Areas of Unrest

4 June 2000 - Wo Shang Hanyu Ke

QOTD: "One should always be a little improbable." - Oscar Wilde

Reading: Richard Selzer, Taking the World In For Repairs

Listening to: the broadcast of the Tony awards

I don't have a way to type the intonation marks, so the title of this entry is partially unreadable. It's intented to be the pinyin for "I go to Chinese class."

Most of my weekend has been spent at UCLA, trying to learn a little bit of Chinese. Mostly I've learned that a lot of the sounds you need to speak Chinese are very hard for me to make. It's mildly reassuring that everybody else in the class is having a hard time, too. One student didn't come back for the second day. Another left at lunch time today and a third left about an hour before the end today. It'll be interesting to see how many people show up next weekend.

One other thing I've learned is that seven hours a day of class is too much. If I ever manage to go away to any language immersion program, I'm going to make it a four hour a day one. By mid-afternoon each day, I was mentally exhausted. An early evening nap was a necessity, not a luxury.

Despite the exhaustion, I'm glad I decided to take the class. A few of the students have been to China and signed up largely because they wanted to go back and feel less frustrated trying to communicate. I've found that learning even a little helps. If nothing else, it's simply polite.

My first foreign language experience was Hebrew school. Most of the emphasis was on learning to sound out words from the siddur (prayer book). I learned more conversational Hebrew at summer camp than I ever did in Hebrew school. It's only in recent years that I've realized one of the major benefits of having had Hebrew as my first exposure to another language. Namely, I have no fear of other alphabets.

My brother got to take French in junior high, but I was subjected to one of the vagaries of my home town not having our own high school. The district we contracted with didn't want to have to offer a fifth year of French and Spanish any more, so they more or less ordered us to get rid of language classes in junior high. The entirely inadequate substitute was speed reading. It was actually called "developmental reading" and there were other silly activities (e.g. a journalism unit) but the speed reading is the only one that had any permanent effect.

Anyway, we did get to take languages in high school. I took four years of German and two years of French. When I finally got to Europe the summer after I graduated from college, my German was adequate for hotel, restaurant and train station use, but I couldn't carry on much of a conversation with an adult. The less said about my attempts to speak French, the better. I did feel that people were friendlier because I tried. Except in Paris, but everyone has heard about Parisians.

I also took a year of Russian in college. Yet another alphabet! It's been a while, but I'm looking forward to seeing how much I can understand when I go to Russia in August. I figure that at least I'll be able to read the street signs. I suspect that I'm all too likely to finish sounding out the name on a train platform sign just as the train is pulling out from the stop I want, though.

Before going to Italy, I took a six week class. I just realized that I've actually already had more hours of Chinese this weekend than I had of Italian in that class. The main thing it enabled me to do was to order bottled water confidently and be sure I was getting the fizzy stuff ("con gas" or "gassata").

And then there's been the travel related self-study. I've listened to lots of Spanish tapes in the car, for example. The best ones had musical accompaniment, with the result that there are certain words I can only sing, not speak. I can understand Mexican Spanish if it's spoken slowly enough, but the Argentinian accent thoroughly defeated me. I still did better with that than with Hindi or with Swahili. In both of those cases, I never learned anything beyond basic greetings. If you want somebody in East Africa to think you're really cool, you say "mambo" instead of "jambo" for "hello". And know that the correct reply is "safi."

Anyway, I will practice my Chinese during the week. And hope that I am not just reinforcing my bad pronunciation. Next weekend, I must remember to ask our teacher how to say "I am sorry I speak Chinese so badly."