Studying via PopupChinese.com

Until recently, I'd never used the internet to study Chinese. I've seen the light now, though.

In the past, I was all about Supermemo and other memory techniques for "burning" Chinese into my brain. Supermemo is very effective and I think that it's helped me a lot get to the intermediate-ish level of Chinese that I'm at. But Supermemo used as a primary method of learning a language lacks a lot. Focusing on vocabulary and reading instead of listening and speaking eventually caught up with me. I was to a point where I knew hundreds upon hundreds of characters but could have only the most basic of conversations.

Frustrated, I focused more on one-on-one classes and eventually really expanded myself with my Chinese. I got to a very conversational level of Chinese. Not incredibly proficient, but I could do a wide array of things with the language. Focusing on listening and speaking helped me tons.

Things were going great and I was making serious strides and then... Qian and I moved away from China to America. I stopped studying for several weeks after the move. Eventually, I got reinvigorated with Supermemo and studied pretty well for a while. I wasn't able to continue an any one-on-one classes though. And without the listening and speaking practice, the studying of characters tapered off after several weeks. I stopped Supermemo months ago.

People reading this who know my living situation must surely be thinking, "Mark, have lessons with your Chinese wife for God's sake!" Yes, Qian is Chinese. And add on to that that she is a Chinese teacher of all things! But it's not that simple. Qian and I talk some, but we've never been able to have a productive teacher/student relationship. I can't explain why, but it doesn't work. In lieu of formal classes, she and I have made efforts to move our conversations over to Chinese, but it, too, has had limited success. Again, I can't explain why. It just hasn't worked.

In more recent months, watching Chinese TV shows has been a good way for me to keep up a steady exposure to Chinese language. But watching TV with Qian is not necessarily a great way for me to learn anything. It's good for listening practice, but if I have any trouble she just explains things to me and I hardly ever write anything down or stop to focus on a certain grammar point. And I have plenty of trouble trying to watch a Chinese TV with my Chinese level.

I've been at a a crossroads in recent months. I still have desire to learn Chinese, but have been frustrated with studying via textbook/Supermemo, watching Chinese TV, and annoying Qian about speaking Chinese. All the while, I've certainly been forgetting a lot of what I'd learned over the past few years by not using any of it in the US of A.

Everything changed for the better for me recently, though. I found popupchinese.com.

After listening to another excellent Sinica podcast hosted by popupchinese.com a few weeks ago, I actually checked out the rest of the site. I found a vast library of podcasts/language lessons for learning Chinese. The lessons ranged from absolute beginner to a level that I'm sure I'll never ever achieve. I was captivated by the high-quality and free content given to anyone who cares to download it.

The best thing about popupchinese is that the lessons are hilarious and twisted on top of being relevant. The host of most of the podcasts, Brendan, has a unique sense of humor. The lessons are consistently full of win. Some of my favorite lessons recent lessons are as follows:

- A father telling his daughter that her childhood has been a sham and that her mother and brother are not her biological family members.
- A father cooking his son's pet rabbit.
- And an honest cabbie telling a foreigner how terrible his Chinese is.

The Popup lessons, both the dialogs and the explanations by the teachers, Brendan and Echo, are entertaining and the language in them is very useful. So basically the opposite of using the conventional textbooks that have guided my first couple years of studying Chinese.

I'm finding the elementary lessons to be great review and the intermediate lessons full of new information. I have a notebook for new grammar structures, vocab, etc. and am trying to listen for a few minutes a day.

I recommend anyone interested in learning Chinese to go check out the site. The lessons start at the most basic of basic. You can listen to any of the lessons for free. If you really like the site, you can sign up for membership at really quite reasonable rates. I haven't decided whether I'm going to sign up for membership. Seeing that I haven't given them a dime yet and I really like what they're doing, I figured the least I could do is to try direct some traffic their way from my little blog.

We'll see whether I can continue on with Popup Chinese. For the moment, at least, it is helping me immensely in my life-long challenge that is learning Chinese more proficiently.

难得糊涂 - Where Ignorance is Bliss, it's a Folly to be Wise

I've given several Chinese calligraphy and painting scrolls to friends and family over the past couple years. Hand painted scrolls are beautiful and inexpensive presents to hand out on a return trip from China. Small scrolls can be as cheap as 20RMB, or about $3.

Before coming to the United States last year, Qian and I went to the 书院门 (Shu Yuan Gate) art district in Xi'an to pick up a few scrolls for people in the US. We bought several.

I particularly liked one calligraphy scroll in a small shop. I couldn't make out the characters very well, but thought the colors and brush strokes looked really nice. I asked Qian the meaning of it. She said something along the lines of:

"Oh, wow. That is really tough to describe. It basically means that sometimes it is better to look past someone's faults and just accept the person for who they are. Kind of like you should just turn your head instead of getting angry. It's very deep and philosophical. Older people use this phrase."

Thinking that this scroll has a pretty heady meaning that wouldn't be easy to explain to an aunt or uncle or anyone else I'd give the piece of art to, I decided to keep it. It is currently on the wall of our apartment. Here is a picture of it:



Having seen this just about every day but not having thought about it deeply much, I asked Qian about it again yesterday.

The characters are 难得糊涂, written traditionally. I went to the very useful chengyu dictionary at chinese-tools.com and looked up the meaning of this idiom. Below is the screen it gave me:


I was pretty taken a back by the translation of this. "Where ignorance is bliss, it's a folly to be wise." Where Qian's explanation was thorough, this is succinct. I think Qian's definition and this definition from the website are similar, but I'm honestly not sure. I've been thinking about these definitions a lot today.

Is Qian's definition of 难得糊涂 and chinese-tools.com's the same? Is this sentence good or bad or foolish or wise? Is it weird that I have this on my wall of my apartment? What does this mean?

As I understand this phrase right now, I like it. So few people in the world are 100% good or bad. Usually there are lots of layers and colors and shades to a person. Taking the bad with the good is part of life. Maybe a deep understanding of 难得糊涂 can be helpful on life's path and relationships with people.

人多力量大 - More Population Means More Power

I took a break from my devouring of China-related books a few weeks ago. Instead of delving into non-fiction about the Middle Kingdom, I read Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam. Breaks of the Game is a chronicle of the '79-'80 Portland Trail Blazers and the commercialism of the NBA during that time period. Halberstam's book was a good read, but by the time I was finished, I was dying to get into another China book.

A few days ago, I picked up Red Azalea by Anchee Min. "Wow" is all I can say so far. Red Azalea is a chronicle of Min's experiences during China's Cultural Revolution. For those that don't know, the Cultural Revolution was (according to Wikipedia), "a violent mass movement that resulted in social, political, and economic upheaval in the People’s Republic of China starting in 1966 and ending officially with Mao's death in 1976. It resulted in nation-wide chaos and economic disarray and stagnation."

The Cultural Revolution was surely one of the most horrific time periods in the history of man. Mao Zedong at his absolute worst.

Min tells her story of being corrupted as a child and then being sent off to a work farm as a young woman. I haven't finished the book and am in the middle of her time on the work farm. The stories are just unbelievable. I can't even begin to describe the situations she faced.

The language Min uses is haunting. I can't find confirmation in the book or online, but I believe I read that Min wrote this in English after moving to America. I've been enchanted so far by her words. Her writing, in her second language, is just wonderful.

I'm going to highlight a passage from the book I found particularly interesting. It's from page 99:

Yan (a woman in Min's platoon) and I betrayed no intimacy in public. We silently washed each other's clothes and took trips to fill hot-water containers for each other. We became accustomed to each other's eye signals. Every couple of days we would go separately to meet at the brick factory. Yan would make excuses such as checking the quality of the day's work. I would take the thickest Mao book and my notebook and pretend to find a place to study by myself. We shuttled through the reeds, hand in hand. She would roll up a piece of reed to make a green trumpet. She told me to blow when she blew hers. We made music of the reeds, of the evening. We messed with each other's tones and laughed when the tone sounded like the cough of an old man.

Even when winter came, we continued to meet. Sitting by the bricks, Yan would practice her erhu; I would just lie back and listen. We began to talk about everything, including the most forbidden subject - men.

Yan said that according to her mother, who hated her father, most men were evil. Mother said that she wouldn't ever have produced nine children with my father if she had not wanted to respond to the Party's call, "More population means more power."

Now there is a lot going on in this passage. I particularly want to discuss the end of it.

I've written on my blog before that I always had a lot of fun learning Chinese idioms - aka. 成语. My teacher - 马老师 (Teacher Ma) - and I would often during our classes stray from the book I used and discuss a wide array of topics in Chinese. During those conversations, Teacher Ma, knowing that I liked idioms and four character phrases, would highlight certain phrases that I should know.

One day when discussing the former Chinese leader, Mao Zedong, I asked her for a few classic Mao lines. She gave me several, but only two have stuck with me to today.

One is 人定胜天 - rén dìng shèng tiān - which means "man's determination can conquer nature." Seeing some of the projects that Mao initiated during his time as China's leader - Beijing's underground city for one - it's easy to see why Mao had an affinity for this idiom.

The other Mao-ism that's stuck with me is 人多力量大 - rén duō lì liàng dà - which is the phrase Min wrote about in the passage above - "more population means more power."

I just did a bit of searching for some more info about this Mao quote. I'm not finding much in English. I found a bit in Chinese here. It's hard for me to translate the contents of this verbatim, but from what I gather, during the disastrous "Great Leap Forward" in the late 1950s, Mao promoted the idea that it was every good country man's duty to produce as many children as possible. That's the gist of Min's writing in the passage too.

In Mao's mind, China's already large population in the 1950s was one of the country's greatest assets and a possible equalizer with the rest of the world. Wanting to be a superpower, Mao encouraged Chinese people to have as many children as possible.

I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that this population growth encouraging is one of Mao's many failures. The most obvious results of the population boom under Mao was the "one child policy," which was introduced in 1978 and implemented in 1979. Mao died in 1976. To counteract what Beijing saw as one of China's most severe problems, the country, almost immediately after Mao's death, used population-control to reverse the fact China had too many people.

Is Mao's declaration and promotion of 人多力量大 the reason why China has 1.3 billion people today? I don't really think that one can say for certain. But looking at charts of China's population, one could argue that such edicts had an effect (Mao had population-growth campaigns in the mid-1950s):




Image from digitalsurvivors.com

On that second image, note that the population dip was due to starvation during the Great Leap Forward. Despite that blip, population was mostly going up at a pretty steady pace.

Whether historians can blame Mao for China's over-population or not, the promotion of 人多力量大 was, I think, misguided. China's population today, thirty years after harsh population controls were put in place, is still the root of many of China's domestic problems.

Watching the Chinese Soap Opera -《蜗居》"Dwelling Narrowness"

I lamented to my old Chinese teacher, 马老师 (Teacher Ma), that I haven't been keeping up with my Chinese study very well in an email a couple weeks ago. With my relatively new job and, of course, not living in China, I've been afraid that whatever Chinese language skills I have are slipping.

She responded with the following:

我刚才一直想你现在应该怎么学习汉语。

我觉得现在你在工作，所以没有那么多时间系统地学习汉语，所以以前学习的办法现在不能用了。

你说你对中国文化还很感兴趣，我就想，你可以从电视里学习汉语，你和你老婆一起看，不明白的地方她可以马上告诉你，而且你可以 了解一些深一点的文化，比如，有的句子虽然很简单，但是很“有名”。而且，你陪她一起看中国的电视，我觉得这样可以让她不那么想家。

去年很流行的电视是《蜗居》讲的是年轻人的爱情，影响特别大，大家一直在讨论这个电视。

Basically, she's telling me that my old methods of studying Chinese (flashcards, 1-on-1 classes, chit-chatting with people I meet, etc.) aren't going to work in America. She suggests that I watch Chinese TV both for language practice as well as understanding Chinese culture better. She recommends that I watch the shows with my wife, Qian, since she'll be able to help me any places that I get tripped up with the language.

Teacher Ma specifically suggests watching a show called《蜗居》- "Wo Ju," which has been horribly translated to "Dwelling Narrowness" by the shows producers (Qian tells me that "Wo Ju" literally means something like "a snail's home." From what I've read, it loosely means "humble abode."). Teacher Ma says that "Wo Ju" is having a big impact in China and that everybody is talking about it.

Teacher Ma's recommendation piqued my interest. And then about a day after I read this email, I read the following post on Ben Ross' blog:

After finishing Fen Dou and taking a short break from Chinese television shows, I am now 11 episodes into a new series, Wo Ju (蜗居). Broadcast in 2009, Wo Ju has been the most popular and controversial series to come from Mainland China in some time. Due to its controversial subject matter, Beijing TV pulled the plug on Wu Ju ten episodes in, and Shanghai moved it from prime time to a late night time slot. Many people (myself included) have thus taken to the Chinese Internets to watch the series in its entirety.

That whole part about controversy and having the plug pulled, it got me real excited about watching "Wo Ju." Qian and I started watching episode 1 on Sunday, April 18th. We just finished episode 31 of 35 this evening, Thursday, April 29th. Yeah... we're addicted.

Qian and I are, obviously, really enjoying the show.

I have to have a disclaimer here. My Chinese is not fluent. I'm getting about 1/3 to 1/2 of the dialog in the show. The stuff I don't understand, Qian is summarizing. Is this ideal? No. Am I catching every detail of what is going on? No. Am I using Qian as a crutch? Probably. Am I getting what is going on in the show? I think I am.

Watching soap operas are a tried and true method of learning a foreign language. They're not rocket science. I remember in Spanish III class in high school watching the soap opera, "Destinos." Just looking "Destinos" up on Wikipedia, I hadn't realized that Destinos was actually created just for people learning Spanish. "Wo Ju" was not created for people learning Chinese and there are parts of the dialog that I just don't get. But the basic story line, like all soap operas, is pretty simple. And I'm getting a lot out of the show despite any language problems I'm having.

Ben did a great job of summarizing the plot of Wo Ju in this post. I'll give my own brief synopsis of the plot here:

The story revolves around two sisters from a small city in China who have moved to the made up city of 江州 (Jiangzhou). Jiangzhou is, for all intents and purposes, Shanghai. The older sister (Hai Ping) is married to a decent man. The younger sister (Hai Zao) has a very nice boyfriend.

Both have their share of problems though.

Hai Ping is OBSESSED with buying a nice condo so that she can bring her young daughter, who is currently living with Hai Ping's parents in her hometown, to Jiangzhou. Hai Zao has a nice job (both sisters have white-collar jobs and graduated from good universities) and a caring boyfriend. But she is not very mature and makes several whimsical decisions throughout the show.

That is very short, but will do for now (just go read Ben's link, it'll help you figure out the main characters).

I've been shocked at how racy the show has been. There have been sex scenes (no nudity) that wouldn't make network TV in America, corruption amongst government officials is rampant, and the exploration of the housing bubble and property rights is a big part of the story-line.

I'd like to expound upon some of the major themes of the show that I've noticed:

1. Housing prices are out of control and condo ownership is a fleeting dream for many.

As I mentioned above, the two sisters in the show are well-educated and have decent jobs and the men in their lives are the same. They are not poor. But at the same time, buying a satisfactory condo in Jiangzhou is impossible.

One of my favorite scenes in the show is in episode six when Hai Ping and her husband go look to buy a condo. They begin by looking at a very modest, second-hand places. They can't believe the prices people are bidding though. Hai Ping is so disgusted that she is convinced that the other people touring the condos with her are friends with the seller and are only there to drive up the price.

Frustrated, they go to a much nicer block of new apartments that haven't been built yet, but that are for sale. They go to a real estate office with a large diorama of future high-rise condos and try to bid on one of those in-the-future-to-be-built condos. They have no chance though. The condos are going for prices that Hai Ping and her husband cannot afford. In fact, they are not even close to being able to afford anything "suitable."

Hai Ping is so frustrated at this time. She is living in a very shabby and dank one room apartment with her husband. It is not big enough for their daughter to live with them. Because they cannot buy a condo, they cannot live with their daughter. Hai Ping is heart-broken.

I've written about housing prices in China a lot on this blog. Just a couple months ago, new Shanghai condos were up 68% in over the previous year! That is insanity. And such craziness is affecting normal people a great deal.

2. Related to point 1 on the housing bubble, the residents of apartments that are being torn down to make way for new condo complexes are not properly compensated.

This point is shown in the show by the neighbors of Hai Ping in their dingy one bedroom apartment. The apartment block where Hai Ping lives is in a prime location for juicy new condos to go up. Although Hai Ping wants to move out of the apartment, not everyone there does.

The resistance to moving is most outwardly personified in a lovely, little old grandma. She has NO interest in moving out of the apartment where she lives. She is smart enough to know that the compensation she'll receive from the government/developers for her apartment being torn down will go nowhere in the heated up real estate market of Jiangzhou. On top of that, she simply doesn't want to move.

This section of the show goes hand in hand with a book I just read. Wild Grass by Ian Johnson (a book I highly recommend) tells three stories of people taking on the system in contemporary China. One of the stories he describes is centered around the destruction of hutongs in old Beijing.

"Wo Ju" portrays the government and the developers in urban China in the same way that Johnson did in his book. The government officials and developers building up these complexes are only in it for the money and they're all making a killing off of it. While the people in their wake are simply out of luck.

3. Moving from the countryside or small cities of China to big cities such as Shanghai can split families apart.

Hai Ping does not live with her toddler daughter. In fact, she's never lived with her. Since her daughter was born, she has lived with her grandma and grandpa (Hai Ping's parents).

There is a very sad scene where Hai Ping and her husband are back in her home city visiting her parents during the Spring Festival. Hai Ping has been looking forward to seeing her daughter for months. Her daughter doesn't even recognize her mother. She cries as soon as Hai Ping holds her and demands to see her grandma.

Hai Ping has chosen making it in the big city over being a mother to her daughter.

4. Although living in the big Chinese city provides new opportunities, life there is no cake walk.

This theme doesn't only apply to China, of course. I wrote a screed on this topic several months ago. Getting rich and having nice things ≠ happiness. More and more, "making it" sucks everything out of the people trying to live a more prosperous life.

There is one particular piece of dialog in "Wo Ju" on this topic I liked a lot. In an early episode, Hai Ping (the older sister) persuades Hai Zao to stay in Jiangzhou. Hai Zao was getting disillusioned and was thinking about going home to the small city where her parents lived.

Hai Ping asks Hai Zao a series of questions like, "Does our hometown have a history museum? Does it have concerts? Does it have cafes? No! Jiangzhou has all of these things. You need to stay and make your life here!"

The funny thing is that Hai Ping had become so obsessed with saving money for her fantasy condo at this point in the show that she never saw any of these things that make Jiangzhou so great. She and her husband had resorted to eating 方便面 (instant noodles) every day in an effort to save money! This great culture that Hai Ping spoke of is completely out of their grasp.

5. The life of an 二奶 (mistress) can seem to be a realistic means of setting up a stable life for a young woman.

I may be completely off base here, but I feel as though married men, especially successful married men, having mistresses and girlfriends is more accepted in China than it is in the West. Maybe I'm just reading too much into a stupid soap opera and a few people I knew in China. This very well may be the case. This statement is an anecdotal observation of mine and I'm willing to concede that infidelity, particularly in the instance of a sugar daddy supporting a young woman, happens just as often in the West as it does in China. Either way, a lot of guys in China have girlfriends outside of their marriage.

I'm not going to get into too much detail, but the life of a sugar daddy's mistress is glamorized in the show. The woman in the show who becomes a married man's girlfriend is given a wonderful condo to live in, a BMW to drive, and a credit card with unlimited resources to go shopping with.

Some downsides to this kind of life are shown. The mistress is often lonely and wants to see the man more than she does. But overall, the show, shows a lot of the positives of being an 二奶.

6. The absence of a solid rule of law makes life in China largely based upon one's 关系 (connections).

There are several instances throughout the show where the well-connected do as they please and break laws and help those in trouble who they care about.

I could keep going. But this post is already WAY too long and I'm going to stop.

If you want to watch the show yourself, go to either Youku.com or Tudou.com or any other Chinese video site for the Chinese version. Qian and I have had better luck with the Tudou.com versions since they download faster here in America.

Also, there does appear to be a version on Youtube with English subtitles. It doesn't look like all of the episodes are there, but there is at least the first one.

For more plot summaries, media, and information on the show, you can read this great resource from Danwei.org on Wo Ju.

Obviously, I've enjoyed this show a lot. I still have a couple episodes left and am looking forward to finishing it up. I recommend it to anyone interested in China and especially to anyone who's made it this far into my post.

Moving Mountains - 愚公移山

A few weeks ago, I made fun of myself for being an NPR Nerd (or an NPaRsehole as my friend, Andy, put it) and constantly using NPR stories in my blog posts. Well, I'm going back to another well I've been frequenting recently and am going to discuss a Peter Hessler quote on here again.

I really enjoyed Country Driving. Different from Hessler's other books. Still is excellent. Impeccably written. I may try to formally review it at some point.

There's a section of the book I liked that reminded me of an ancient fable I learned while studying Chinese when I was back in Xi'an.

I'm first going to present Hessler's piece and then the fable it reminded me of.

From Country Driving, on pages 304 and 305:

At Lishui, the exit led straight to the city's Economic Development Zone. After the peacefulness of the new expressway, it was a shock to enter the half-built industrial park, where most roads had yet to be paved. Earth movers and bulldozers worked around the clock, and rugged farmland surrounded the zone on all sides, a reminder of how this place had looked until recently. The scale of the construction project was impressive - nearly six square miles. The director of the economic zone, a man name Wang Lijiong, told me that in order to prepare for the factories they had leveled exactly one hundred and eight mountains and hills.

...

Every time I met an official, I scrambled to write down the numbers, and then in the evening I'd look at my notebook and wonder if they could possibly be true. But Director Wang Lijong's remark about moving one hundred and eight mountains made me stop scribbling. I asked the man to explain what he meant.

"Pretend that this is a mountain," he said, pointing at a spot on the table between us. He moved his finger a few inches over. "This is another mountain. Between them there's a valley. So we take the tops off the two mountains, and we fill in the valley. We lower the high parts and raise the low parts, and we make it as flat as possible."

"He ran his hand along the table - perfectly flat. He continued: "There's a saying here in Lishui. 'For every nine acres of mountains, there's half an acre of water and half an acre of farmland.' With such a small percentage of good land, we had no choice but to move the mountains."

And here is the fable this passage reminded me of. First, in Chinese and then my (attempt at a) translation:

愚公移山

很久很久以前，有一个叫愚公的老人，他家的门前有两座大山，一座叫太行山，一座叫王屋山。这两座大山挡住了他家的路，无论去哪儿，都必须翻过这两座大山，出门很不方便。

于是愚公决定带领全家人搬走这两座大山，那一年他已经九十多岁了。一天，他把全家人召集到一起，说：“我想和你们一起搬走门前的两座大山，你们同意吗？” 全家人无论是儿子还是孩子都表示同意。可是愚公的妻子却说：“你已经这么老了，连石头都搬不动，怎么可能搬走那么大的两座山呢？再说，那么多的土和石头放到哪儿呢？” 是啊，这真是个问题， 大家商量了半天，决定把土和石头运到渤海去。

第二天，愚公就带着全家人开始挖山，不管是男人还是女人，都去挖土搬石， 连七八岁的小孩子也去帮忙。他们把土和石油运到大海，往返一次，要一年的时间。但是他们还是不停地挖呀运呀。不管是春，夏，秋，冬，全家人一天也没休息过。

有一个叫智叟的老人看到他们这么干，觉得太可笑了，就对愚公说：“你可太笨了，您这么大年纪了，连山上的树都砍不动，这么可能搬走大山呢？” 愚公说：“不是我太笨了，是您太没理想了，还是如女人和孩子呢。我死了，我的儿子会继续挖；我儿子死了，孙子会继续挖；子子孙孙会永远延续下去。山虽然很高，可是却不可能再长高了，只要我们坚持下去，就一定能把山搬走。”

愚公一家不停地挖山。两座大山的山神害怕极了，他们到天上把这件事告诉了玉帝。玉帝被愚公一家人的精神感动了，就派了两个神仙把两座大山背走了。

这个古老的故事，教育着一代又一代的中国人：不管多么难的事，只要坚持，坚持，再坚持，就能成功。不过现在却有人认为愚公太笨：他为什么不搬家？搬家不是比搬山容易多了吗？还有人认为愚公是最早的破坏环境的人。你认为呢？你对这个古老的故事有什么看法？


The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains

A long, long time ago, there was an old man named Yu Gong. There were two tall mountains just in front of his family's home. One mountain was called, Taihang Mountain, and the other, Wangwu Mountain. The mountains blocked the road near the family's house. Whenever the family wanted to go anywhere, they had to traverse the mountains. Going anywhere was so inconvenient.

Because of the trouble that the mountains had caused his family, Yu Gong, a ninety year-old, decided to move the mountains. One day, he asked every family member to come together. He said: "With all of you, I want to move these two mountains, do you all agree to this?" All of Yu Gong's children and grandchildren agreed to this idea. But Yu Gong's wife said: "You are already so old. You can't even pick up a rock. How are you going to move two huge mountains? What's more, where would we put the dirt and rocks if we did move these mountains?" Yes, this was a serious question. Everyone discussed the problem for a long period of time. They decided that they should put the earth from the mountains in the Bo Sea.

On the second day, Yu Gong led everybody to start digging. Both men and women dug. Even seven and eight year-olds helped out. Everyone carried the earth with them to the Bo Sea. One round-trip to the sea took one year. Despite the difficulties, the family didn't stop. They went in spring, summer, fall, and winter never taking a rest.

A wise old man named Zhi Sou saw the family working one day. He thought they were so silly. He said to Yu Gong: "You are so stupid and old. You can't even chop down a tree. How can you move a mountain?" Yu Gong responded: "It's not that I'm dumb. It's that you don't have any ambition. You're no more capable than a woman or a small child. When I die, my children will keep digging. When my children die, my grandchildren will continue digging. Generation after generation can forever continue. Although the mountain is tall, it won't grow any taller. We just have to continue to work and one day the mountain will be gone."

Yu Gong's family continued to dig up the mountain. The two mountains' spirits both began to worry. In heaven, the spirits told Yu Di (the supreme deity of Daoism) about what was happening. Yu Di was moved by the persistence of Yu Gong's family. Yu Di then asked two spirits to come down to earth and move the two mountains.

This ancient story has taught generation after generation of Chinese people the following: no matter what difficulties you face, persist, persist, and persist and you will succeed. However, some young people today think that Yu Gong was an idiot: Why wouldn't Yu Gong just move his family? Isn't it easier to move one's house? Some people even believe that Yu Gong was a pioneer in destroying the environment. What do you think? What's your opinion of this story?

This story is in the second volume of my Chinese text book - 发展汉语.

Looking back on this fable (I haven't thought about it in some time), it doesn't exactly apply to Hessler's experience in Zhejiang Province. There might be a little bit of a connection. I don't know.

Just talking with about this story with Qian, she says that the 愚公移山 fable is a very traditional one that every Chinese person knows. She also says that it, in some ways, captures a spirit of Chinese society that goes back generations.

As the fable asks, what's your opinion of this story? Does it at all apply to the economic development that Hessler saw in present-day China?

Studying Mandarin

China's Confucius Centers across the globe are making it much easier to study Mandarin.

From The Associated Press:

Image from Chinese-tools.com

TAMPA, Fla. — In a small room at the University of South Florida, Maya Ueda and two classmates prepare for a Mandarin exam. A pot of green tea idles nearby and Chinese folk instruments, games and movies fill the cabinets and bookcases.

Although the students are doing their work at a state school on Florida's Gulf Coast, the center they are studying in is part of a global outreach by the government of China called the Confucius Institute. The cultural and language centers have sprung up around the world, hosted at universities eager to boost their Mandarin offerings as China's economic influence grows.

...

China observers see the Confucius Institutes as part of the nation's efforts to reshape its image from that of a threatening superpower. Such displays of "soft power" are hardly new, though analysts say the Confucius Institutes are unique in the close relationships they establish with universities.

Read On

One of the first Confucius Centers in the United States was at the University of Kansas, near where I grew up. Qian has asked about teaching at the school, but there are only subbing opportunities available since their full time teachers are all on exchange programs from China (ie. they don't hire locals). This is unfortunate since Qian would be a great asset to the Confucius Center.

Qian put an ad on the internet a few weeks ago for tutoring Chinese. The ad has worked pretty well. She has three students - two adults and a young girl - already. None of them have any experience with studying Chinese. Qian has been really impressed with the talent of the students though. They're all doing pretty well with the language.

A fellow China blogger just wrote a really long and in-depth analysis of studying Chinese. The title of Ben's post - Journey Across the Great Hump: Debunking the Myth that Chinese is the World's Toughest Language.

Ben grew up about five minutes from me here in the suburbs of Kansas City. Although I've never met him in person, I think it's interesting how we both ended up going from Kansas to China and falling in love with the place.

I'm really impressed with Ben's studying of Chinese. He's currently acting as a translator in Chicago. He seems to have taken a similar path as Peter Hessler did in Rivertown - a book I highly recommend to anyone interested in China. Both Hessler and Ben attacked Mandarin and learned it very quickly.

Unfortunately, I did not learn the language as quickly as Ben did. I was too intimidated when I first started and was more interested in learning "survival Chinese" than really perfecting what I was doing. This lack of time and effort in the beginning made my Chinese path much more arduous than Ben's. Whereas he got to a very high level in about two years, I'm still at a more intermediate level after studying for about two years. I regret that I didn't tackle the language more head on when I first got to China (I really wasted my first year linguistically in China thinking I was only going to stay for a year and then come back to the States... I ended up staying for three and a half years).

There's nothing I can do about how I learned Chinese now though. So I'm just trying to do the best I can after my rocky beginning. Although I've left China (for the time being), I'm continuing to use my Supermemo study method and am trying to use Chinese as much as possible on a daily basis with Qian.

I'm not sure I can say that I've cleanly crossed Ben's "Great Hump," but I'm relatively happy with my level. I've crossed many personal "humps." The way I'd put where my level is is that I can have fun with Chinese now. I can chat fairly easily in one-on-one conversations. I still get tripped up from time to time, but I can tackle a wide array of issues and topics. I can't understand a lot of what goes on on TV and am not ready to be a translator, but I'm having, and have had over the past year, a lot of fun. And since starting studying Chinese more seriously about two years ago or so, that's been my goal.

The Story of Zhang Liang Picking Up the Shoes

I was talking about the role of Confucianism in contemporary Chinese society with a colleague of mine today. This, honestly, isn't something I can say much about. I haven't read much of Confucius' works and am only vaguely aware of Confucianism's principles.

But in thinking about Confucianism, a story I read the other day popped into my mind. Recently, I've been studying Chinese a lot better than before. I'm not sure why I'm more motivated now (on the cusp of leaving China in a few months), but I am and am trying to ride it for whatever it is worth.

In particular, I'm reviewing a lot of chapters and passages I studied a long time ago. I can't emphasize how important this is when it comes to studying Chinese.

A couple days ago, I reread the story of Zhang Liang. It is in chapter two of my second book. I just finished chapter twenty-seven of that second book last month. So the story is something I read for the first time a long time ago. In fact, it's been at least a year since I'd looked at it.

The Story of Zhang Liang Picking Up the Shoes is probably my favorite passage of anything I've ever read in Chinese. I remember after I finished it the first time, I just thought to myself: "Whoa..."

I just typed up the story and am going to quickly translate it as well:

张良捡鞋的故事

中国古代有一个名人，叫张良。关于他的故事很多，下面是他小时候的故事。

张良家附近有一座桥，有一天，张良刚走上那座桥就看见一位白胡子老人从对面走来。那位老人看见张良就脱下自己的鞋仍到桥下，然后对张良说：“孩子，下去替我捡回来！” 张良看了看桥下的鞋，又看了看老人，马上跑到桥下去帮助他捡鞋。可是，张良刚把鞋交给老人，老人又把鞋仍到桥下去了，“孩子，再下去替我捡回来！” 张良又吃惊又生气，但是因为对方是位老人，没办法，就又到桥下去捡那只鞋。张良刚要把鞋交给那位老人，老人却抬起脚说：“孩子，给我穿上！” 张良虽然很生气，但还是蹲下来，给老人穿上了鞋。鞋穿好了，老人谢也不谢，站起来就走。张良说：“真是一位奇怪的老人。“

老人走了几步，突然又回来了，对张良说：”你真是个好孩子。后天早晨，你到着座桥上来，我要给你一件重要的东西。“

第三天早晨，张良来到那座桥上的时候，老人已经在桥上等着他了。老人不满意地对张良说：”跟老人约定了时间，怎么能迟到呢？你回去吧，后天早一点到这里来！“

两天以后，张良很早就来到那座桥上，他想：”今天肯定不会迟到了。“ 可是，当他到那儿的时候，老人又在桥上等着他了。老人生气的说：你怎么又迟到了？回去吧，后天早一点到这里来！“ 说完又生气的走了。

又过了两天，天还没亮，张良就到桥上去了。他在桥上等着老人。天渐渐亮了，老人还没来，他又等了很长时间，才看见那位老人从远处慢慢地走来。老人满意地对张良说：”孩子，你就是我要找到的人。“ 他拿出一本书交给了张良，”这是一本兵法书，你要刻苦学习，以后肯定有用。“

张良刻苦学习那本兵法书，后来真的成了中国历史上有名的政治家，军事家。”

And here is my quick translation of the story:

The Story of Zhang Liang Picking Up the Shoes

Ancient China has a famous person named Zhang Liang. There are many stories about him. The following is a story from his childhood.

There was a bridge near Zhang Liang's house. One day, after Zhang Liang went to the bridge he saw an old man with a white beard walk towards him. When this old man saw Zhang Liang, he threw his shoe under the bridge. The old man then said to Zhang Liang: "Young child, go pick up my shoe from under the bridge for me!" Zhang Liang looked under the bridge, looked at the old man, and then quickly ran down to help the old man pick up the shoe. But right after Zhang Liang had given the shoe to the old man on top of the bridge, he again threw the shoe under the bridge. "Young child, go pick up my shoe from under the bridge for me again!"

Zhang Liang was both surprised and angry. But because the other person was an old person there was nothing he could do. He went under the bridge to go pick up the shoe. Right after Zhang Liang gave the old man his shoe, the old man lifted up his foot and said: "Young child, put it on my foot!" Although Zhang Liang was very angry, he stooped down and put the shoe on the man. After the shoe was on the old man's foot, the old man stood up without saying "thank you" and began walking away. Zhang Liang thought: "This is some weird old man."

After the old man had walked a few steps, he suddenly walked back towards Zhang Liang and said to him: "You are a really good kid. In the early morning of the day after tomorrow, come back to this bridge. I want to give you an important thing."

The third day early in the morning, Zhang Liang came back to atop the bridge. The old man was already there waiting for him. The old man angrily said to Zhang Liang: "How can you be late to a meeting with an old person? Go away. Come back earlier in the morning the day after tomorrow!"

Two days later, Zhang Liang went back to the bridge really early in the morning. He thought: "Today, I definitely won't be late." But when he got to the bridge, the old man was there waiting for him. The old man angrily said to Zhang Liang: "How are you late again? Go away. Come back earlier in the morning the day after tomorrow." The old man then angrily walked away.

Two more days passed. On this morning Zhang Liang went to the bridge before there was morning light. He waited for the old man on the bridge. The day slowly came. The old man didn't come. Zhang Liang waited a long time. But then he finally saw the old man slowly walking towards the bridge from far away. The old man happily said to the boy on the bridge: "Young child, you are the kind of person I want to find."

The old man then took out a book and gave it to Zhang Liang. "This book is The Art of War. If you study it very carefully, you will one day be a very useful person."

Zhang Liang studied The Art of War very hard. He later in life became a very famous politician and war strategist.

I'm exhausted from typing and translating this. I can't really write my thoughts on it right now. I'll just leave this post with this: To me, this story does a wonderful job of highlighting the mystery and mystique that is China and has so much stereotypical "Chinese thought" in it.

Do you have any opinions on the story?

Microsoft's Sickness

Microsoft just launched a new search engine: Bing.

The engine is already causing headaches for Microsoft in China. There aren't any problems about lewd pictures or politically-insensitive content. No, "Bing" is just a stupid name for a Chinese website.

From The Wall St. Journal:

After a brief hiatus last week, software giant Microsoft’s Bing search engine is back online in China.

Microsoft launched a Chinese version of Bing on June 1 at cn.bing.com, marking the first time the company has offered a Web product specifically targeted at the 298 million Web users in mainland China. But unlike its American counterpart (and like many of the other international versions of Bing), Chinese Bing is still a bit of a shell at this point, without all of the handy features that are available on the U.S. search engine.

And in China, Microsoft prefers not to call it “bing,” since that sound can have several meanings in Mandarin, depending on the tone and character associated with it. For example, this word: 病. Pronounced bing (fourth tone), it means “sickness” or “to be ill,” something most people would prefer to avoid. Other “bings” mean ice, soldier and pancake.

The Chinese version has thus been named “biying” (必应) which means “must respond/answer” and which Microsoft is marketing it as a“decision engine”– something that will provide information to assist Internet users with their decision-making processes.

Read On

This is a pretty funny scenario. It reminds me a lot of the classic example of the Chevy Nova trying to be sold in Latin America. In that case, "no va" loosely means can't go. The story I remember is that this naming-flub doomed the car's sales in Spanish-speaking countries.

It turns out that this Nova situation isn't completely true though. I just did a Google search on it and found this article from About.com:

Chances are you've heard about how Chevrolet had problems marketing the Chevy Nova automobile in Latin America. Since no va means "it doesn't go" in Spanish, the oft-repeated story goes, Latin American car buyers shunned the car, forcing Chevrolet to embarrassedly pull the car out of the market.

Chevrolet's woes are often cited as an example of how good intentions can go wrong when it comes to translation. There are literally thousands of references to the incident on the Internet, and the Nova example has been mentioned in textbooks and often comes up during presentations on cultural differences and advertising.

But there's one major problem with the story: it never happened. As a matter of fact, Chevrolet did reasonably well with the Nova in Latin America, even exceeding its sales projections in Venezuela. The story of the Chevy Nova is a classic example of an urban legend, a story that is told and retold so often that it is believed to be true even though it isn't. Like most other urban legends, there is some element of truth in the story (no va indeed means "it doesn't go"), enough truth to keep the story alive. And, like many urban legends, the story has the appeal of showing how the high and mighty can by humiliated by stupid mistakes.

Read On

So maybe the Chevy Nova in Latin America isn't completely analagous here. But it is in the same ballpark.

I'm not sure what Chinese people are going to think of the change from "Bing" to "Biying." The web address is still going to be cn.bing.com, so it's not as if people will be typing "Biying." I could see confusion or mocking of Microsoft over this name.

The Wall St. Journal article also goes on to discuss some other problems with the site. Again, it's not being threatened by the Great Firewall or anything. It's just that it's not a very good site or search engine. And the search market on the Chinese internet is already firmly established. So an inferior product just isn't going to cut it.

I don't really feel sorry for Microsoft blowing a big opportunity here. I haven't been a fan of the company for some time now. I bought a Mac Book a couple years ago and would never consider buying a PC again. Apple OS X is so much better than Windows, in my opinion. In addition to operating systems, Microsoft has also fallen behind with its search (MSN and Bing), its web browser (Internet Explorer), and its email (Hotmail).

Office is still pretty good though. I'll give Microsoft that.

Maybe one day 必应 will be big in China. I doubt it though. It's probably going to, instead, be another symptom of Microsoft's 病.

Teacher Ma's Last Class

Today was a sad day for me. The Chinese teacher I've had for the past two years and I had our last class. 马老师 (Teacher Ma) is going to South Korea later this week to work and to live with her boyfriend. She will be back in Xi'an in a few months, but I'm most likely going to be back in America at that time. Regardless, we had our last tutoring session today.

I began having class with Teach Ma in the Spring of 2007. I met her at a school in Xi'an that specializes in teaching foreigners Chinese (the school is particularly popular with Xi'an's buzzing missionary community). I enjoyed her classes a lot, but the school was way too expensive. The missionary aspect of the place also weirded me out a bit. I told her that I wanted to continue having classes with her, but outside of that school. She told me that such an arrangement was against the rules of her contract, but that she'd be quitting the school in a few months. So after I visited America in the summer of '07 and got back to Xi'an that fall, we began meeting again.

Teacher Ma and I met for one-on-one lessons four hours a week for the better part of the past two years. Over these two years, I went from being a really shoddy beginner to the lower-intermediate speaker I am now. We went through the first two books of 发展汉语, the books from the Beijing University Press that Shaanxi Normal University uses to teach foreigners Chinese, and had begun a third intermediate book. We definitely didn't move at a break-neck pace - it took me two years to study what university students study in a year - but we moved at the right pace for me considering that I've been working a job thirty hours a week in addition to studying Chinese during this time period.

Over the two years, we discussed tons of things outside of the books.

One of the things I was able to do was pick Teacher Ma's brain on questions regarding Chinese politics and history that I didn't feel comfortable asking most Chinese people. Teacher Ma is from Urumqi in China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region in the far west. She's half Uighur, half Han. Hearing her unique perspective on China's development, its history, and its future has been fascinating (and has surely contributed to this blog in many ways).

It's also been helpful for me to have a female Chinese teacher for the simple fact that it's helped me understand my own Chinese girlfriend better. Qian and I have always had a generally smooth relationship, but when there were any rough patches or questions regarding what we're doing, Teacher Ma, who is our age, was able to help me understand the psyche of a twenty-something year-old Chinese woman a great deal.

I've said before that having a Chinese girlfriend doesn't necessarily help one's Chinese. Qian's English is so good that we hardly ever speak Chinese. It's just not worth the effort when English is there for us to use. We're speaking Chinese more often, but still no more than 15% of our total conversation. Having a Chinese girlfriend also acts as a crutch when we're out on the town and Qian can just do all the talking for us. Indeed, having a Chinese girlfriend who speaks English can actually hinder one's Chinese ability.

Having Teacher Ma, who speaks very little English, has been so important for me. All the conversations that we've had have been in Chinese. Our two-hour-at-a-time lessons are probably 99% Chinese, with English only being used a word or two at a time to clarify new words or complex grammar structures. Not being able to revert back to English with Teacher Ma has been so important. I've truly needed someone in my life to force me to use Chinese.

My Chinese is not the best. My tones aren't very good and I don't spend enough time studying outside of the four hours a week we have class to really boost myself into a more fluent level of Chinese. But I'm at a very "conversational level" of Chinese. I can chat with Chinese people about all kinds of different topics, particularly in a one-on-one setting. This ability is most certainly due to the fact that I've been engaged in lessons with Teacher Ma over these past couple years.

I've joked with Teacher Ma before that my Chinese may not be the best advertisement for her teaching abilities, but there's no doubt that she's been a very special teacher. Our classes in Shaanxi Normal University's garden and/or cafeteria have been well worth the small amount of money per hour I paid her.

Assuming that I don't see Teacher Ma after she comes back from Korea later this year, I'm not sure when the next time I'll see her will be. No matter when that is, she and the time we spent together using Chinese over the past couple years are always going to hold a special place in my heart.

Foreigners Still Not Studying Mandarin

Living in China, it seems to me like there are foreigners everywhere studying Chinese. It turns out that there are a lot here doing so, but not so many outside of China.

From Reuters:

Photo from Reuters

BEIJING (Reuters) - There has been a big rise in the number of foreigners learning Chinese, but still too few are studying the language, officials said on Thursday, worried this may affect efforts to soften China's global image.

China began setting up Confucius Institutes in 2004 to teach Chinese and they are now in 81 countries, but efforts to expand them are being hampered by too few teachers and poor teaching materials.

"At present, the basis for the studying or teaching of Chinese is very weak, unlike for English, French or Spanish, which have been popularized for hundreds of years," said Xu Lin, director of the Confucius Institute Headquarters.

Xu, speaking to reporters on the sidelines of China's annual meeting of parliament, said that in the United States more students studied Latin at middle school than Chinese.

"Though the desire to learn Chinese is very high, there is a lack of teachers and teaching materials," she added, referring specifically to the Confucius Institute.

Read On

The fact that Latin, a dead (although in its own way very useful) language, is more popular than Chinese says a lot about how far Chinese has to go.

I believe Westerners believe studying Chinese is simply too hard. I know when I first came to China, I thought it would be impossible for me to ever really learn the language. Therefore, I put very little effort into my studies.

After being here for about six months, I realized that the language was not beyond my reach and began studying in earnest.

I've been studying Chinese for about two years. It is very difficult. I'm still not "fluent" by any means. I'm "conversational," but still run into trouble every day with my language skills. If I'd been studying Spanish and living in Spain for two years, I have little doubt that I'd be very "fluent" and would be at a much higher level than where I am with Chinese.

This difficulty level surely hurts Chinese when it comes to attracting interested students.

Saying that, there are a number of ways to study Chinese other than formally attending classes or going to the Confucius Institutes.

One method, chinesepod.com, has really taken off. From The Financial Times (h/t Peking Duck):

Ken Carroll is challenging a basic tenet in the global economy: that we all need to learn Mandarin Chinese to conquer the world’s largest market – but that learning Chinese is boring. Mr Carroll, a Shanghai-based language teacher turned internet entrepreneur, says that does not have to be so: he has pioneered a painless podcast method for learning Mandarin, and nearly a quarter of a million people worldwide are using it on chinesepod.com, which sends daily Man­darin lessons to iPods and Google phones around the world.

Chinesepod revenues have defied the global economic downturn, too, rising 250 per cent from December 2007 to the same month last year and climbing strongly again in January, according to the company. Study without suffering may sound too good to be true, but there seem to be plenty of people willing to listen to this particular siren song, especially now that more professionals are taking enforced vacations from the workforce, giving them time to learn new skills such as languages.

Investment analysts think education in China could even prove to be a recession-proof business. Bejing’s National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language says 40m foreigners studied Mandarin last year. Chinesepod is riding that wave: with China’s economy expected to grow by 8 per cent this year – compared with a flat global economy – learning Chinese has rapidly begun to look like a clever investment.

Read On

Chinesepod is very popular amongst foreigners living in China. I've heard a number of friends talk about their experiences using the site.

I believe Chinesepod's popularity shows just how much more popular studying Chinese is with business people or people living abroad compared to younger students living outside of China. Older people who don't have the time to formally study a language yet realize that learning Chinese is going to get them ahead are turning to means such as Chinesepod.

Personally, I don't use Chinesepod. I know I should. I have four hours of one-on-one lessons a week instead. It'd be great if I had the motivation to sit down and listen or study on the Chinesepod.com site a little bit every day, but I don't. When I eventually do come back to America, it'd probably be a good idea for me to get into Chinesepod.

That, and speaking more Chinese with Jackie. I still stand by the fact that having a Chinese significant other who speaks great English isn't much help with studying Chinese. It is just too easy for us to revert back to English. Jackie and I just don't speak Chinese with each other very well.

I'm hopeful that Jackie and I can speak more Chinese once we leave China though. I think it'll be a lot of fun speaking Chinese with Jackie in America when other people will have no idea what we're talking about. It'll be like our code language where we can say whatvever we want when we don't want others to understand.

From the strikingly low numbers of people studying Chinese abroad, I don't think we'll have too much trouble with people understanding what we're saying if we do resort to using Chinese as code language in the US.

Mandarin Taking Over the States

Seeing that I'm an American who's put a decent amount of effort into learning how to speak Mandarin Chinese, I like reading this news.

From The Boston Globe:

The little boy answered the teacher's question in perfect Cantonese, which until recently would have earned him praise at the Kwong Kow Chinese School in Boston's Chinatown.

But the teacher shook her head.

"No," said Catherine Lui, peering at the boy over her eyeglasses as he stared up at her from the front row. "You have to use Mandarin."

Say hello - or better yet, ni hao - to Chinatown's rapidly expanding language, Mandarin. The official language of mainland China is sweeping into Cantonese-speaking enclaves across the United States, the result of increased immigration from across China and an urgent push by parents to teach children the language of one of the world's most powerful nations.

China's growing global clout, already inspiring suburban parents of varying backgrounds to enroll their children in Mandarin classes, is now looming large over tiny Chinatown, where 9,000 people are squeezed into a bustling neighborhood of shops, red-brick tenements, and narrow, winding streets. Mandarin is being heard everywhere, on subway platforms, under the blow dryers at hair salons, and at the 93-year-old Kwong Kow School.

Read On

This transition from Cantonese to Mandarin was inevitable. There just aren't that many people who speak Cantonese compared to Mandarin. As you can see on this map, only people in the magenta part of China speak Cantonese:


Historically, a very large portion of Chinese emigrants to America came from southern China and the Hong Kong area. Wikipedia has a good explanation as to why this was the case:

Chinese people were some of the early immigrants to live in the U.S., but then were banned from emigrating between 1885 and 1943 - when the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed. Immigration of Chinese was heavily restricted until 1965. During the 1970s, the vast majority of ethnic Chinese immigration into the United States was from Hong Kong and followed by Taiwan with relatively few immigrants coming from mainland China, which almost completely banned emigration for most of the 1960s. During the 1980s, in part due to the liberalization of emigration restrictions in the mid-1970s, immigration from the mainland China became a larger fraction of ethnic Chinese immigration into the United States.

But now that China's economy is growing and mainland China has liberalized, the demographic of Chinese Americans is changing. More and more Chinese Americans will be speaking Mandarin instead of Cantonese in the future.

As Peter Kiang, the director of the Asian American Studies Program at UMass-Boston, said in the article:

"Everyone just realizes that Mandarin is the language of the 21st century," he said.

It makes me feel better that my study of Mandarin has the chance of being useful in America as well as in China. Now I just have to get my Chinese more fluent so I can chat with any Chinese person I encounter. Unfortunately, that's easier said than done.

Clinton Throwing Around Chinese Idioms

During her trip to China this week, Hillary Clinton took on the daunting task of using four character Chinese idioms.

From McClatchy Newspapers:

Here's a lesson on when to use Chinese proverbs and who to use them with.

Short answer: It's probably best for Westerners not to try to out-proverb the Chinese, especially when speaking with Premier Wen Jiabao.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has just passed through China, and she displayed a propensity to throw Chinese proverbs into her public statements, exclaiming at one point: "I love Chinese proverbs!"

She tossed out her first Chinese proverb before even departing on her weeklong trip, and in some ways it was apt.

In a speech on U.S.-China relations to the Asia Society on Feb. 13 in New York, Clinton used the aphorism "tongchuan gongji," which means roughly "when on a common boat, cross the river peacefully together." The proverb was made famous in "The Art of War," the book by the ancient philosopher and military strategist Sun Tzu. Most listeners probably got the gist of what Clinton was seeking to say: The United States and China have common problems and should work together.

Like most Chinese proverbs, this one contains four characters (and four syllables) but is loaded with historical and literal meaning.

Read On

The article goes on to show that while Clinton was making her points with the idioms, the phrases she used usually had double entendres which didn't help her case or was immediately out-proverbed by Premier Wen.

Studying four character Chinese idioms is something I have a bit of experience with. Using Chinese idioms is a very important step in learning Chinese. One's proficiency in Chinese is directly linked with one's ability to use idioms.

Here is a nice write-up on Chinese idioms from Chinese-tools.com:

Four-character idioms, or chéngyǔ (Traditional Chinese: 成語; Simplified Chinese: 成语, literally "to become (part of) the language") are widely used in Classical Chinese, a literary form used in the Chinese written language from antiquity until 1919, and are still commonly used in Vernacular writing today. Classical Chinese can be compared to the way Latin was used in the Western world in science until recently. According to the most stringent definition, there are about 5,000 chengyu in Chinese, though some dictionaries list over 20,000.

Chengyu are mostly derived from ancient literature. The meaning of a chengyu usually surpasses the sum of the meanings carried by the four characters, as chengyu are often intimately linked with the myth, story or historical fact from which they were derived. As such, chengyu do not follow the usual grammatical structure and syntax of the modern Chinese spoken language, and are instead highly compact and synthetic.

Chengyu in isolation are often unintelligible to modern Chinese, and when students in China learn chengyu in school as part of the Classical curriculum, they also need to study the context from which the chengyu was born. Often the four characters reflect the moral behind the story rather than the story itself. For example, the phrase "破釜沉舟" (pinyin: pò fǔ chén zhōu) literally means "break the woks and sink the boats." It was based on a historical account where General Xiang Yu ordered his troop to destroy all cooking utensils and boats after crossing a river into the enemy's territory. He won the battle because of this "no-retreat" policy. The phrase is used when one succeeds by burning the bridge. This particular idiom cannot be used in a losing scenario because the story behind it does not describe a failure.

Read On

When it comes to using idioms, my lack of proficiency in Chinese really shows. I can maybe use about ten in daily conversation. Off the top of my head, here are a few of the ones I could come up with:

入乡随俗 - (ru xiang sui su) - "When in Rome, do as the Romans." - The word "Rome" is not in this idiom. Literally, the idiom reads something like, "When entering a village, follow their customs."

- 重色轻友 - (zhong se qing you) - "Lover is more important than friends." - I suppose this is the exact opposite of the English idiom, "Bros before hos."

- 张三李四 - (zhang san li si) - "Any Tom, Dick, or Harry" - This idiom is funny to me. Literally it reads, "Zhang three, Li four." The idea behind this idiom is that Zhang and Li are probably the two most popular sur names is China.

- 马马虎虎 - (ma ma hu hu) - "Alright" or "OK" - The literal translation of this one is pretty awesome - "horse horse tiger tiger." This one is really easy to use in daily conversation.

- 人山人海 - (ren shan ren hai) - "A large crowd" - This one literally reads "People mountain, people sea." An interesting way to say, "China is way too crowded."

- 人生如寄 - (ren sheng ru ji) - "Life is short" - I don't really understand the logic behind how these characters mean this statement. Just have memorized it.

- 无处可去 - (wu chu ke qu) - "No place to go" - I like how this one sounds. The phrase is very logical to me too.

I'm near certain that my Chinese will never get to the point where I'll actually be able to throw around Chinese idioms with any sort of regularity or skill. The ability to use idioms really is vital to being a Chinese speaker. I'm not going to get too caught up in the difficulty of using Chinese idioms though, I'll still be able to make strides in Chinese. Just won't ever be the next Da Shan or anything.

Other than Clinton's attempted usage of Chinese idioms, I vaguely kept up with her trip to China. It sounds as if the confident and rather blunt Clinton accomplished what she went to China to do. Pragmatism and keeping China on board with funding the United States' ever-increasing debt and spending certainly was the focus.

New Senator Showing Off Her Mandarin

Hillary Clinton's replacement in the senate is getting off on the right foot in connecting with the hordes of Chinese in New York City.

From The New York Times:

She had them at “Ni hao ma.”

When Senator Kirsten E. Gillebrand grabbed the microphone at the Lunar New Year parade in Chinatown two weeks ago, she blurted, “Ni hao ma, zenma yang?” in Mandarin, or “Hello, how’s it going?” Later that day, after wrapping up a meeting with local leaders at a senior center, she walked by a few card tables and said, “Hao bu hao?” or “Are you doing O.K.?”

It is customary for politicians eager to connect with ethnic voters to butcher a few words in Spanish, Chinese or other foreign tongues. But Ms. Gillibrand is no ordinary politician when it comes to linguistic and cultural comfort: as an Asian studies major at Dartmouth, she studied for six months in China and Taiwan, becoming proficient enough to absorb stories in Chinese newspapers, and later spent four months in Hong Kong as a corporate lawyer.

Ms. Gillibrand’s Chinese is rusty now. But she tells her 5-year-old son, “Man man yi diar,” or “Slow down a little,” and calls chopsticks “kuaizi,” out of habit. And she can still converse for a few minutes, as evidenced when a reporter from a New York City-based Chinese-language newspaper trying to learn her Chinese name unexpectedly found an enthusiastic Ms. Gillibrand on the line.

“She definitely understood what I was saying, and she had good pronunciation,” said the reporter, Yan Tai, who writes for The World Journal. “Actually, I was very impressed.”

Read On

As this article alludes to, if you are a foreigner and have made any effort towards learning Chinese, Chinese people are easily impressed. Chinese people realize that their language is hard for foreigners to get into. Most Chinese people are quite enthusiastic and supportive of foreigners who try to speak even a little.

While she knows a bit, it doesn't sound like Senator Gillebrand's level is too high. There's another world politician who's definitely got her beat: Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Here is a video of Rudd blingin' his Chinese on China's biggest TV night of the year, CCTV's New Year's Eve Gala:



When talking about foreigners who've can speak good Chinese, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Da Shan.



Don't recognize this guy? Nobody outside of China does. But in China, he's a mega-celebrity.

Da Shan, aka Mark Henry Rowswell, made a name for himself while studying Chinese in Beijing during the 1980s. The Canadian is famous for his Chinese because it is "better than Chinese peoples'."

He speaks all kinds of dialects and can perform the traditional Chinese dialog performing art xiangsheng (相声), which a friend told me "takes some serious Chinese skills." I've seen xiangsheng a few times. I can understand parts of it occasionally. It is loosely translated to English as "crosstalk." Da Shan said the closest thing to xiangsheng in English is the "Who's on First?" bit by Abbot and Costello.

Here is a video of his xiangsheng performance at this year's CCTV Spring Festival Gala:



From what I've heard other foreigners say about Da Shan in my three years in China, it sounds like most hate the guy. I'm not quite sure why. Sure, he's cheesy. But I, personally, admire his Chinese greatly. He's got some serious skills.

Seeing Rudd, Da Shan, and to a lesser extend Gillebrand, I'm encouraged to keep studying Chinese. It is good to know that if the effort is put in, the language can be learned. It is also good motivation to know that if my Chinese can continue to improve, it could open doors for me down the road.

Second-Hand Smoke, Warmth, and Chatting with the (Soon-to-be) Inlaws

China's Spring Festival is a time of gift giving. And possibly the most popular gifts of the season are cartons of cigarettes.

From Xinhua News Services:

BEIJING, Jan. 30 (Xinhua) -- Despite knowing all the harms of smoking, Li Pingping, who lives in Shanghai, still decided to buy two cartons of cigarettes as presents for her father back in southwest China's Chongqing.

"When you pick up gifts for the elders during festivals or anniversaries, cigarettes are a nice choice," she said.

Li will take the cigarettes with her on the three-hour-flight to her hometown Chongqing Municipality.

It's Chinese tradition to give cigarettes when meeting new friends or visiting relatives, either to show friendliness or respect.

But the tradition has long stood in the way of the government's and anti-smoking organization's efforts to discourage smoking.

Xu Guihua, deputy director of Chinese Association on Tobacco Control (CATC), said "the lack of understanding and support" has made their job difficult.

Read On

I'm proud to say that I was part of the "problem" this year; Jackie and I gave two cartons of red Hao Mao (translated to "good cat") cigarettes to her dad on Chinese New Year's Eve.

The purchase was actually a bit controversial. Jackie and I bought them at a small store which we figured was legit, ie. wouldn't sell us fake cigarettes. Jackie then went home that night and told her dad that we bought red Hao Maos for him for the holiday. He said that the carton should have a date that the cigarettes were made on them. Our carton didn't and we were a bit worried that we'd purchased fake cigarettes.

On New Year's Eve when we gave Jackie's dad the cigarettes, he looked at the box and thought they looked OK.

The real test was in smoking the cigarettes though.

I watched him as he deeply inhaled the relatively expensive cigarettes. He took a few puffs and then said, "可以。是真的。" Or, "They're real."

He then went on to smoke several over the course of the next few hours.

I've been around Jackie's parents and her extended family all week. During this time span, I was probably exposed to more second-hand smoke than my entire life living in the United States. Jackie's dad, cousins, uncles, and paternal grandma chain-smoked cigarettes nearly every minute they weren't feasting on delicious home-made food (which was a rather large percentage of the time spent over the past week).

I'm a non-smoker, but second-hand smoke doesn't bother me that much. I don't think I'd like to live with a smoker who smokes inside (and yes, all Chinese people who smoke do so inside), but it doesn't bother me that much to be around smokers on special occasions.

And this Spring Festival has been a very special occasion. Honestly, the past week has to be up there with one of the best weeks I've had in China since I came here three years ago.

Although this is the second time for me to spend the Chinese New Year with Jackie and her relatives, this is the first year that I've spent the new year with Jackie as her fiance.

The difference between the two years has been stark.

Last year, Jackie's relatives were very friendly and warm towards me. But this year, they've really treated me as a family member. I've felt an amazing amount of love and warmth from them as we prepared and ate food, got a bit tipsy on baijiu, played ma jiang, went to KTV (karakoe), and did all of the other things which Chinese people do during their most important holiday of the year.

The communication between myself and the family surely added a lot to my enjoyment. This is due to me studying very hard over the past year. I still don't claim to be fluent, but I have had far fewer problems chatting with Jackie's family members this year than I did last year. Her dad and I, particularly, can chat with great ease.

One interesting aspect of our chatting is that I was told throughout the week that I've been speaking 河南话, or the dialect from Henan Province.


I live in Shaanxi Province in the middle of the map. Henan is directly east of Shaanxi.

My manager at work is from Henan and he and I speak Chinese quite often. I don't think I picked up the pronunciation from him though. Instead, Jackie said that I use the 4th tone too often when speaking and a lot of the words/sentences I say end up coming out in a Henan dialect.

Although I am studying 普通话 (standard Mandarin Chinese) and should not be happy about my Henan dialect-like pronunciation, I am thrilled to hear that I speak with one. It shows me that my Chinese is to the level where people can understand what I'm saying, even if it comes out as sounding like someone from a different province. To me, being told I sound like someone from Henan implies that I'm speaking with some degree of proficiency.

I'm back at work today and the holiday is largely over for me. Yet I'm sure I'll see Jackie's parents and relatives a time or two more before the Latern Festival in about ten days. The Lantern Festival is the official end of the Chinese New Year.

This past week reminded me a lot of Christmas at home back in America last month. I'm very content that I can have such experiences both in America with my family as well as in China with the people who are soon going to be my extended family.

The Current State of My Chinese Study

Recently, I've been studying Chinese really well. I still feel far from "fluent" and wish I was leaps and bounds better, but I'm not sure I'll ever feel that great about my Chinese.

I'm beginning to realize more and more that, for me, studying Chinese is a lot like playing the guitar: I'll never be satisfied with where I'm at. I'd be lying to myself if I said that I haven't improved (in both guitar and Chinese), but I just feel so far from where I want to ultimately be.

Although frustrating, I'm not sure that having such resistant feelings towards contentment is a bad thing.

I'm 100% committed to SuperMemo. Avid readers of my blog know that I began using the spaced repetition study method this past Spring.

It is simply unbelievable. I don't know where I would be without SuperMemo. Trying to learn Chinese without it seems incomprehensible to me now. I turned my two best friends in Xi'an on to SuperMemo and the three of us are fully committed.

The following photos show just how strong my commitment actually is:





I'm now up to pile "BJ" on my Chinese flashcards. This means that I've already used "A" through "Z", "AA" through "AZ," and have recently gone from "BA" to "BJ."

By my calculation, that means I have 62 piles of flashcards integrated into my SuperMemo study method. I roughly have between 25 and 35 flashcards in each of those piles. So that means I have between 1,550 and 2,170 Chinese flashcards made.

I'd say that all of those are more or less part of my working vocabulary. Theoretically, I should know the pinyin, tones, Chinese characters, and English translation of every card in every one of those piles. Of course I don't know 100% of all these cards at any given time, but I'm getting there.

In addition to being a Chinese flashcard fiend, I'm still using my text book to develop my skills with the language.

Here are some photos from the chapter I covered last week with my teacher:


This is the last page of the previous chapter. At the end of each chapter, there is a passage with tons of new vocabulary. As you can see, there were a number of new words for me here. There are also a few reading comprehension questions to chew on. This is a traditional Chinese folk story about why the moon often looks so sad.


The beginning of Chapter 18. This is an article about the benefits and drawbacks of living in "the era of cards." The "cards" this chapter is referring to are credit cards and things like that. Quite a timely topic for me to be studying these days.


More of the passage and a cheesy dialog between two students studying Chinese in China.


The end of the dialog and the beginning of the "New Words" section. As I go over the words with my Chinese tutor, a graduate student who I spend four hours a week one-on-one with, I make notes about the words and add any new ones that seem useful to me.


The end of the new words and a few notes on some of the words.

The chapter goes on further with some grammar and then exercises, but I'll just end my posting of the chapter here.

Like I said, I'm by no means satisfied with my Chinese. I'm more conversational, yet still trip up quite frequently. My listening, not something that SuperMemo or studying by myself can help, really needs to pick up. And I'm still quite a ways from being able to read a Chinese newspaper.

But despite these frustrations, I'm not discouraged. I'm loving studying Chinese. At this point, I see it as a life-long commitment. I'll keep getting better and I'll keep having fun with it.

I'm finding the whole endeavor to be thoroughly satisfying.

Crisis = Danger + Opportunity

Last week, President-elect Obama's newly appointed chief-of-staff, Rahm Emmanuel, said the following:

"Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste," Emanuel said. "They are opportunities to do big things."

This quote from Emmanuel reminds me of another Democrat from fifty years ago.

On April 12th, 1959 in Indianapolis, then presidential candidate John F. Kennedy said the following:

When written in Chinese, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters - one represents danger and one represents opportunity.

This reference from Kennendy popularized the notion about the unique nature to Chinese's word for "crisis." Al Gore, Condoleeza Rice, and even the Simpsons have all used this idea. In fact, there is even a Wikipedia page entitled - "Chinese translation of crisis" - which gives information surrounding this translation.

Unfortunately, it appears as if this phenomenon is too good to be true.

A detailed debunking (one might say pwnage) of this translation can be found at the website pinyin.info from the Sinologist Victor Maer:

There is a widespread public misperception, particularly among the New Age sector, that the Chinese word for "crisis" is composed of elements that signify "danger" and "opportunity." I first encountered this curious specimen of oriental wisdom about ten years ago at an altitude of 35,000 feet sitting next to an American executive. He was intently studying a bound volume that had adopted this notorious formulation as the basic premise of its method for making increased profits even when the market is falling. At that moment, I didn't have the heart to disappoint my gullible neighbor who was blissfully imbibing what he assumed were the gems of Far Eastern sagacity enshrined within the pages of his workbook. Now, however, the damage from this kind of pseudo-profundity has reached such gross proportions that I feel obliged, as a responsible Sinologist, to take counteraction.

Read On

While my studying of Chinese is not anywhere near to the point of being able to fully understand what Mair is saying, I see his main points.

I know both the characters that make up the word crisis: 危机. I know 危 from the word 危险, which means "danger." And I know 会 from a variety of different phrases and usages: meaning to be able to do a learned thing, meaning something will happen in the future, and the words a "meeting" (开会), a "date" (约会), and "opportunity" (机会).

On the surface, I would say that Kennedy's interpretation of the word 危机 is correct. But I suppose that proves that my Chinese isn't that thorough.

I've asked Chinese people about 危机 before. They all agreed with Maer and said that I shouldn't read too much into this romanticized translation. Even after being shot down a bit from Chinese people, I still thought it was pretty cool.

Upon reading Maer's article though, I will all together drop 危机 from what I considered to be a "pretty interesting insight into Chinese linguistics and, possibly, Chinese people's worldview."

I'm also abandoning the notion I've flirted with for a few years which involved getting a small tattoo of 危机 on my back.

Oh yeah, and Emmanuel's quote from the beginning of the article also is not nearly as romantic as before.

We're all screwed on this economic crisis.

More Americans Studying Abroad in China

Young Americans are seeing China as a good place to spend a semester or a year of college.

From The New York Times:

Record numbers of American students are studying abroad, with especially strong growth in educational exchanges with China, the annual report by the Institute on International Education found.

The number of Americans studying in China increased by 25 percent, and the number of Chinese students studying at American universities increased by 20 percent last year, according to the report, “Open Doors 2008.”

“Interest in China is growing dramatically, and I think we’ll see even sharper increases in next year’s report,” said Allan E. Goodman, president of the institute. “People used to go to China to study the history and language, and many still do, but with China looming so large in all our futures, there’s been a real shift, and more students go for an understanding of what’s happening economically and politically.”

While the traditional study-abroad sites for Americans — Britain, Italy, Spain and France — still attract more students from the United States, the report found that China is now the fifth-most-popular destination.

Read On

I studied abroad in Maastricht, The Netherlands in the fall of 2003. It was without a doubt four of the best months of my life. Living abroad taught me so much about myself and about life. I wouldn't trade the experiences I had studying abroad for anything in the world.

While studying in The Netherlands and coming to China to work after I graduated aren't directly connected, there's no doubt that living in Holland expanded my horizons enough to where it seemed like a good idea to come over to China by myself.

Personally, I think China would be a great place to spend time as a college student. So much can be learned from China's vastly different culture, formally studying Chinese could be very valuable, and, if in a big city, China's night life can be great.

And Chinese women aren't too bad either.

I'd recommend studying abroad anywhere to any college student who has the means to do so and is at all interested the idea.

Chinese Characters That Look Like People

Over the last several weeks of studying, I've noticed more and more Chinese characters that resemble human beings. Maybe my mind is just going a bit nuts learning all of these insane characters, but I do think there is something to this.

Here are some examples of what I'm talking about:

赏 - shang3 - This is the best example of what I'm talking about and the reason I decided to make this post. You can see the hair on top, the head under the hair, and then arms and legs on the bottom. I learned this character as the second character in the word "to appreciate."

员 - yuan2 - This character means "person" when added to words. The head, arms, and legs are all there on this one.

堂 - tang2 - This character seems to mean "place" based on the words I know it from. Again, hair, head, arms, and legs.

常 - chang2 - This character means "often."

觉 － jue2 - There's no head on this one. Ironically, the Chinese meaning is "to think."

负 - fu4 - I know this character as part of "to bully." The head on this one is a bit screwed up, but the arms and legs are there.

贵 - gui4 - This character means "expensive." This one is a stretch, but I can see a person in there somewhere.

人 - ren2 - This is the character for "person." It makes sense that it would visually represent a person. This is fairly abstract, but you can see the two legs.

女 - nv3 - The character for "woman." No head and rather curvacious. Hmmmm.

男 - nan2 - The character for "man."

My knowledge of Chinese is still quite superficial. The assumptions and connections I've just made on here with these characters may very well be wrong or off-the-mark. I'm just just calling out some characters as I see them.

If anyone reading this has any insight into the above characters, I'd love to hear some knowledge from someone who actually knows what they're talking about.