Learning Mandarin

Pai Mai is training the main character Uma Thurman in Kill Bill 2.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEjI0A9iMow

When I see Uma Thurman, I can't help but think about my early days in Chinese school.

My Chinese school had central A/C, but starting out was painful, boring, and repetitive.

My first Chinese teacher was a former radio news reporter in Taiwan, so her Mandarin Chinese was pitch perfect.

Everyday weekday after "English" school was 3 hours of "Chinese school."  For the first six months I didn't write a single character.  We reviewed the Taiwan phonetic table known as Zhuyin Fuhao and practiced pronouncing every permutation.  Here's a table:



Multiply this by 4 and you can pronounce any character in Chinese!  Although the list is intimidating, English fills up an entire book!

The first set of words I wrote was my Chinese name, 陳俊祥。 If a single stroke was off, you had to re-write a page worth of your name, or around 150 times!!

The first character I learned besides my name was "好。" The radical for girl and boy are smooshed together to make 好， and it makes perfect sense because that's how you greet people.  The conversation oddly turned to why procreating children is good.

Every character was written in these neat little white boxes like this.



One mistake and you had to rewrite a character in another column 14 times.

I got plenty of hand cramps like Pai Mai's training.

I wrote sentences in 1 year

I wrote paragraphs in 3 years.

I wrote essays 5 years.

Before entering college I knew HOW to study Chinese, but I didn't know WHY.

Then I knew why.

During the last day of my language class, my college Chinese teacher gave us this advice:

"Right now you are all at the peak of your Chinese ability.  For most of you will slope downward gradually and forget.  But if you want to maintain what you have I only have one word:  Read.  There is no shortcut.  No trick.  Just read as much as you can."

Something within me still wants to learn this beautiful ancient language. Although I can carry a basic conversation, I'm still too far from an educated Chinese person.

After 17 years, my hands still cramp.



 

"Educational"

"I don't want to do that, it's too educational."

The English languages uses the word "educational" as an adjective, describing something that has a quality related to education.  But how did it have a derogatory connotation?

"Learning" is more innate.  An individual arrives at a realization.  "Education" appropriates knowledge from  institution or external entity.  The former is active, while the latter is passive.

I've recently been reading this excellent blog about homeschooling by Penelope Trunk.  Here are a few brief points about her views on educating kids:

1.  Kids can more efficiently teach themselves how to learn if you give them room to be self-motivated.

2. Kids in public schools are taught to passively regurgitate information for a standardized test, not solve complex problems in society.

3.  The structure of the public school system is too rigid to allow for kids to learn for themselves.

4.  The subjects taught in public school education are mostly useless to the real world.

5.  The social environment in public schools is about competing with young immature children, while the working world requires collaboration with adults.

I had to unlearn habits that were enforced from public education.  Education was something you did at school, completely separate from our personal lives.  Public education discourages you from allowing your self-motivation to fully explore the complexity of learning.  You can only learn in a given amount of time and test from an arbitrary outline.

Maybe that's why people don't spend time reading.  It's not that we lack the ability, but somehow we think learning takes place in a finite amount of time.  After graduating, the time to educate ourselves is "gone."  All we only look forward to work, retirement, then death.

I'm still wondering after leaving college whether I truly "educated" myself.  Outside the context of grades and a career, can we still "educate" ourselves?

Sometimes I wonder why I'm still studying Chinese after leaving college.  Then I remember this quote from Mencius.

學問之道無他, 求其放心而已矣

The way to learning requires nothing else, just search for what you let go of in your heart.

                                                     ---孟子  Mencius

Make Mistakes! Make Mistakes!

As a good rule of thumb, you need to know 1000 characters to carry a basic conversation, 2000 to read a newspaper, and 3000 to write decent Chinese.

Aside from quantity, you must have the heart to study Chinese.  As good ole' beef jerky lover said:

"學而時習之不亦樂乎？"

When practicing learning, is there not joy?

(Analects 1.1)

Mandarin literally translates to “speech of the official."  Because every region had their own local dialect, there needed to be a standard so that everyone could understand each other.  When the Chinese Communist Party was in its infancy deliberating between Cantonese and Mandarin as the national language, Cantonese lost by one vote!  (I'm pretty sure I read this in Jonathan Spence's "In Search of Modern China."  This little quip in history always stirs controversy between my Mandarin and Cantonese speaking friends.)

My first Chinese teacher used to be a former radio broadcaster in Taiwan.  Her pronunciation is immaculate.  Every year the students in our class would attempt to do a poetry recital contest.  I became very aware of my vocal inflections and intonations, but I also became overly self-conscious about speaking.  Looking back, the kitchiness of these competitions make my flesh crawl.

I remember sitting in my language classes in college being utterly helpless as everyone around me was talking their heads off while I sat like a shy sheep at the corner.  I speak Teo Chew at home, so although I could hear understand everyone clearly, I was too self-conscious to respond.

And there's an unspoken rule that the Asian students should be better than the non-Asian students.  I had this prejudice when I first entered class, but I was quickly put into place.  My non-Asian classmates were able to argue about the death penalty in Mandarin.  I could barely keep up in English!

Hey, everyone's a little bit racist!

Non-Chinese speaking people learning Chinese have a huge advantage when learning Chinese: it's more socially acceptable to make mistakes.  If a Chinese person makes a mistake speaking Chinese, you're seen as "uneducated" and of a lower rung of society.  If you're non-Chinese, then it's okay because your family doesn't speak Chinese.

But then you start to get reverse racism.  A common segment on variety shows in China is to have a non-Asian person speaking Chinese。  This segment is equivalent to a Chinese person singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on American television.

I asked my Chinese professor if there was a magic pill, or Chinese-speaking steroids or something.  She only said one thing:

"Read!  Read everyday you can, any moment you can!"

I had to unlearn some of my conditioned guilt.  First by talking to myself while reading text, and slowly contributing in class.  The fear of making mistakes is slowly fading.

Sometimes it's best to lower your expectations and go for it!