yang. And you, just add some flavor to hundreds of different accents that Chinese people already have, get a quite nice and distinctive Spanish accent, German accent, or English accent. No big deal.

Now it's time to think what is the real thing that stands between you and a smooth communication.

You Need to Know Why You Don't Understand People

If I ask 10 people this question: Do you think why you don't understand when you are talking to Chinese people?
It's a safe bet that I'll get one answer: It's the vocabulary. I need to learn more vocabulary.

Vocabulary certainly is a barrier, but it is one only for beginners. There are people who have learned Chinese for years, and accumulate vast amount of vocabulary. But when in real life, they still get lost quite quickly.

In fact you face three barriers:
1- vocabulary and sentence patterns
2- talking speed
3- accent

The first one is the easiest one to solve. You can employ many different methods. The end result is to remember certain words and sentence patterns. It's also the reason why learning reading and writing is easier than learning listening and speaking. When in reading and writing, your brain has time to recollect your memory, and if you have done your homework well you will find it easy to learn reading and writing. Although it's the easiest one to accomplish, memorizing large amount of vocab and grammar patterns can still be a daunting task.

The second one is not so easy to tackle. And most of the time, it's speaking speed that hinders your understanding. You have no time to reflect and it's already over. You need to have rigorous training on listening until a foreign sound becomes so familiar and you can call it your second nature. It's not so easy. It requires hours and hours of listening training.

The third one is the most difficult. When you are out of your classroom and your standard tape recording, you face people with different accents. There are so many different accents out there. And those accents can really lost you. The good news is if this is the only reason why you don't understand, you can adapt to it fairly quickly.

In the end, that's just why there's so much fun in learning Chinese!

Want to ride a bus, anyone?

I stayed in Beijing for a week from Dec 26, 2007 to Jan 1, 2008.

It was a good time to visit Beijing, to appreciate the Forbidden City and the Great Wall in the cold and very windy winter. And indeed I saw plenty visitors from all over the world in those places. People speak all kinds of languages and some of foreign visitors can speak Chinese too.

But when I was outside of the tourist attractions, I saw no foreign visitors. When I was in a public bus, or when I was in a small neighborhood restaurant, or when I was in a local convenient store, I had no foreign visitor in sight! Where did they go? What did they do?

I sincerely hope that Beijing's attraction is beyond the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. And people (at least those who take Mandarin lessons) are courageous enough to explore some small wonders in the nearby neighborhoods, and can have the opportunity to see ordinary people's lives.

I want to go to Beijing for one month

I heard this quite often: "I want to go to Beijing for one month and study putonghua."

It sounds good, but the real question should be asked is "then what?"

If anybody believes that one month stay in Beijing (or even six months stay) can make a person a fluent putonghua speaker, and require no further study, this person is too naive.

A devoted full month study is excellent no matter where you are. The real challenge comes after that. When you don't have that much of time, when your life goes back to pre-study routine, it's time for you to really concentrate on how you can carry on your study.

I read this sentence in a coffee shop. It's excellent for putonghua learners as well:

You do what you can at where you are.

Training Your Hand rather than Your Brain

I've seen many many people bought a huge stack of Chinese characters cards, roughly 1000 at least, to study. They read each card, trying to remember what the character looks like, and read the explanations, and, try to read the sample sentences, but often failed here because there are too many news words in the sample sentences. Then what happened?

They quickly forgot what they learned.

Leaning characters is a process of training your hand rather than your brain. If you write enough times, your hand will remember each characters better than your brain can. And your hand will remember those tiny details that differentiate different characters. For example: 已, 己, 巳.

Trust your hand more. It's more reliable.

Running in the dark nights

It is said that sometimes people want to get somewhere quickly and they run in the dark nights. The problem is that they are running in the wrong direction. But running itself keep them feeling comfortable and hoping that they are getting closer.

If you want to learn Mandarin as much as you can and as fast as you can. Be careful, and be alert on where you are going. If you want to achieve speaking and listening fluency, reading lots of grammar will not get you there. Only speaking and listening exercises will. If you want to achieve reading and writing fluency, study decks of decks of character cards will not get you there. Only reading and writing passages will.

You don't want to run in the dark nights in a wrong direction. Even you run as hard as you can, you won't get to where you want to be.

Putonghua and local dilect

For lots of Putonghua students, it's their goal that they can travel around China using only Putonghua. It's very doable in many places, but it can also be quite difficult.

I just had a short trip to Wuhan, Hubei. And I was surprised to find out that Wuhan people prefer Hubeihua rather than Putonghua, even when they are talking to Putonghua speaking people. Hubeihua sounds kind of similar to Putonghua, but only to native ears.

I believe it's very difficult for Putonghua students to understand them, especially those who are programmed in standard four tones.

When asked why they only speak Hubeihua, Wuhan people said that it's habit, or it's not enough education. One or the other. They certainly have no problems understanding Putonghua. They just don't want to speak it!

Not satisfied at your progress?

If you have spent at least one hour per day to study Chinese, to review, to do homework and probably watch Chinese programs on TV, but somehow you don't feel you have made any progress.

It could be that you still utter badly pronounced words, or you still struggle to make a full sentence, or you still can't understand the simplest questions when you hear them. Maybe it's time for you to consider that it's your teacher who didn't do a good job.

Moving forward is as important as review

Sometimes people stop learning because they feel that they need to re-study what they have learned before. It's a good idea. But most of time, it turned out to be a trap.

Re-study can be boring, and that leads to low motivation, and that leads to low self-esteem, and that leads to stop, and that leads to abandon, and that leads to totally forget whatever you have!

Feelings sometimes can be very misleading, and waiting for tomorrow's miracle certainly will never happen. The best way is to forge ahead, move on, roll and stop worrying so much.

Is Summer a good time to study?

Maybe not. That's why schools are all closed during the Summer.

There are too many distractions. Good weather, bad weather, sports, TV, movies, trips and meals, etc, etc. To keep a good disciplined study plan is almost impossible.

Do you want to play the leading actor/actress in Study Mission Impossible?

11 years in China

Over the years, I have met people who have stayed in China for 11 years and don't speak Chinese, and also those who do. Sometimes I'm not sure which type is more impressive. How can anybody resist the temptation of speaking to the locals using their own language?

The gentleman in the picture, Guo Tong, has stayed in China for 11 years, speaks good Chinese, and doing business in China. Chinese language skills are essential to him.

Reading stories

If the whole textbook is full of conversations, dialogs which are supposedly very useful but actually are not (people are not scripted when they are speaking), what can you do?

My suggestion is: start reading interesting stories.

Mandarin Songs

Last night I went to a Turkish restaurant for dinner. There had live music. I guess they could be from Philippines, Mexico, or some other tropical countries since they have this nice brown skin.

They sang a lot of English songs. Since it was a small restaurant and also I was sitting right in front of them, they asked me where I was from. After learned I am from China, they smiled and said "ni hao" to me. That was really nice of them. And then, they did something even nicer - they sang two Chinese songs.

One was Qi Qin's "da yue zai dong ji", the other one was Deng Lijun's "yueliang daibiao wo de xin". They did really well, and I was very happy sitting there and listening. Later on they told me it had been a long time since they sang Chinese songs, but they really loved it.

How far can good memory go?

Not very far. I have seen people with excellent memory. Quite often, once they see a new word, or hear a new word, they will remember it for as long as a day. That's all there is. If they don't review, or practice in one form or another, they will forget what they have learned.

It's a great advantage for people who have excellent memory, but also a great pit fall. This type of people tend to be over confident and neglect the fact that learning a language requires more than just memory. Learning a language is a journey with commitment.

Object vs Context

Richard Nisbett's The Geography of Thought is a very interesting read. Asians and Westerners are so different in so many ways, and they live in literally a very different world.

He discussed the language effects which I find really intriguing.
Western languages force a preoccupation with focal objects as opposed to context. English is a "subject-prominent" language. There must be a subject even in the sentence "It is raining." Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, in contrast, are "topic-prominent" languages.

I don't know Japanese or Korean, but I do know "It is raining" in Chinese is "xia yu le!"

It's indeed very different. It shows that to learn Chinese, at least for English speaking people, it's much better to learn through context than to memorize a dictionary. And be prepared, learning Chinese can change your world, literally!!

Learning a language is too expensive to waste

Learning a language can be very expensive. Not only the money you paid to school or your tutor, but also the time and energy you committed.

If you started with two weeks program, and four weeks later you forgot everything, all the effort your have made is wasted! It's better that you didn't start it at all. You can use the money, the time and the energy to do something more beneficial, like go hiking or read a book.

My advice is that if you are not sure, don't start. If you have committed, you should carry on for more than one year to not waste anything.