Worst Kept Secrets

I’ve been on Facebook since October 28, 2004 (I now know, after trying to wrestle my Timeline into a presentable state). At the time, a .edu email address was required, and I had never heard the phrase “personal brand.” Facebook was correct in removing the ridiculous .edu stipulation and opening up to the world at large, but I mention this in order to emphasize that in the beginning, no one was under the impression that the site was anything more than a platform for college kids to say stupid things that we thought were charming and clever for the purposes of winning love and glory. No one was looking to break into a career path or advertise a product or service or their own marketability - we were mostly interested in bantering with each other and sharing the gory details of our bad decisions. Immature and shortsighted, most definitely.

Then our professors started joining, and we started hearing rumors of people making REALLY bad decisions, like bragging about cheating on exams, or missing class because of various illegal substance indulgences. For the most part, I don’t think professors minded us acting like we were coasting through a period of extended adolescence, but it became immediately apparent that you needed to be careful about what you said and posted, especially if it was something against academic rules and regulations.

Then our parents joined. Then our bosses. Then every person we ever crossed paths with ever. Then it became a situation where saying anything political, religious, or otherwise opinionated put you at risk for a Facebook tussle with someone you’d never dream of offending in real life (though perhaps you hadn’t even thought about the person in years). And I think that’s fine - being a social critter is a messy, tricky business in real life, and of course a wildly popular online social service will mirror that. And the golden rule of the internet is, post not that which you would not say to your mother. Please understand that I’m not trying to say I don’t want the world to have access to a special college kid clubhouse - I’m just trying to explain how Facebook evolved from a fairly obnoxious college kid clubhouse to something much bigger, and much more interesting.

However. This new Timeline business seems tailored not to socializing, but to stalking - the casual “I wonder what happened to so-and-so” variety that most of us do occasionally and joke about often, or the “so-and-so thinks I should hire him, so let’s see what dirt we can find” style which seems a little unfair to me on separation of work and play grounds but that I’ve accepted as part of the world I live in, or the truly threatening kind. Older posts on Facebook have always been accessible, but Timeline makes them infinitely more so, lowering barriers to serious amateur private investigation. It’s upsettingly simple to get dates on all of my major life events (which might help an unscrupulous person figure out my account protection secret questions in one extreme and unlikely scenario), and it’s embarrassingly easy to catch me out as not having always been a relatively mature adult with reasonably well-supported opinions and tempered judgment. Looking at the earlier sections of my Facebook feed didn’t fill me with a warm glow of nostalgia - it felt like a one-click-away dream in which I suddenly realized I wasn’t wearing any pants.

Combining user profiles with user walls is streamlined, and I like that aspect of it. I’m also grateful for the seven-day cleanup period, and for the fact that in spite of my obsessive/self-obsessed anxieties about being “caught out” as less than a perfect human being, there’s really nothing that bad in my backlog. I am not shy about using privacy controls and I’ve mostly made good sharing decisions (except for all those China party pics - ex-pat life is just different, I don’t know what else to say). Nevertheless, I did not craft the past seven and a half years of Facebook activity as a cohesive document that explains who I am as a person, and that’s exactly what it’s about to become, whether I like it or not.

I own the fact that I started out on Facebook as an excessively privileged and naive child, and I do understand the internet well enough to know that you can never really take anything back. I just feel really weird about having all of my online skeletons summarily exhumed from underneath layer after layer of “older posts” links for public perusal unless I do some labor-intensive housecleaning. I understand that it’s my responsibility to make sure everything’s in good order, but it’s going to take an awful lot of time to get through the past seven and a half years to prepare for a compulsory and drastic change in the way my profile functions.

[I did enjoy the existential character of old-school status updates, though. Here's a transcript from 2006:

currently unavailable for comment.

undercaffeinated.

overcaffeinated.

happy as a clam, hidden from predators, with an endless food supply, and whatever else might make clams extra happy.

just a lonely puppy.

all about fortune cookies.

What does it MEAN?]

So, I’m really badly stuck on a paper, and it seemed like as good a time as any to blog, which is a wonderful word that sounds exactly like the mental vomiting I feel like I need to do right now. Internet, I’m tired. My head hurts. It’s gorgeous autumn time and I don’t have the stamina to even care. I can barely remember my husband’s name and have taken to referring to him as The One Who Brings Me Food and Makes Sure I Don’t Rot in a Puddle of My Own Filth (in all seriousness, if you must work full time and take four grad classes the same semester in which you write your thesis, I highly recommend marrying Chris Clanton first).

I’m working on a review of a business book for my library management class. Incidentally, I’m really grateful that it’s a required course, because I never would have taken it on my own and so far, it’s been the best in my program. The book I’m working on is Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader. The three imperatives are: manage yourself, manage your network, manage your team. I am struggling to manage myself these days, let alone my network or my team (I don’t talk to anyone anymore).

One of my biggest issues with online education is that I don’t have a good verb phrase for it. “Going to school” isn’t right - believe you me, I’m not getting much further than occasionally shifting position on the couch to avoid bed sores. “Doing work” is what gets used around the Gresham-Clanton household. As in, Chris might ask, “are you doing work tonight?” as a polite way of asking if I’ll be acting like a normal, responsible human being who enjoys goofing off and would like to watch a silly horror movie, or will I be shrieking unreasonable demands while foaming at the mouth and behaving like a wounded, rabid bear when directly spoken to? “Doing homework” doesn’t cover it - that suggests a specific component of a larger educational experience. There’s no not-homework in my not-work time. I sometimes use “working on school stuff” on a good day, but that seems awfully mild and misleadingly pleasant.

Another big issue: the writing. I can’t get away with massively overstated and flowery opinions that soar to dizzying hyperbolic heights, daisy chains of improbable adverb-adjective pairs, deliberately overextended metaphors, or completely unsupported assertions about human behavior and desires. Just the facts, madame, in to-the-point language and direct, unadorned style. No, Anne, you may not go off on tangents about how the ineffective management of library staff is similar to that time you tried to keep too many fish in a tank and all the guppies got eaten by black skirt tetras and you stayed up all night watching them die and sobbing. I’m just not good at this kind of writing, and it takes me forever to finish even relatively simple assignments.

Ok, good talk, internet. Back to it.

Ok. I have been wrestling with Mandarin Chinese for well over three years now, and it’s a lazy Saturday afternoon, so I thought I’d tell the internet about a few mistakes I’ve made in trying figure out how to learn Chinese. Full disclosure: my Chinese isn’t great. I lived in Nanjing from 2007 to 2009, and I’m in my second semester of intermediate Chinese classes at an American university. I can’t write a post about how to be fluent in Chinese, because I haven’t accomplished that. But I CAN tell you about some pitfalls that have slowed me down. Also, to be fair, there are better writers on this subject out there, and you really shouldn’t be reading this when you could be reading Sinosplice. I’m also just going to use the term “Chinese” throughout this post - I’m studying standard Mandarin, but I’m pretty sure that this stuff applies to Cantonese as well, or any other dialect you might be studying, you brave person, you.

So, if you’re still here, here we go:

Anne’s Six Ways to Fail at Learning Chinese

1. Move to China (and think that’s enough)

If all you do toward learning Chinese is pack up and move to China, the only thing you will accomplish is seriously freaking yourself out.

This is not to say that spending time in China isn’t a crucial ingredient in studying the language. I promise you, though, that most normal English speakers (normal meaning lacking in unbelievable linguistic talent) are not going to “just pick it up” by being around a ton of people speaking it. You will learn how to say hello, good bye, thank you, and “I don’t understand” this way, and that’s about it. You can learn these things from any textbook introductory lesson in about an hour, incidentally, and it will be much cheaper than a plane ticket.

When I tell people I lived in China for a while, they usually and understandably ask, “do you speak Chinese?” A lot of us former “foreign experts” (as printed on our little magenta permit document) will quite happily lie to you in answer to this question, and when we toss off a phrase or two, you will probably believe the lie, because it’s definitely going to sound like we’re speaking a foreign language. I usually recite my MacDonald’s order, which, much to my chagrin, is probably the most on-the-tip-of-my-tongue chunk of dialog I’ve got. What my audience doesn’t know is that in a Chinese MacDonald’s, this little monologue was almost always delivered while pointing to items on the picture menu, and the employee was paying a lot more attention to my fingers than my speaking.

Plenty of non-native speakers do live in China and learn to speak Chinese, but plenty are able to get by just fine with hello and thank you. I got by just fine, and when I got off the plane, I sort of knew how to count to five and that was it. I also lived in a large city, and I didn’t have a single close friend who wasn’t at least proficient in English, though, and I think people in less expat-saturated situations have a little more motivation to successfully learn the language.

Don’t get me wrong, you’re probably never going to reach fluency if you don’t spend some hardcore Chinese-speaking time in China. But being there isn’t a magic bullet, and you shouldn’t expect to learn Chinese there without a serious amount of effort that you may or may not have time for. Furthermore, you can’t hole up in your accommodations and drill characters and then expect to jump in a taxi and discuss politics with the driver. You also run the risk of getting pretty discouraged after spending hours studying only to have people stare at you like you’re a feces-flinging lower primate when you try to inquire what time the next train to Shanghai leaves. You’ll get there eventually, but it’s a long, slow road, without the false validation you might get from acing a Chinese midterm in an English-speaking university. Which brings me to #2.

**EXCEPTION** Moving to China to teach eighteen year olds is a wonderful, just-add-water way to learn how to cuss in Chinese!

2. Take a Chinese class (and don’t do anything else)

Much like spending time in China, I think that you need to take a Chinese class or find a Chinese tutor if you’re going to get anywhere. But you’re going to have to do a lot more beyond that. Three hours of classroom instruction a week plus the time needed to finish homework and get a handle on the exam material isn’t enough. In my experience, an intermediate Chinese class is not the same thing as intermediate Spanish or French class. I have a really good professor, but it’s a slow, uphill battle, and even though my class will have met the college language requirement at the end of this semester, I seriously doubt that any of us have anywhere near the proficiency of students at the same level in a western language. You really, really, really need to supplement your classroom stuff with something else (Chinesepod is really worth the cost of a subscription), and you need to have appropriate expectations - namely, that you will learn some grammar and some vocabulary, but they will not amount to fluency, and maybe not even proficiency if you’re not willing to go the extra thousand miles.

That said, my class has really consolidated a lot of stuff for me, thanks to my awesome teacher and my decent textbook (Integrated Chinese - I’ve hated every other Chinese textbook I’ve tried to use, but this one is working for me). The trick is to not revert to student habits of the bare minimum necessary to get by - do the exercises that aren’t assigned as homework, use new grammatical structures the next time you see your conversation partner (you DO have a conversation partner, right?), and get on a daily regimen of podcasts or something manageable that may or may not be related to anything you’re working on in class.

3. Read a grammar book

It’s going to make you cry and you’re not going to retain it. The grammar isn’t that hard, but it’s useless if you’re not using it. I can read a chapter about resultative compliments until I’m cross-eyed, but I didn’t really understand them in a way that I could use until I’d heard them used over and over and over and over again and memorized a fair number of expressions. The few grammar books I’ve looked at were written for linguistics folks, not necessarily for language learners (unless you’re a specific sort of language learner, which I’m not). Worry about this stuff after you’ve laid the groundwork - get your basic understanding of grammar from a Chinese class and a LOT of practice with a conversation partner. Some of this stuff sounds really weird when you try to explain it, even though in practice it’s not so bad. Except 了. That’s bad (for me, at least). It will make more sense if you can apply it to a phrase or set of phrases you’re comfortable with. [I could be totally off base with this - I'm not a linguist, just a 28 year old who got burned by confusing grammatical explanations sans examples.]

4. Memorize a million flash cards

There’s something vaguely comforting about the numbers game. They say I’ll be functionally literate when I reach 2000 characters, eh? Well, it’s a large number, but not an impossible one. Enter the flash card game. I could correctly enter the pinyin and select the multiple choice definition of about 800 characters before I could produce a full sentence in a social situation. Worry instead about actual words, which may consist of one or several characters, and the individual character recognition will follow.

That said, a good flashcard set or program is great for keeping massive amounts of material fresh in your mind. I really like ZDT, which is free software that lets you build your own character lists. Just try not to worry about numbers and focus on words that you need to know. And don’t just memorize them - use them in sentences, write little stories with them, and make a conscious effort to use them the next time you meet your conversation partner (seriously, the conversation partner is non-optional). That 2,000 character number isn’t a guarantee, and I’d try not to pay attention to it unless you’re gearing up for the HSK.

5. Watch Chinese movies

Well, watching Chinese movies is fun, and it gives you something to talk about with your conversation partner (I’m very serious about how much you need a conversation partner). Sure, every once in a while, you’ll hear someone say something that you sort of get, like “hello”, and that feels good. By all means, watch Chinese movies for the cultural content and to occasionally pick out a word, just don’t expect it to radically improve your listening skills until you don’t need the English subtitles anymore. Incidentally, that day’s probably a long way off if you found this post by googling “how to learn Chinese” or something similar (and I’m not trying to be hateful - I’m in that boat too). As an example, I was pleased as punch when I caught a shift from Mandarin to Shanghainese in Lust, Caution - didn’t understand a thing, just heard the difference in dialect.

I DO think it’s important to hear native speakers talking to other native speakers, on the street, in a movie, or whatever, because it sounds quite different from the textbook recordings or the way your Chinese professor or tutor will speak to you. But don’t have any illusions about making rapid strides when you sit down to watch something in Chinese, because those illusions probably won’t last long.

I just took a massive tumble while hustling across the street so as not to unduly inconvenience cars stopped at the crosswalk. I tripped on a rock, and went hurtling through the air for enough of a duration to be aware that no part of my body was in contact with the ground, and landed, hard, in front of a large crowd of people and a caravan of vehicles.

I don’t have much skin left on my palms or my knees, but after it happened and I skittered away from the onlookers with burning ears, my first thought was, “well, I’ve had my statistically probable accident, but didn’t really hurt myself, didn’t break my glasses, and didn’t kill anything. Nothing bad will happen for a while after this, and so now I am in an awesome mood.”

There are three papers I’m supposed to be writing right now, and page after page of Chinese characters I’m supposed to be drilling, but I wanted to take the time to share this tidbit I found in a footnote in one of my textbooks:

In 1893, a guy named John Nix went to the Supreme Court to try to get around a vegetable tarif being imposed on his imported tomatoes on the grounds that they are actually a fruit. The Supreme Court of 1893 apparently had a similar means of comprehending the world as I do - by dividing everything in it into Dessert and Not-Dessert categories. Tomatoes aren’t a dessert, and therefore, legally are not a fruit.

That Wikipedia article is here.