Tonight I ate out at a 'western' restaurant again, the third time I've used a fork and knife since I got here. Though the restaurant offered some Chinese food options as well, it was western in it's decor - red couches surrounding the tables and Christmas decorations, including a 'Meery Christmas' (sic) sign on some of the windows. I ordered spaghetti, and a waffle. To be honest, I didn't know it was a waffle when I ordered it, I thought maybe it'd be more like a crepe. The options for topping were: eel, meat, fruit, or honey. I opted for the first, which turned out to be something of a sweet eely mush spread on two quadrants of the waffle, with whipped cream and an quasi-marachino cherry in the center.
The Chinese have a strange attitude towards sugar, I find. They don't have this clear cut idea that it belongs after the meal, in a course called dessert. My spaghetti was sweet. My friend ordered fruit pizza, which was sweet. I also tried to explain that having fruit - which included apples, pears, and candied cherries - on a pizza with cheese was strange. And, tomato sauce on pizza is something of a must (though this was absent from, and indeed did not sound appealing with, the fruit topping). The last time I was at a western restaurant, they served watermelon and an apple salad with the 'steak,' and cherry tomatoes with the cake.
It's not just in foreign foods that sugar is put in weird places, but in Chinese food as well. There are 'sweet and sour' dishes, but these taste quite different those in the US -I find them to be better described as sweet and garlicky. Popular ice cream flavors include milk flavor, various kinds of beans, wheat, and green tea. This sweet bean idea - strange at first - I quite like. And the milk ice cream is decent too. The other two ingredients most notably and unfortunately absent in the diet here are cheese and chocolate. Neither have a long history here. Cheese is not found in any traditional Chinese dishes, and I have yet to see anything beyond a processed American-esque cheese in a store or restaurant. (Oh to be back on the French organic dairy farm for a few days.....). You can buy chocolate, but it's expensive and not very good. The couple times I have tried to eat chocolate cake, though the color is decent, any flavor is hardly noticeable.
Fortunately, though I miss these foods very much, there are a million new and developed flavors to stimulate my taste buds and make up for it, most of the time.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Friday, December 14, 2007
Spelling and word games
Some things about this Chinese separation of phonetics for writing are pretty cool and some pretty strange. You can read without saying the words to yourself, for instance, and you can understand things you read without being able to communicate them to someone else. You can say things you haven't got a clue how to write. Doing this makes me realize how much I rely on spelling, and how closely my spoken language is linked to it. When I say something, the written version is a split second away, or even closer, hanging somewhere inside my head. When learning French, I remember noting that I was never able/willing to say anything which I did not know how to write. But here, I can't insist on that, and it's strangely liberating. The characters I know best I still sort of 'see' when I say them, but I am perfectly fine saying things I wouldn't be able to recognize on paper. I guess I still insist on knowing the pinyin and tone of everything, but that's because it's essential information if you want to be able to say the word correctly. In English, you can say things totally right without being able to spell them correctly (though you'd probably have a good idea). It's sort of hard to explain.
With no alphabet, you can't ask someone to spell a new word for you. You can look it up in the dictionary by its pinyin, but there are so many homophones it is often not easy to figure out which is the one you heard, and in a quick conversation setting you need a quicker option, and there are several. The most common is to try to figure out if the character is used in another character combination you are familiar with. As a simple example in English, say you learn the new phrase red-eye, and you want to know what the 'red' character is. You might say, 'is that red as in 'I read a book?' And your friend would say, 'no, it's not, it's red as in 'red bull' or 'red, white and blue.' This option only works if you already know the character but haven't yet associated it with this particular meaning/phrase. The second possible method is to have the person write the character out for you. This seems obvious, but what I mean mostly is not with a pen, but usually by tracing the character with a finger on a hand or a table. You've got to watch carefully for this to work. Thirdly, they might explain what radicals make it up: 'well, it's got a tree radical on the left, and then a sheep radical on the right.' There are names for each of the strokes, too, which can be used to help 'there's a horizontal line then a downward hook, and a little dot.'
Along with no spelling comes no spelling bees, no crossword puzzles, no word searches, no boggle, no ghost and no scrabble. Instead there are other word games based on characters, which I am just getting to the surface of, and looking forward to more of. There are lots sort of like rebus puzzles, where you have to put together clues about the radicals that make up characters and maybe some clues about the pronunciation. While the commonality of puns makes them not very funny or clever in most situtations, it opens a lot of possibilities here. Another I really enjoy is to start with a simple character (like 日) and try to come up with all the characters which can be made by adding only one stroke (申，电，白，旦，旧）, or two strokes, etc.
With no alphabet, you can't ask someone to spell a new word for you. You can look it up in the dictionary by its pinyin, but there are so many homophones it is often not easy to figure out which is the one you heard, and in a quick conversation setting you need a quicker option, and there are several. The most common is to try to figure out if the character is used in another character combination you are familiar with. As a simple example in English, say you learn the new phrase red-eye, and you want to know what the 'red' character is. You might say, 'is that red as in 'I read a book?' And your friend would say, 'no, it's not, it's red as in 'red bull' or 'red, white and blue.' This option only works if you already know the character but haven't yet associated it with this particular meaning/phrase. The second possible method is to have the person write the character out for you. This seems obvious, but what I mean mostly is not with a pen, but usually by tracing the character with a finger on a hand or a table. You've got to watch carefully for this to work. Thirdly, they might explain what radicals make it up: 'well, it's got a tree radical on the left, and then a sheep radical on the right.' There are names for each of the strokes, too, which can be used to help 'there's a horizontal line then a downward hook, and a little dot.'
Along with no spelling comes no spelling bees, no crossword puzzles, no word searches, no boggle, no ghost and no scrabble. Instead there are other word games based on characters, which I am just getting to the surface of, and looking forward to more of. There are lots sort of like rebus puzzles, where you have to put together clues about the radicals that make up characters and maybe some clues about the pronunciation. While the commonality of puns makes them not very funny or clever in most situtations, it opens a lot of possibilities here. Another I really enjoy is to start with a simple character (like 日) and try to come up with all the characters which can be made by adding only one stroke (申，电，白，旦，旧）, or two strokes, etc.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Music
You probably have some melody in your head that you associate with Chinese music, likely having to do with the traditional 5 note scale. I've been learning a little bit about it, and playing traditional tunes from different time periods and regions, but I've been learning more about the Lanzhou approach to music these days than anything else. I've got a lot of experiences saved up to talk about here: playing with a Chinese orchestra, a concert given by an orchestra of traditional instruments, a month's worth of Chinese violin lessons, a student singing talent show, and yesterday's harmonica concert. I'm still not sure what this means about music in general here, something about a strong appreciation and pride, a sort of confused mix of influences from different traditions, and a lack of musical experience in the general public (if you play, you're good, with few dabblers). I'll start from the end.
1. Harmonica concert
I usually play tennis on Saturday afternoons, but this week my tennis friend Tian wu xing asked if I'd be interested to come along to a '口琴/kouqin' concert. He'd recently started taking lessons, and his teacher had organized a concert bringing together kouqin experts from all across China or something. So I looked up 'kouqin,' which literaly means 'mouth instrument,' in my dictionary. My faithful dictionary said it meant 'harmonica,' but I didn't believe it and decided it must be some kind of Chinese wind instrument that didn't have a proper English translation. This was eing taken way to seriously to be about harmonicas. To my surprise, which I had to keep my insides from laughing about for a good 15 minutes, it was indeed a harmonica concert. I even got to hear 'eine kleine nachtmusik' performed by five harmonicas. It was even better than the lady who plays baroque melodies on the flutaphone. Unfortunately the concert was preceded by an hour long 'meeting' held by these harmonica experts which I don't think anyone in the audience paid attention to, and whose purpose still evades me.
The empty stage:
The kids warming up noisily behind us:
Wu xing and I discussing the program, learning useful new vocabulary such as 'arranged by' and wondering why the actual composers were not listed for most of the pieces. Plus you can see my hair slowly turning brown again:
Another friend, Wang hai feng, who also came along:
And here's an idea, though dark, of what the long pre-concert meeting was like:
Honestly, though, I enjoyed the concert, because practicing even the harmonica for years has good results. My friend's teacher has been playing the harmonica for over 60 years, and his son and grandsons also performed impressively. It was something else to watch teenage boys playing four harmonicas at once, stacked on top of eachother. It was even wackier to see full-grown men in suits pecking their heads from side to across a tiny instrument, or sliding a really long, deep one like a typewriter. There were groups of little children, too, and at the end they all came together for a finale. Harmonicas played classical works, and various kinds of Chinese or Chinese minority tunes. I've never known anyone to really take this instrument anywhere near this seriously. I don't know if this is a cultural difference, there may well be harmonica players in the US and they're just not very public about it? Or, I may just have happend on the rare case of it in China. I wish I had a recording, but I forgot my camera (pics are not mine). Here we go:
The kids go first:
And a soloist with a table of about 7 harmonicas in front of him, usually playing 2-3 at a time:
A grown trio:
A combined medley across generations to finish:
2. Student Talent Show
A couple weeks ago, I tried to go to the Lanzhou University Graduate student singing talent show. I went because my friend Travis, one of my two American friends, was performing. This was the final round - there were only 15 contestants left. He was quite the talk around campus, apparently, because it's very unusual for a foreigner to participate in this event. Frankly it's no wonder because it's impossible for us to figure out anything that's going on on campus. I still don't know where things are posted or how to sort through the Chinese even if I find something that looks like an activity (and is why I find myself saying over and over, 'a friend helped me find..., a friend told me about.... that's really how I get to know most things here). Anyway, the place was too small and packed, but I was trying to show support for my fellow countryman and fought my way in the back, where I could stand on tiptoes, squeezed in neck to neck with a whole lot of people.
This was definitely the place to be. As the first singers went through their routines, though, I become really unimpressed. The sound system was terrible - sometimes you could hardly hear the singing, and they just weren't very good. I've heard much better at KTV (karaoke)!! Thinking about it later, I think the kids just don't have any experience either performing or watching their peers perform. Also, most have little musical background. Only a small percentage have had the opportunity to study a musical instrument, which is very different from the US where a lot of kids have at least dabbled in a school band or orchestra. Maybe my expectations were too high. Travis, honestly, was decent -- he just started Chinese this past summer but he's a really eager, happy-go-lucky guy...he played the guitar to accompany his song (the only performer who played an instrument), which was half in English and half in Chinese. As he walked on stage I heard murmurs of 'he's so tall!!' as they had to raise the mike as far as it would go for him. He was pretty good, but still, his guitar was all blurry and his words hard to make out. Maybe from the front the sound was a bit better but I doubt it. He got a lot of shouts for singing in Chinese, and I was glad I had suffered through the near suffocating body heat that was surrounding me. After his number, I booked it out of there.
3. Orchestra of Chinese instruments
Back in October, the school took us to see a performance of Chinese traditional music and dance, especially featuring various ethnic groups from here and nearby regions of northwestern China. I absolutely loved the first half, which was a concert by an orchestra of traditional instruments -- I'd heard of the erhu, which has two strings and is held on the lap (see instruments on left, video below), but didn't know much about what others were like (you can see lute-like pipas and hear some great Chinese drumming). Then there were cymbols and a bass drum and a couple out of place looking cellos. If you look carefully in the back you can see a string bass or two, as well. I have no idea if this is some modern arrangement, if there once were Chinese instruments in this range, or what. Below are a couple photos of the orchestra and later a smaller ensemble that played, and some from the second half which was dance, filled with elaborate costumes and visual effects. The Chinese also have this thing about putting you in couches -- most of the seats were couches rather than chairs or auditorium seating. I find this a little too comfortable and a little too low, and makes me feel like I'm watching TV. A lot of western restaurants also have this idea, and sit you in a couch at your table. Here are some pictures. You'll notice the red banner above the stage stating what the performance is and why it's being held. The Chinese love their red banners. Which appear for various events and to convey various messages, both inside and outside.
The orchestra:
The Chinese Flinstones:
Dance acts:
4. Playing with a Chinese orchestra
When I was looking around for a violin teacher, my friend He wen juan went to the effort of finding out that there was no orchestra at the university, but there was one at the best high school in town. Her painting teacher's daughter played the cello in it, and with their help she'd arranged for me to try it out. If I liked it, I could probably join. So, I went along on a Saturday afternoon last month. I should have found out a little more about it before. Or maybe I should have just figured it out for myself. The musicians were all high school students, about 16-17 years old. I really enjoyed experiencing the rehearsal, if only to find out that it was much like many rehearsals I've been to before. We played one piece, by a Korean composer, which I didn't care much for d'ailleurs, for 2.5 hours. It was, in short, a high school orchestra. The kids didn't pay much attention, they chatted and passed messages on their cell phones, some trying to find out who I was. The cymbal player kept giggling when she was called out several times for coming in at the wrong place. Though I felt bad because my friend had put such effort into finding this orchestra for me, ultimately it was an easy decision not to join. My strongest feeling was how familiar this felt - I've been in this kind of orchestra before - and that's not what I was looking for. Instead, I have found something else...
5. Violin lessons
Another friend, who's father teaches dance, connected me with a violin teacher or works and lives in the same place. So for the past month, on Sunday evening, I go for my hour long violin lesson and have dinner with my friend and his family. This friend has recently left town, but I've become a weekly regular, and enjoy both eating meals in a home (though it isn't by any means home-cooked with any warm cozy connotation), and studying Chinese/English with my friend's 13 year old half brother, who's actually a pretty good teacher :). But anyway, about the lessons -- I was initially impressed by the way my teacher picked up on everything I knew I do wrong from the very start. He recommended books for me to buy and gives me a variety of things to practice from them each week. I've got a book of Chinese pieces, and one of western classical pieces. As you might imagine, the vocabulary can be pretty tough. They're on the do-re-mi system, like France was, so instead of referring to the notes by letter names, they get a name on the do-re-mi scale with do set as C. The classical pieces are still marked with Italian, just as I'm used to, and there's a handy glassary in the back of one of my books defining them in Chinese.
Chinese is extremely logical, but sometimes that logic doesn't fit with my idea of what is logical. I am ever confused by two directional terms: 上 and 下. These are opposites - in front of words like 'month' or 'time' using the first then means 'last month' or 'last time' and using the second means 'next.' But these terms also mean above and below, respectively (can't you tell from the characters?). For whatever reason, I have trouble though with the association of 'above' and 'last,' because to me these just don't seem like the same idea. And now I've got another, which is that a downbow is '下 bow' and upbow is '上 bow.' Another example is that the strings are numbered from top to bottom, with the highest being 1 and lowest 4. I can't remember if this is how I would have done it before, but in any case I got it wrong at first. Mostly though, I like learning this vocabulary - spiccato (jumping bow), staccato, vibrato, harmonics, quarter note, etc. And I like playing Mongolian shepherd's songs, and songs for Spring Festival, or celebrating a return from service in the Chinese army.
I also enjoy the metaphors my teacher comes up with to explain techniques or feeling in the music. Sometimes they take a really long time to understand because I'm missing vocabulary, like when he tried to explain that this bowing motion should resemble the way lotus root has all these gooey fibers that gracefully but resistantly stretch out when you cut it into slices. Or when he explained that I shouldn't bend my right wrist because it would prevent the flow from my shoulder through my arm and into the violin like a kink in a hose, and instead should be like the spout on a tea kettle. Figuring out who the pieces are by in my book of western music and exercise books is also not easy - as I said before, the Chinese adapt names from any other language into their syllabic system, making them often unrecognizable until you already know who they're supposed to be. For instance, Vivaldi, since Chinese has no 'v' sound, is 'wei er di,' and Kreutzer is Ke lai cai er. I remember loving the sound of 'mesopotamia' in chinese, and it cracks me up at times to hear famous people's names - you can imagine brad pitt and arnold schwarzenegger, perhaps, chinese-icized.
1. Harmonica concert
I usually play tennis on Saturday afternoons, but this week my tennis friend Tian wu xing asked if I'd be interested to come along to a '口琴/kouqin' concert. He'd recently started taking lessons, and his teacher had organized a concert bringing together kouqin experts from all across China or something. So I looked up 'kouqin,' which literaly means 'mouth instrument,' in my dictionary. My faithful dictionary said it meant 'harmonica,' but I didn't believe it and decided it must be some kind of Chinese wind instrument that didn't have a proper English translation. This was eing taken way to seriously to be about harmonicas. To my surprise, which I had to keep my insides from laughing about for a good 15 minutes, it was indeed a harmonica concert. I even got to hear 'eine kleine nachtmusik' performed by five harmonicas. It was even better than the lady who plays baroque melodies on the flutaphone. Unfortunately the concert was preceded by an hour long 'meeting' held by these harmonica experts which I don't think anyone in the audience paid attention to, and whose purpose still evades me.
The empty stage:
The kids warming up noisily behind us:
Wu xing and I discussing the program, learning useful new vocabulary such as 'arranged by' and wondering why the actual composers were not listed for most of the pieces. Plus you can see my hair slowly turning brown again:
Another friend, Wang hai feng, who also came along:
And here's an idea, though dark, of what the long pre-concert meeting was like:
Honestly, though, I enjoyed the concert, because practicing even the harmonica for years has good results. My friend's teacher has been playing the harmonica for over 60 years, and his son and grandsons also performed impressively. It was something else to watch teenage boys playing four harmonicas at once, stacked on top of eachother. It was even wackier to see full-grown men in suits pecking their heads from side to across a tiny instrument, or sliding a really long, deep one like a typewriter. There were groups of little children, too, and at the end they all came together for a finale. Harmonicas played classical works, and various kinds of Chinese or Chinese minority tunes. I've never known anyone to really take this instrument anywhere near this seriously. I don't know if this is a cultural difference, there may well be harmonica players in the US and they're just not very public about it? Or, I may just have happend on the rare case of it in China. I wish I had a recording, but I forgot my camera (pics are not mine). Here we go:
The kids go first:
And a soloist with a table of about 7 harmonicas in front of him, usually playing 2-3 at a time:
A grown trio:
A combined medley across generations to finish:
2. Student Talent Show
A couple weeks ago, I tried to go to the Lanzhou University Graduate student singing talent show. I went because my friend Travis, one of my two American friends, was performing. This was the final round - there were only 15 contestants left. He was quite the talk around campus, apparently, because it's very unusual for a foreigner to participate in this event. Frankly it's no wonder because it's impossible for us to figure out anything that's going on on campus. I still don't know where things are posted or how to sort through the Chinese even if I find something that looks like an activity (and is why I find myself saying over and over, 'a friend helped me find..., a friend told me about.... that's really how I get to know most things here). Anyway, the place was too small and packed, but I was trying to show support for my fellow countryman and fought my way in the back, where I could stand on tiptoes, squeezed in neck to neck with a whole lot of people.
This was definitely the place to be. As the first singers went through their routines, though, I become really unimpressed. The sound system was terrible - sometimes you could hardly hear the singing, and they just weren't very good. I've heard much better at KTV (karaoke)!! Thinking about it later, I think the kids just don't have any experience either performing or watching their peers perform. Also, most have little musical background. Only a small percentage have had the opportunity to study a musical instrument, which is very different from the US where a lot of kids have at least dabbled in a school band or orchestra. Maybe my expectations were too high. Travis, honestly, was decent -- he just started Chinese this past summer but he's a really eager, happy-go-lucky guy...he played the guitar to accompany his song (the only performer who played an instrument), which was half in English and half in Chinese. As he walked on stage I heard murmurs of 'he's so tall!!' as they had to raise the mike as far as it would go for him. He was pretty good, but still, his guitar was all blurry and his words hard to make out. Maybe from the front the sound was a bit better but I doubt it. He got a lot of shouts for singing in Chinese, and I was glad I had suffered through the near suffocating body heat that was surrounding me. After his number, I booked it out of there.
3. Orchestra of Chinese instruments
Back in October, the school took us to see a performance of Chinese traditional music and dance, especially featuring various ethnic groups from here and nearby regions of northwestern China. I absolutely loved the first half, which was a concert by an orchestra of traditional instruments -- I'd heard of the erhu, which has two strings and is held on the lap (see instruments on left, video below), but didn't know much about what others were like (you can see lute-like pipas and hear some great Chinese drumming). Then there were cymbols and a bass drum and a couple out of place looking cellos. If you look carefully in the back you can see a string bass or two, as well. I have no idea if this is some modern arrangement, if there once were Chinese instruments in this range, or what. Below are a couple photos of the orchestra and later a smaller ensemble that played, and some from the second half which was dance, filled with elaborate costumes and visual effects. The Chinese also have this thing about putting you in couches -- most of the seats were couches rather than chairs or auditorium seating. I find this a little too comfortable and a little too low, and makes me feel like I'm watching TV. A lot of western restaurants also have this idea, and sit you in a couch at your table. Here are some pictures. You'll notice the red banner above the stage stating what the performance is and why it's being held. The Chinese love their red banners. Which appear for various events and to convey various messages, both inside and outside.
The orchestra:
The Chinese Flinstones:
Dance acts:
4. Playing with a Chinese orchestra
When I was looking around for a violin teacher, my friend He wen juan went to the effort of finding out that there was no orchestra at the university, but there was one at the best high school in town. Her painting teacher's daughter played the cello in it, and with their help she'd arranged for me to try it out. If I liked it, I could probably join. So, I went along on a Saturday afternoon last month. I should have found out a little more about it before. Or maybe I should have just figured it out for myself. The musicians were all high school students, about 16-17 years old. I really enjoyed experiencing the rehearsal, if only to find out that it was much like many rehearsals I've been to before. We played one piece, by a Korean composer, which I didn't care much for d'ailleurs, for 2.5 hours. It was, in short, a high school orchestra. The kids didn't pay much attention, they chatted and passed messages on their cell phones, some trying to find out who I was. The cymbal player kept giggling when she was called out several times for coming in at the wrong place. Though I felt bad because my friend had put such effort into finding this orchestra for me, ultimately it was an easy decision not to join. My strongest feeling was how familiar this felt - I've been in this kind of orchestra before - and that's not what I was looking for. Instead, I have found something else...
5. Violin lessons
Another friend, who's father teaches dance, connected me with a violin teacher or works and lives in the same place. So for the past month, on Sunday evening, I go for my hour long violin lesson and have dinner with my friend and his family. This friend has recently left town, but I've become a weekly regular, and enjoy both eating meals in a home (though it isn't by any means home-cooked with any warm cozy connotation), and studying Chinese/English with my friend's 13 year old half brother, who's actually a pretty good teacher :). But anyway, about the lessons -- I was initially impressed by the way my teacher picked up on everything I knew I do wrong from the very start. He recommended books for me to buy and gives me a variety of things to practice from them each week. I've got a book of Chinese pieces, and one of western classical pieces. As you might imagine, the vocabulary can be pretty tough. They're on the do-re-mi system, like France was, so instead of referring to the notes by letter names, they get a name on the do-re-mi scale with do set as C. The classical pieces are still marked with Italian, just as I'm used to, and there's a handy glassary in the back of one of my books defining them in Chinese.
Chinese is extremely logical, but sometimes that logic doesn't fit with my idea of what is logical. I am ever confused by two directional terms: 上 and 下. These are opposites - in front of words like 'month' or 'time' using the first then means 'last month' or 'last time' and using the second means 'next.' But these terms also mean above and below, respectively (can't you tell from the characters?). For whatever reason, I have trouble though with the association of 'above' and 'last,' because to me these just don't seem like the same idea. And now I've got another, which is that a downbow is '下 bow' and upbow is '上 bow.' Another example is that the strings are numbered from top to bottom, with the highest being 1 and lowest 4. I can't remember if this is how I would have done it before, but in any case I got it wrong at first. Mostly though, I like learning this vocabulary - spiccato (jumping bow), staccato, vibrato, harmonics, quarter note, etc. And I like playing Mongolian shepherd's songs, and songs for Spring Festival, or celebrating a return from service in the Chinese army.
I also enjoy the metaphors my teacher comes up with to explain techniques or feeling in the music. Sometimes they take a really long time to understand because I'm missing vocabulary, like when he tried to explain that this bowing motion should resemble the way lotus root has all these gooey fibers that gracefully but resistantly stretch out when you cut it into slices. Or when he explained that I shouldn't bend my right wrist because it would prevent the flow from my shoulder through my arm and into the violin like a kink in a hose, and instead should be like the spout on a tea kettle. Figuring out who the pieces are by in my book of western music and exercise books is also not easy - as I said before, the Chinese adapt names from any other language into their syllabic system, making them often unrecognizable until you already know who they're supposed to be. For instance, Vivaldi, since Chinese has no 'v' sound, is 'wei er di,' and Kreutzer is Ke lai cai er. I remember loving the sound of 'mesopotamia' in chinese, and it cracks me up at times to hear famous people's names - you can imagine brad pitt and arnold schwarzenegger, perhaps, chinese-icized.
Thursday, December 6, 2007
A Day in the Life 1: Friday (morning)
High time for an update, again. I think I'll tell you what my day was like today. It was very uneventful, which makes it great to write about, right?
I woke up just before 9 o'clock, and rushed into the bathroom to get the last of the hot water to wash up a bit (no time for a shower). I usually have oral Chinese class at 9 on Friday mornings, but my teacher had to go out of town this week, so painfully squeezed extra classes in last week. This morning I was thankful. I heated up water for my morning green tea, and made up some oatmeal with honey. Chinese milk is a strange beast. You can buy it in little one-serving bags which keep for 30 days. I dont know what they've done to the milk so that it will last that long, but it's not fresh, and inevitably has flavor. It's usually not a bad flavor, but still, I like my plain milk to taste like milk. Sometimes milk brands admit to actually flavoring their product, which is a pretty popular commodity. Since unflavored milk is flavored too, it sometimes feels good not to be lied to and I too occasionally buy walnut or peanut or wheat flavored milk. Generally not for my oatmeal though.
So I sat at my desk and had my breakfast, putting on a TED talk. I don't know what I'd do without TED and BBC documentaries. Chinese is stimulating to study, of course, but there's some kinds of challenges that it just can't provide. For instance, I just can't think complex things in Chinese, and as noted before, I can't read what's around me, and media in English is sparse to say the least. So, I rely heavily on online news, BBC documentaries (I'm almost done with 'Days that Shook the World') and TED talks. The TED talks (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design) are from an annual conference which invites really interesting people working in any field that touches even remotely on those topics to give a 20 minute talk or performance. Speakers have included Al Gore and Richard Dawkins, but most of them are people doing really cool stuff I've never heard about. Today I watched a biology professor at Berkeley talk about designing robotic feet from a combination of strategy ideas inspired by, among others, octupi, spiders, crabs, and geckos especially. Yesterday, I watched a mathemetician who talked about his project to study the way African villages were often constructed in the form of fractals. Anyway, site is highly recommended (www.ted.com).
Breakfast over, I started to preview a bit for my 11:00 listening class. I find I have to be careful with the previewing. I like to look up the characters I don't know ahead of time so that I won't waste my time listening to a whole discussion featuring one or a few words I don't understand, when if I'd just looked them up before I'd have been able to follow the whole thing. But, if I preview too thoroughly, class can get really boring. The biggest complaint I have about my classes here is that they all strictly follow a book. Honestly, the teachers are just there guide you through the book. They don't come up with exercises or activities, they rarely assign or look at homework, and every single unit of the books takes the exact same form, as does the way the teacher goes through them. Personally, I learned how to read and do exercises in a textbook by myself a long time ago, what I want is a teacher who is able to get me to use what I'm reading, able to explain it orally in a way that a book can't, and answer my questions about the language. There is time for questions, but I tend to either have none, or have too many, because I haven't understood anything we've just done. Plus, since the classes are all in Chinese, it's hard for the teacher to give an explanation for something we don't understand that's simple enough for us to understand...it's very easy for the explanation to turn out to be harder to understand than the original concept.
Back to listening class. I particularly dislike this class. First of all, I feel like most of my life here is a listening class, so it's not very useful. We've recently changed teachers, but I don't find either of them particularly inspiring. The first teacher used to talk unbearably slowly. Many of my classmates didn't mind, but I was particularly frustrated by this. We all spoke faster than him. How could he possibly not notice this? Finally we (I) were sort of complaining to another teacher about this and she told him. After that it got a bit better. Still, he struck me as condescending to us, and treated everything as if we didn't know. Every other sentence was 'do you understand?,' he'd even ask us silly things like, 'do you know what 'time' means?.' I just really didn't understand - we were studying difficult words too like how to say the nape of your neck and latitude. Last week he announced that something had come up and he wouldn't be able to teach us anymore.
I was apprehensive about what the new teacher would be like, and rightly so. I mean, she's ok, but again it goes back to the point that I don't really need a teacher if all she's going to do is read the book to me. Basically she just tells us which exerciese to do in the book, turns the tape recordings on and off and goes over the answers (which are in the back anyway). At least she speaks quickly, but she has a habit of translating words absolutely unnecessarily into English. I wouldn't mind if she were translating words that I didn't know, but she's not. She'll translate 'heart,' for example, or 'baby'. I'm the only one in my class who's first language is English, and though some of them speak quite well, nearly all speak better Chinese than English. Plus, I'm not very patient.
This makes me think of another issue which has been something to deal with - how do I want to be treated in conversation with a Chinese person? Ideally, of course, the answer is that I would like to spoken to the same way as if I were a native speaker. I do hope to get there, but at this point that's not necessarily the best scenario, because I'm likely to miss things and not understand at points. I have some friends who do this, and I like them for it. Sometimes I just have to let things slide by that they say, but I learn the most from them. I have always thought this was important when speaking to foreigners in the US or in England -- not to dumb down the language at all because hearing it the way it is spoken is why they came, and is essential for improvement. There is also the case of Chinese who want to speak to me in English, of course. I am generally strongly against this -- I came to China to study Chinese. If you, friend, want to learn English then why don't you displace yourself and go to the US? The argument doesn't work as well here as in Europe per se, because it's not so easy for my peers to go abroad, even if they do want to. So I occasionally tolerate it, but my response is always in Chinese. Most Chinese students my age have studied English for many years, but can hardly speak. They're mostly happy to slip into Chinese then and have some discussion. Their vocabulary is extensive, but are uncomfortable with conversation.
So I sat through my Chinese listening class, which involved listening with lots of numbers, and writing them accurantly in the blanks in the book, distinguishing between similar sounding sentences, and deciding on the 'mood/tone' of a sequence of statements. Oh, and there was also a dialogue about the growing elderly population in various countries in the world, following by questions to check comprehension. The class is an hour and forty minutes long, as are all my classes. Afterwards, I went to have dumplings for lunch with some classmates. I don't eat dumplings very often, but I like them a lot because they're good, and because they change things up from the usual rice or pulled noodles. We went to a chain this time, and each ordered about 20. I had a combination of lamb and turnip, three mushroom, and a toufu/vegetable mix. Dipped in a mixture of vinegar and hot sauce, they're quite tasty.
I apologize for only getting through the morning, but that's a lot to read already. Maybe next week you'll get to hear about Friday afternoon :)
I woke up just before 9 o'clock, and rushed into the bathroom to get the last of the hot water to wash up a bit (no time for a shower). I usually have oral Chinese class at 9 on Friday mornings, but my teacher had to go out of town this week, so painfully squeezed extra classes in last week. This morning I was thankful. I heated up water for my morning green tea, and made up some oatmeal with honey. Chinese milk is a strange beast. You can buy it in little one-serving bags which keep for 30 days. I dont know what they've done to the milk so that it will last that long, but it's not fresh, and inevitably has flavor. It's usually not a bad flavor, but still, I like my plain milk to taste like milk. Sometimes milk brands admit to actually flavoring their product, which is a pretty popular commodity. Since unflavored milk is flavored too, it sometimes feels good not to be lied to and I too occasionally buy walnut or peanut or wheat flavored milk. Generally not for my oatmeal though.
So I sat at my desk and had my breakfast, putting on a TED talk. I don't know what I'd do without TED and BBC documentaries. Chinese is stimulating to study, of course, but there's some kinds of challenges that it just can't provide. For instance, I just can't think complex things in Chinese, and as noted before, I can't read what's around me, and media in English is sparse to say the least. So, I rely heavily on online news, BBC documentaries (I'm almost done with 'Days that Shook the World') and TED talks. The TED talks (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design) are from an annual conference which invites really interesting people working in any field that touches even remotely on those topics to give a 20 minute talk or performance. Speakers have included Al Gore and Richard Dawkins, but most of them are people doing really cool stuff I've never heard about. Today I watched a biology professor at Berkeley talk about designing robotic feet from a combination of strategy ideas inspired by, among others, octupi, spiders, crabs, and geckos especially. Yesterday, I watched a mathemetician who talked about his project to study the way African villages were often constructed in the form of fractals. Anyway, site is highly recommended (www.ted.com).
Breakfast over, I started to preview a bit for my 11:00 listening class. I find I have to be careful with the previewing. I like to look up the characters I don't know ahead of time so that I won't waste my time listening to a whole discussion featuring one or a few words I don't understand, when if I'd just looked them up before I'd have been able to follow the whole thing. But, if I preview too thoroughly, class can get really boring. The biggest complaint I have about my classes here is that they all strictly follow a book. Honestly, the teachers are just there guide you through the book. They don't come up with exercises or activities, they rarely assign or look at homework, and every single unit of the books takes the exact same form, as does the way the teacher goes through them. Personally, I learned how to read and do exercises in a textbook by myself a long time ago, what I want is a teacher who is able to get me to use what I'm reading, able to explain it orally in a way that a book can't, and answer my questions about the language. There is time for questions, but I tend to either have none, or have too many, because I haven't understood anything we've just done. Plus, since the classes are all in Chinese, it's hard for the teacher to give an explanation for something we don't understand that's simple enough for us to understand...it's very easy for the explanation to turn out to be harder to understand than the original concept.
Back to listening class. I particularly dislike this class. First of all, I feel like most of my life here is a listening class, so it's not very useful. We've recently changed teachers, but I don't find either of them particularly inspiring. The first teacher used to talk unbearably slowly. Many of my classmates didn't mind, but I was particularly frustrated by this. We all spoke faster than him. How could he possibly not notice this? Finally we (I) were sort of complaining to another teacher about this and she told him. After that it got a bit better. Still, he struck me as condescending to us, and treated everything as if we didn't know. Every other sentence was 'do you understand?,' he'd even ask us silly things like, 'do you know what 'time' means?.' I just really didn't understand - we were studying difficult words too like how to say the nape of your neck and latitude. Last week he announced that something had come up and he wouldn't be able to teach us anymore.
I was apprehensive about what the new teacher would be like, and rightly so. I mean, she's ok, but again it goes back to the point that I don't really need a teacher if all she's going to do is read the book to me. Basically she just tells us which exerciese to do in the book, turns the tape recordings on and off and goes over the answers (which are in the back anyway). At least she speaks quickly, but she has a habit of translating words absolutely unnecessarily into English. I wouldn't mind if she were translating words that I didn't know, but she's not. She'll translate 'heart,' for example, or 'baby'. I'm the only one in my class who's first language is English, and though some of them speak quite well, nearly all speak better Chinese than English. Plus, I'm not very patient.
This makes me think of another issue which has been something to deal with - how do I want to be treated in conversation with a Chinese person? Ideally, of course, the answer is that I would like to spoken to the same way as if I were a native speaker. I do hope to get there, but at this point that's not necessarily the best scenario, because I'm likely to miss things and not understand at points. I have some friends who do this, and I like them for it. Sometimes I just have to let things slide by that they say, but I learn the most from them. I have always thought this was important when speaking to foreigners in the US or in England -- not to dumb down the language at all because hearing it the way it is spoken is why they came, and is essential for improvement. There is also the case of Chinese who want to speak to me in English, of course. I am generally strongly against this -- I came to China to study Chinese. If you, friend, want to learn English then why don't you displace yourself and go to the US? The argument doesn't work as well here as in Europe per se, because it's not so easy for my peers to go abroad, even if they do want to. So I occasionally tolerate it, but my response is always in Chinese. Most Chinese students my age have studied English for many years, but can hardly speak. They're mostly happy to slip into Chinese then and have some discussion. Their vocabulary is extensive, but are uncomfortable with conversation.
So I sat through my Chinese listening class, which involved listening with lots of numbers, and writing them accurantly in the blanks in the book, distinguishing between similar sounding sentences, and deciding on the 'mood/tone' of a sequence of statements. Oh, and there was also a dialogue about the growing elderly population in various countries in the world, following by questions to check comprehension. The class is an hour and forty minutes long, as are all my classes. Afterwards, I went to have dumplings for lunch with some classmates. I don't eat dumplings very often, but I like them a lot because they're good, and because they change things up from the usual rice or pulled noodles. We went to a chain this time, and each ordered about 20. I had a combination of lamb and turnip, three mushroom, and a toufu/vegetable mix. Dipped in a mixture of vinegar and hot sauce, they're quite tasty.
I apologize for only getting through the morning, but that's a lot to read already. Maybe next week you'll get to hear about Friday afternoon :)
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