Tonight I sat down at my computer determined to complete at least one personal statement for graduate school. I find it quite difficult, however, to flip the switch and return completely to English, especially something resembling artful and expressive written English. Not to mention that to do so I've got to put myself in a mindset where next year does not seem completely abstract. So I'm going to do some warm-up writing here. It's about time anyway.
I've mentioned that things are cheap here, particularly food and services. I can eat quite easily, especially within the university campus, for $1-2 a day. Mostly I average a bit more than that, but still, the cost of each meal is almost always under $2. In other examples, it costs 1 yuan (13 cents) to ride the bus, and 5 mao (1/2 a yuan) for a simple clothing alteration.
Prices on the street are rarely fixed, and often in stores are negotiable as well. The question this has been bringing up recently is when and how adamantly I should bargain. I've thought this over before, most notably in Madagascar where things were even more inexpensive and bargaining was an even bigger deal. When the first price quoted is an amount you're easily willing to pay, should you bargain it down anyway? If you know someone is trying to get more money out of you than the going rate, but it's still not very much to you, and you know they need the money, should you just pay it?
Example 1: Pay toilets
Last month while visiting Bing ling si caves, I knew it should only cost 5 mao (1/2 a yuan) to use the bathroom, but the attendant tried to charge me 1 yuan. I called him on it and announced that I wasn't going to use the bathroom then if it cost that (I was paying for two friends as well so it seemed a little bigger of a rip off than it sounds). The attendant then agreed to the 5 mao rate and let us go. On the way out, a German tourist asked me what I'd been arguing about and I explained. She scolded me for it, saying that I could easily afford the 5 mao(about 6 cents), which was worth nothing to me, and should have just paid it.
Example 2: Buying fruit
I know you're supposed to bargain for fruit from stands on the street, but when I'm discussing whether a pomelo should be 3 or 4 yuan, or whether my collection of bananas and mandarin oranges should cost 8 yuan or 10 yuan, the struggle for cents starts to seem ridiculous.
Example 3: Violin lessons
A friend's family helped me find a violin teacher, and I agreed to the initial price of 60 yuan (about $8) for an hour lesson. How could I bargain this price when it actually is worth this much to me? How could I bargain this price when I could make twice as much to teach little kids English?
Sometimes I'm just not up for bargaining and accept whatever the vendors say. Other times I'm in a stubborn mood and refuse to budge on my price, walking away empty-handed or getting into a bit of an argument. I think I've come to the conclusion that it's important to bargain, most of the time. Bargaining is in the culture, as part of learning how things work here, and even showing respect for this custom, I want to understand when and how people bargain, and emulate it to some extent. But once I've bargained some, it's not worth haggling over a few pennies. The German lady was right, 6 cents is not much to me. On the other hand, I don't think the attendants or fruit vendors mind - they're used to it, they know what the going rate is, and they won't let you get away with any less. Plus, I'm not here as a tourist, I'm here for something of a long-run, and my 'income' is not a foreigner's income.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Friday, November 16, 2007
Written Chinese, and being illiterate
It's a strange feeling to be illiterate here. It's different from being able to read a foreign language but not understand it (such as we can do with Italian, French, or Spanish, for instance). I guess it's comparable to being surrounded by Russian or Korean or any language that's written with a different alphabet. Then, too, you can't read the names of places or look words up in the dictionary. But Chinese illiteracy goes a step further because that initial overwhelming illiteracy goes away painfully gradually. The difference is that in most languages, there's an alphabet to learn, and after a short struggle, you can read anything. Written Chinese, though, is not phonetic, and two months in, I'm still frequently surrounded by incomprehensible, inaccessible material.
So those rumors are true - Chinese has no alphabet. When you look at written Chinese characters, you can't sound out how they should be pronounced. Each character does represent a syllable, but may have a different pronuncation depending on its usage, and many characters often represent the same syllable. There are only 411 possible syllables (I don't really know how this compares with other languages, but one of the particularities is that you can't create any more. You can't 'rearrange the letters' to make a new sound combination, because there are no letters to rearrange.) Multiply those 411 syllables by the 4 tones, and you get 1644 possible monosyllabic pronunciations (the actual number in use is less because not every syllable exists in all four tones). Yet this 1644 is not the number of Chinese characters either since each one is represented by anywhere from 1 to over 40 characters - which character is used depends on the meaning. I've read that the total number of characters is upwards of 50,000, though many of these are rare and you only need to know 3,000-4,000 to be literate. I think most educated Chinese know over 10,000.
How in the world can you learn even 3,000 characters? It definitely involves feats of memorization to instantaneously recall the correlation between written character and phonetic syllable. It's kind of like a giant game of memory - a multi-dimensional memory game, in fact - because you also need to associate other information somewhat arbitrarily with each character: one of the four tones, a meaning, and some information about how to use it. Put this way, it sounds kind of impossible or at least tedious, but the characters are aesthetically pleasing to read and write, and are interesting. Though some characters' representations are arbitrary, or the reason for them has been lost or distorted, many make some sort of sense. The characters are built of smaller units called radicals that can be found in various combinations within them. There are about 225 of these radicals, though some are much more common than others. Each radical has a meaning associated with it -- for instance, 氵means water, 口 means mouth, and 刀 means knife -- and are found in characters which have something to do with that meaning, such as:
渴 - thirsty, 海 - sea, 泡 - bubble
唱 - sing, 咳嗽 - cough
分 - to divide, 切 - to cut
Besides the radicals making up a single character, many words are made up of two or more characters (such as cough above), and this combination of characters is also often interesting and creative. In a way, learning characters is like studying Latin roots to understand the meaning of English words, or even just considering the reason our words and phrases are constituted the way they are. While I'm on the topic, one of my favorite examples of the radicals adding to the meaning of words is in the Chinese periodic table -- just from looking at the characters, you can till which ones are gases, which are metals, and which are non-metals because they have the air/gas (气), metal (钅), and stone (石) radicals respectively (see http://www.limestone.on.ca/ibuild/davies/chinesept.html). This doesn't seem very fair for a chemistry test, though.
But back to this issue of illiteracy - the reasoning within the characters only gives a hint, at best, to the meaning, and doesn't tell you how to pronounce the character. To be fair, sometimes there is a radical within the character which hints at the sound - has nothing to do with the meaning, but is either part of another character or is itself an independent character which has the same or similar sound. For example, the above character for bubble is pronounced 'pao,' while the right part, when independent, is itself a character， 包, pronounced 'bao.' Still, you can never be completely sure that what you see in new character is a pronunciation clue.
So, as in the pao/bao example above, there is a standard way to write Chinese pronunciation using the Roman alphabet. Very, very occasionally these are printed on signs. This is called pin yin, and is essential for studying Chinese, but can't really replace the characters for several reasons (the most important probably being the issue of homonyms and the fact that many dialects of Chinese do not use the 'standard' pronunciation but can still read any Chinese text because the characters are the same).
Not being able to read unknown words is quite an obstacle for learning a language, and I would say slows it down considerably. First, it takes a long time to learn each character. It is generally not enough just to look at a character to be able to remember it and write it, I find that I must practice and write it myself many times first. And, how can you look up words you don't know in the dictionary if there's no 'alphabetical order' to follow? The traditional way to solve this involves counting the number of strokes in teh major radical in the character and then in the rest of the character, and is a rather cumbersome process. In general, I bypass this by either asking any Chinese person in the vicinity to read the character to me and then look it up by its pin yin, or by drawing it into my electronic dictionary or my computer, which then skillfully recongnizes it (or rather giving me a list of characters it thinks I might be attempting to draw). Still, not very convenient.
Typing Chinese is also not particularly convenient, but also kind of fun. I type to use online dictionaries, to chat on the web with friends, and most often to send text messages on my phone. The keyboard can't have thousands of characters obviously, so entry is by the standardized pin yin. Once you type in a syllable, you're presented with all the options of characters which have that pronunciation. You can type a whole phrase or sentence, and the software tries to adapt and guess what you're saying, though you often have to correct it. My phone system doesn't have this, but it does try to offer suggestions for what the next character should be, based on the previous one or presenting the most commonly used characters. I worry a bit when I think I'm typing something very common but the computer doesn't come up with my phrase for me, and I can get an idea of how difficult my vocabulary words are by how far back they are in the list of characters the computer presents to me. It's still kind of astonishing for me to see it come up with characters, though I suppose it's not a very complicated computer program. I wish it was a bitter smarter though, and maybe could learn what phrases I commonly use and adapt to suggest these more readily. It's also rather inconvenient to be constanty alt-shifting my way between the four languages installed on my computer (English, French, Korean, and Chinese), to activate the right keyboard at the right time.
Despite not being able to read, I like going to the bookstore here - there are many of them. There are huge sections on learning English (which unfortunately can't very easily be used in reverse to learn Chinese because there's no pin yin). Most remarkably, there are always lots of people there. There aren't nice couches and coffeeshops, but there is space in the aisles and on the stairs and this can and is used for the same purpose. I like to look around at the different subjects, the way the books are organized, and see what people are reading. I bought a dictionary, and I bought a book for 8-12 year olds about ecology.
Books are cheap. They range from about about $1-6 generally. Also, there is a rather big business of photocopying them. You can take a book to one of many places on campus or in town where someone photocopies each page by hand and then uses glue to bind them together for you. This is bad for copyright reasons, but it's good for books which aren't available to buy -- such as books from the US shared among us foreign students, or for copying a book of violin exercises lent by my teacher, published in 1962 in Russia, and not available in China (I'm taking violin lessons here! more on this later).
I guess that after all, I shouldn't say I'm illiterate now. Being able to read is a slow process and I have a long way to go, but I can read so much more than before. And, the biggest difference is qualitative - even considering the characters I don't know yet, Chinese doesn't look so foreign anymore.
So those rumors are true - Chinese has no alphabet. When you look at written Chinese characters, you can't sound out how they should be pronounced. Each character does represent a syllable, but may have a different pronuncation depending on its usage, and many characters often represent the same syllable. There are only 411 possible syllables (I don't really know how this compares with other languages, but one of the particularities is that you can't create any more. You can't 'rearrange the letters' to make a new sound combination, because there are no letters to rearrange.) Multiply those 411 syllables by the 4 tones, and you get 1644 possible monosyllabic pronunciations (the actual number in use is less because not every syllable exists in all four tones). Yet this 1644 is not the number of Chinese characters either since each one is represented by anywhere from 1 to over 40 characters - which character is used depends on the meaning. I've read that the total number of characters is upwards of 50,000, though many of these are rare and you only need to know 3,000-4,000 to be literate. I think most educated Chinese know over 10,000.
How in the world can you learn even 3,000 characters? It definitely involves feats of memorization to instantaneously recall the correlation between written character and phonetic syllable. It's kind of like a giant game of memory - a multi-dimensional memory game, in fact - because you also need to associate other information somewhat arbitrarily with each character: one of the four tones, a meaning, and some information about how to use it. Put this way, it sounds kind of impossible or at least tedious, but the characters are aesthetically pleasing to read and write, and are interesting. Though some characters' representations are arbitrary, or the reason for them has been lost or distorted, many make some sort of sense. The characters are built of smaller units called radicals that can be found in various combinations within them. There are about 225 of these radicals, though some are much more common than others. Each radical has a meaning associated with it -- for instance, 氵means water, 口 means mouth, and 刀 means knife -- and are found in characters which have something to do with that meaning, such as:
渴 - thirsty, 海 - sea, 泡 - bubble
唱 - sing, 咳嗽 - cough
分 - to divide, 切 - to cut
Besides the radicals making up a single character, many words are made up of two or more characters (such as cough above), and this combination of characters is also often interesting and creative. In a way, learning characters is like studying Latin roots to understand the meaning of English words, or even just considering the reason our words and phrases are constituted the way they are. While I'm on the topic, one of my favorite examples of the radicals adding to the meaning of words is in the Chinese periodic table -- just from looking at the characters, you can till which ones are gases, which are metals, and which are non-metals because they have the air/gas (气), metal (钅), and stone (石) radicals respectively (see http://www.limestone.on.ca/ibuild/davies/chinesept.html). This doesn't seem very fair for a chemistry test, though.
But back to this issue of illiteracy - the reasoning within the characters only gives a hint, at best, to the meaning, and doesn't tell you how to pronounce the character. To be fair, sometimes there is a radical within the character which hints at the sound - has nothing to do with the meaning, but is either part of another character or is itself an independent character which has the same or similar sound. For example, the above character for bubble is pronounced 'pao,' while the right part, when independent, is itself a character， 包, pronounced 'bao.' Still, you can never be completely sure that what you see in new character is a pronunciation clue.
So, as in the pao/bao example above, there is a standard way to write Chinese pronunciation using the Roman alphabet. Very, very occasionally these are printed on signs. This is called pin yin, and is essential for studying Chinese, but can't really replace the characters for several reasons (the most important probably being the issue of homonyms and the fact that many dialects of Chinese do not use the 'standard' pronunciation but can still read any Chinese text because the characters are the same).
Not being able to read unknown words is quite an obstacle for learning a language, and I would say slows it down considerably. First, it takes a long time to learn each character. It is generally not enough just to look at a character to be able to remember it and write it, I find that I must practice and write it myself many times first. And, how can you look up words you don't know in the dictionary if there's no 'alphabetical order' to follow? The traditional way to solve this involves counting the number of strokes in teh major radical in the character and then in the rest of the character, and is a rather cumbersome process. In general, I bypass this by either asking any Chinese person in the vicinity to read the character to me and then look it up by its pin yin, or by drawing it into my electronic dictionary or my computer, which then skillfully recongnizes it (or rather giving me a list of characters it thinks I might be attempting to draw). Still, not very convenient.
Typing Chinese is also not particularly convenient, but also kind of fun. I type to use online dictionaries, to chat on the web with friends, and most often to send text messages on my phone. The keyboard can't have thousands of characters obviously, so entry is by the standardized pin yin. Once you type in a syllable, you're presented with all the options of characters which have that pronunciation. You can type a whole phrase or sentence, and the software tries to adapt and guess what you're saying, though you often have to correct it. My phone system doesn't have this, but it does try to offer suggestions for what the next character should be, based on the previous one or presenting the most commonly used characters. I worry a bit when I think I'm typing something very common but the computer doesn't come up with my phrase for me, and I can get an idea of how difficult my vocabulary words are by how far back they are in the list of characters the computer presents to me. It's still kind of astonishing for me to see it come up with characters, though I suppose it's not a very complicated computer program. I wish it was a bitter smarter though, and maybe could learn what phrases I commonly use and adapt to suggest these more readily. It's also rather inconvenient to be constanty alt-shifting my way between the four languages installed on my computer (English, French, Korean, and Chinese), to activate the right keyboard at the right time.
Despite not being able to read, I like going to the bookstore here - there are many of them. There are huge sections on learning English (which unfortunately can't very easily be used in reverse to learn Chinese because there's no pin yin). Most remarkably, there are always lots of people there. There aren't nice couches and coffeeshops, but there is space in the aisles and on the stairs and this can and is used for the same purpose. I like to look around at the different subjects, the way the books are organized, and see what people are reading. I bought a dictionary, and I bought a book for 8-12 year olds about ecology.
Books are cheap. They range from about about $1-6 generally. Also, there is a rather big business of photocopying them. You can take a book to one of many places on campus or in town where someone photocopies each page by hand and then uses glue to bind them together for you. This is bad for copyright reasons, but it's good for books which aren't available to buy -- such as books from the US shared among us foreign students, or for copying a book of violin exercises lent by my teacher, published in 1962 in Russia, and not available in China (I'm taking violin lessons here! more on this later).
I guess that after all, I shouldn't say I'm illiterate now. Being able to read is a slow process and I have a long way to go, but I can read so much more than before. And, the biggest difference is qualitative - even considering the characters I don't know yet, Chinese doesn't look so foreign anymore.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Caterpillars turn into...
I was walking down the street yesterday with a Chinese friend after dinner and noticed a strange sign. There are signs lit up all over the place advertising a restaurant or some new product and I often take advantage of my company to learn what things around me say and mean (photographing signs is also not beyond me). Usually they're not very interesting, but I often get a new vocabulary word or two. This one looked particularly strange -- it said something about a worm, so I was very curious why a huge yellow sign, posted vertically sprawling five floors, had something to tell me about worms. There were four important characters on the sign -- 'winter worm summer grass.' I still didn't get it once these were identified, so my friend started to explain that there was this caterpillar that, instead of turning into a butterfly, turned into a plant, from which you got this expression, in the winter it was a 'worm' and in the summer a 'grass'. I still didn't quite get it, so my friend, being a good scientist in fact, went into more detail, explaining that this wasn't quite the whole story. The caterpillar doesn't actually turn into a plant, and actually the summer phase isn't a plant at all. In the winter when it should be metamorphosing into a butterfly, it often gets infected by a fungus, and in the summer a mushroom sprouts from it. This mushroom is extremely valuable in Chinese medicine, especiallly as a nutritional supplement for strength. Anyway, I later looked it up on wikipedia and indeed it's a pretty cool organism interaction that sort of does look like it results in a half worm/half mushroom type of thing (.
My friend was initially astonished that I was so puzzled by this situation - why hadn't I heard of this very well-known thing before? It's easy to forget that the things so well known to you can be unheard of to others. I forget this often too, and it's nice to be jolted to remember that there are a million things you don't know, and a million things that don't necessarily have to be the way you know them to be. An example, perhaps with the table turned, was in a conversation earlier in the week with this same friend. We somehow came upon the topic of time zones. China is roughly the same size as the US, but is all on the same time, whereas the US spans four different zones. I have thought this ridiculous for China and tried to explain why -- it means that the time of sunrise in the east must be 3-4 hours different from the time of sunrise in the very west. For example, some people may have sunrise at 5am, and others at 8 or 9am, and I would guess it means that someone is having sunrise and/or sunset at a rather awkward time. (I guess we're all on Beijing time, which to my calculation should mean I get more sunlight in the evening than I should, so I'm not too upset by it. Still, I find that acknowledging that the earth spins is more reasonable.) My friend though, thought it was equally ridiculous that a single country could split itself into time zones, making unnecessary complications for domestic affairs. What about live telecasts? What about national exams? What about phoning someone across the country? What about traveling on business to the opposite coast? I still argued that regulating daylight hours was more important, but admitted that sometimes making phone calls, or waiting for election results, or probably arranging important national live speeches, was inconvenient. I realized someone living with this alternate situation might quite reasonably hold this opinion I had previously not considered. I think we both came out with a bit better understanding of the two sides. We're used to the inconveniences that come with having time zones, but we also have states with power that allows some domestic affairs to be taken care of on this level, and state boundaries to serve as time zone dividers. While people do often talk about different provinces and who's from where here, I think that China places a lot of importance on being a single, unified entity. I guess we do too, but maybe we're more comfortable and stable in this identity. China is large, populous, and has a large income gap between rich and poor, but it maintains a unified front to the world, and wants it citizens to feel that they belong.
My friend was initially astonished that I was so puzzled by this situation - why hadn't I heard of this very well-known thing before? It's easy to forget that the things so well known to you can be unheard of to others. I forget this often too, and it's nice to be jolted to remember that there are a million things you don't know, and a million things that don't necessarily have to be the way you know them to be. An example, perhaps with the table turned, was in a conversation earlier in the week with this same friend. We somehow came upon the topic of time zones. China is roughly the same size as the US, but is all on the same time, whereas the US spans four different zones. I have thought this ridiculous for China and tried to explain why -- it means that the time of sunrise in the east must be 3-4 hours different from the time of sunrise in the very west. For example, some people may have sunrise at 5am, and others at 8 or 9am, and I would guess it means that someone is having sunrise and/or sunset at a rather awkward time. (I guess we're all on Beijing time, which to my calculation should mean I get more sunlight in the evening than I should, so I'm not too upset by it. Still, I find that acknowledging that the earth spins is more reasonable.) My friend though, thought it was equally ridiculous that a single country could split itself into time zones, making unnecessary complications for domestic affairs. What about live telecasts? What about national exams? What about phoning someone across the country? What about traveling on business to the opposite coast? I still argued that regulating daylight hours was more important, but admitted that sometimes making phone calls, or waiting for election results, or probably arranging important national live speeches, was inconvenient. I realized someone living with this alternate situation might quite reasonably hold this opinion I had previously not considered. I think we both came out with a bit better understanding of the two sides. We're used to the inconveniences that come with having time zones, but we also have states with power that allows some domestic affairs to be taken care of on this level, and state boundaries to serve as time zone dividers. While people do often talk about different provinces and who's from where here, I think that China places a lot of importance on being a single, unified entity. I guess we do too, but maybe we're more comfortable and stable in this identity. China is large, populous, and has a large income gap between rich and poor, but it maintains a unified front to the world, and wants it citizens to feel that they belong.
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