Sunday, October 30, 2011

Language Barrier: Learning the Body, From Tǒu to Jiǎo

I am aware that Pepper isn't a fully-developed person.
Meet Pepper! She teaches me Chinese words for the body. She is my new friend, even though she doesn’t say much.

Chinese pronunciation requires two elements, the sound combination of the letters and the proper tone. One word can have four different tones. Change the tone, change the meaning. With one slip of the tongue, lotus becomes puke, which changes the “tone” of your conversation a bit.

Pepper is helpful, but I was learning words based on their relationships with each other. Head is tǒu, so hair is tǒu, so then eyebrow is méi máo, and then mouth is zuí, and so on. If I start at the top of the body, it takes a loooong time to get to foot, or jiǎo. Learning words independently of each other is key for their usefulness. I must know jiǎo as quickly as I know tǒu.

Also, because Pepper doesn’t speak, it’s up to me to master my tones. Those tones add a complicated layer to learning.

What to do? How to learn? Good old-fashioned repetition. When I teach my students, we practice the same nine words over and over and over during the class. We yell them. We spell them. We dance a jig with them. We play games with them. We yell them again. To learn my Chinese, I follow the same method, only I don’t yell (I use my inside voice), and I don't jig. I write each word ten times, with the tone. I speak it ten times with the tone. I then write the English equivalent while speaking the Chinese version with the tone. Try speaking one language while writing in another at the same time! This brain-bender makes my mind work really hard to forge the connections into my neurons.

I move onto the next word, repeating the steps. The process looks like this:

Looks just like those third-grade spelling lists, doesn't it?














Finally, I quiz myself. I quiz myself again. I test myself again the next day. It’s tedious, but it works. Just ask me a word or two from Pepper's body!

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Where Exactly Am I?


China!















I am in city of Tongren, in the province in Ghizhou, in the People's Republic of China. It is a capital city of the Tongren Region, or Tongren Prefecture.

Tongren is located in the Karst Mountains, and the Jinjiang River flows through the city. The city is five or six square miles square, and I can run across town in an hour, with a few steep hills along the way. You can see the mountains from anywhere in the city. Sometimes you have to peak between a few tall buildings or just move a bit to the left.

These bumpy, tree-filled mountains surround Tongren.




















Between 250,000 and 500,000 people call Tongren home. No one really has a solid answer. People come and go; cities often have a large transient population. Everyone lives in apartments, and single-family homes do not exist. I think this in partially due to Communist ideology and the shortage of space in this mountain valley. There are many people in a small space.

Tongren is known for Mt. Fanjingshan, a very popular tourist destination, but it is still a few hours away. I'm sure that I will visit the mountain during my time here. I read that this city is also known for it's stature of Zhou Yiqun Martyr, apparently one of the generals of the Chinese Red Army. I did indeed see this statue, but because I can't read anything, I couldn't figure out why everyone having their picture taken next to this statue of some guy.

Instead, I took a picture of this:

Happy Buddha!




Language Barrier
















What an interesting mural, the artist in me thought. What's this about? I wonder if there's some information. Oh, wait! There's a sign!
















Oh, that's right! I CAN'T READ ANYTHING!

I spend 99 percent of my day having absolutely no idea what people say. I am trying to learn the language, one more thing I am figuring out in my new home. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed when trying to learn this language, but its starting to make sense -- albeit nominal sense.

The first few times I stopped at restaurants, I had no choice but to point to what vegetables I wanted in the stir fry and then point to the wok. On October 11, after nearly one month in China, I successfully ordered my first dish at a restaurant in Chinese.

"Wo yao yi ge qiezi." This is the pin-yin spelling for "I want one eggplant."

This sounds something like "Woh yeeow yee guh szche-eight-suh".

Here's the literal translation:
I (Wo)
want (yao)
one (yi)
(ge -- a qualifer with no Engish equivalent)
eggplant (qiezi).

First, I had to figure out what words Chinese words I needed. It took many conversations and flipping through my Lonely Planet Mandarin phrase book to get the right words.

Then I learned the pronunciation of each word and syllable. Pronunciation is hard because there are some sound combinations that we don't have in English, like this throaty "szch" sound for the first syllable in eggplant.

Now, add the the proper tones for each word:
Third low falling/rising (Wo)
Fourth falling (yao)
First high (yi)
Fourth falling (ge) (I think it's fourth falling.)
Second rising on the first syllable (qiezi)

Finally, I practiced this sentence over and over. I got enough of the the sentence correct because I ordered without having to point. They understood me, AND I could ask "Duoshao qian?" for "How much?" AND understand that "ba qian" meant eight qian (about $1.12 in American dollars).

Forget reading anything. Right now, I know the characters for people -- 人 -- and mouth -- 口. I can't yet recognize the characters for the city that I live in, Tongren.

It will be awhile before I can decipher enough of that mural sign to have any idea what the mural represents. Right now, it's a pretty picture.

Observations

During one of my first days in Tongren, I found a great walking path along one of the rivers.

Several bridges span the river, and all have a distinctive architectural element. I snapped this picture, trying to capture the strong upward curve of this bridge, and I realized there was some graffiti on its under belly. This is the one and only graffiti element I've seen in the city. I was quite curious ... what does Chinese graffiti look like?


Would the picture be really naughty or curse something? Uhm ... no ... [insert drumroll here]

It's Underpants Space Boy! Graffiti here is quite innocent!