I graduated from Carleton College, which is a small liberal arts school in rural Minnesota. I clarify this because so few people in the states have ever heard of it. The conversation usually goes like this:
“Where’d you go to school?”
[brightly] “Carleton!”
[blank stare]
“It’s in Minnesota.”
[further blank stare until the other person comes up with the only thing they can think of to say] “Is it cold there?”
And I’m always tempted to say that, no, actually, it’s a secret tropical paradise that the natives are covering up by lying about snot-freezing subzero temperatures in order to scare tourists away. Anyway, I tell you this because I want you to understand why I almost passed out when one of my students asked me if I knew anything about it. It turns out that this student wants to apply to Carleton. I found this out yesterday, and I’ve already emailed admissions, burned her a CD of my Carleton pictures, printed out the application for her, and started drafting a letter of recommendation in my head. Exciting times.
In other news, I’m closing in on 100 Mandarin characters (this is emphatically no where near enough for me to be able to read anything, but it’s 100 more characters more than I knew before). I’ve been really bad about teaching myself Chinese. You’d think I’d be a little more motivated to work on that, what with living in China and all, but I can’t seem to stay focused on it for more than a couple of days at a time. But I’ve started getting really into characters. I guess that makes sense for me. I’m the sort of person who’d be perfectly happy if I went mute and had to use written language to communicate. I think I’d be happier, more social, and easier to get to know if I could just type everything I wanted to say. So maybe I was wrong to think that spoken Mandarin should be my first priority.
It’s really time-consuming and doesn’t make a lot of sense in my western brain. Sometimes there’s some logic to the character configuration - for example, the character for xue2 combines the character for “child” and the character for “roof” in such a way that you can read it as a child studying in a building. But then again, here’s a direct quote from my book regarding the character mei2 (not have): “The full form combines water with [phonetic symbol] to give the idea of death by drowning, or ‘not have’. ???? Also, mei3 means “beautiful.” It’s a combination of the characters “big” and “sheep.”
I’ve had to more than triple the number of figures I had to learn to write in English in order to write a handful of very simple sentences in Mandarin, and it’s been incredibly time consuming, but it’s a surprising amount of fun. It’s like having a couple of hours of art time every day. And every once in a while, I’ll see something I recognize on the street (”Oh, that store has something to do with a door!”).
And I’m really telling the internet about this because I’m locked into some sort of perpetual gold star quest. Be proud of me! I did something! I want to be special! etc.
9 Comments
your Chinese is REALLY impressive! I can’t believe you learned that many characters so quickly.
You can definitely read/write way more than I can now!
GOLD STAR FOR YOU!
I hear that it’s better to learn a language in text than just by speaking it, because when you learn to read something, by default you’ll be able to render it verbally. Whereas learning something by ear has no accompanying guarantee that you’ll be able to understand it in print…
I laud your 100 characters. I’m scared silly of languages that don’t use an alphabet that’s somewhat familiar (cyrillic only makes me worry a little bit).
Chris - thank you. I’ll offer the modest criticism that as a friend, you’re a little too generous with the gold stars sometimes, but it’s always appreciated.
Whitney - yeah, that’s a really good point. I think most people suggest learning survival Chinese by focusing on speaking just because it takes such a ridiculous amount of time to learn the characters, but the few words that I’ve learned how to write I remember a hell of a lot better than the words I’ve overheard in bars.
I’m kind of in love with the alphabet as a linguistic system right now. It’s just so damn smart, flexible, and digestible. Well done, whoever had that idea.
I read your blog on my google reader, and i gave you a gold star by clicking on the star button next to the post.
Alphabet: omg i know. i read a whole book about the alphabet. basically, it came from an abbreviated version of egyptian hieroglyphics. every new language would adapt the letters from this original alphabet to the sounds in they needed, changing/swapping/adding as necessary. The original letters were like A is for apple, b is for bear in that they were a simplified picture of words that started with that letter. Example: Б, which used to be flipped 90 degrees, was the first letter in the word for house. When it’s flipped on its side, you see a simple house with a door (door’s on the right)!! My favorite was the letter Y (i think), which stood for a word that was basically “hey!” and it was supposed to be a picture of a dude jumping up off the ground yelling “hey!”
@beth
really? that’s insanely awesome!
I’ll be damned! That alphabet was called the Proto-Canaanite alphabet and later turned into most western alphabets! Here’s the wikipedia article with a chart of the different pictures->meanings->letters.
AWESOME!
Yes! That’s the part that fascinates me, too — that once they invented The Alphabet, they didn’t think they needed to make up a new one for each language. Which when you think about it makes a lot of sense.
100 characters merit a gold, red, blue, AND silver star! And if you can write that in Proto-Canaanite, I’ll give you a bronze star too.
I read this and thought of your post:
bokane.org
/2008/02/29/white-guy-speaks-chinese-film-at-eleven
/#comment-104260
I have to post it all weird or it won’t go through the comments.
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