re: snarls
the unwashed proles? seriously? social darwinism, white man's burden, eugenics, man, you've got it all. good thing your chinese is so freaking sweet you can read a book when all the "plebian masses" get sick of listening to you.
okay. that was mean. and i do think you're making a good point in here somewhere. as someone more eloquent than me said:
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/you-dont-have-a-foreign-language-problem-you-have-an-adult-literacy-problem
it frustrates the hell out of me, too, when people say, "oh, i'm not learning the characters, they're too hard, and i can talk to people just fine without them." they are hard, but that's no excuse to stay illiterate and expect the people who did learn the characters to have sympathy for you when you can't read a menu or find your way on a subway map.
more often than not, though, the part of me that gets pissed off at those people is the same part of me that gets pissed off at MYSELF for not be able to keep up with a conversation that goes over my head or running into a character that i know i've seen a million times and can't quite place it or a chengyu that i can't make heads or tails of. there is no need to put other people down to make ourselves feel better. because they only bug us because they ARE us, however many years of dictionaries and flashcards earlier.
-nick
That last entry of mine really seems to have hit a nerve, and it's best expressed by this comment. I guess I've always had to answer this question one way or another, so here goes.
"How did your Chinese get so good?" Locals and expats alike feel the need to inquire about this several times a day, even as my Chinese is nothing I feel like I have any qualification to wave around and club other people with. The trigger for my last post was an unsolicited message on my long-warehoused OKcupid account where I posted a snarky dogwhistle-type screed in my profile in Chinese, and a less-so one in English. I got a message from yet another college student in the States who was all "OMG you learned Chinese I'm so jealous". I answered as nicely as I could, with a "Yeah, kind of, but it's never something you're done with, so don't get all idol-worshippy, I'm always down to hang if you make it over." (For the record, yes my profile says in big loud letters that I'm married and mean it).
But I sent it, and then I looked at it, and then I squinted at it, and then The Rage came upon me. GRARGRARLAOWAI and I let The Rage loose upon an unsuspecting internet, and I guess I should have expected what came next. But the thing is, people ask me that question, and they don't know about The Rage. They don't know how crucial it is to my language-learning process, and what lessons they should take away from that. It's not something I can explain in 5 minutes in a bar. I can say read a book, I can say the key to remembering vocabulary is forgetting and remembering, I can say it takes patience and determination and you've gotta get yourself in that headspace...but it's the rare man who actually listens. You can find all that crap anywhere in the CFL sphere, on blogs and advice sites and forums. Nobody needs that advice from me.
Don't be all looking at me like I'm James Frey, yo. The Rage is my secret, and it's intensely personal, and it's hard to generalize from it lessons and advice that you can take home and use. 99% of it is about me and my personality. And the 1% of it that you can use is a real long fucking roundabout. But now that I've posted it, I do owe an explanation in language that doesn't expect you to be inside my frame of reference.
First, the register I wrote that post in was put there partly because I'm frustrated with the EFL and CFL and foreign language studies all over the world. When you open your textbook and learn Chinese, Yuehan goes to the supermarket and comes home where Xiao Hong cooks dinner. And then they go to the museum and Tiananmen. The article linked in the comment above does a good job of expounding on how I feel about that:
Most learners of a foreign language - any foreign language - remain, like a novice skater to the wall of the rink, glued to their textbooks: a boring, sanitized, artificial, mutant subset of their target language. As a result, if they get good at anything at all, they get good at handling a boring, sanitized, artificial, mutant subset of…you get the picture. Their exposure to native materials is insufficient at best if not non-existent. And their language skills suffer accordingly.
That article also does a good number on the history of Western views of Eastern scripts, which...I mean, can we get over that already? They are not better or worse, just different. And yet, from both sides of the gap, I encounter such bullshit as would make a Kemp's cess pond blush. Chinese learning English say it's easy but never think about the spelling and whine about their inability to remember words while their only mnemonic tool is a list in a notebook, Anglophones learning Chinese say it's hard with the characters and tones and bitch about the tones and whine about how Pleco doesn't work on their iPod.
And then there's always that one dumbass on the language forums who tells the story of the joke in Mandarin he labored over all afternoon to get just right. He tried real hard and checked the grammar books and asked his pals on QQ and it just fell flat at dinner, none of the "Chinese friends" (I hate that term so much) laughed. Oh, sure, he explained it and the Chinese friends then chuckled politely and corrected him and told him how it could have worked and consoled him with affirmations that it's not easy to get this far and that his pronunciation is A++ and told him to keep studying and that one day they'd laugh for sure.
But what rarely, if ever gets posted is the followup to that story. That is, this guy then goes home, sulks for a few days, goes back to his textbook, and then stumbles on a grammar lesson explaining the very principle his joke turned on. So he goes back, and looks at the joke again, and...what do you know, it still looks sound. So he dusts it off and gets ready to tell it again, probably after a few beers with people he knows and trusts and likes. Now we're loosened up, the alcohol's tearing the nervous sheen off his Mandarin, and he's rolling. He hesitates, then lets rip with a joke that nearly brings down the table it's so funny. The waiters have to come over with extra napkins and for the rest of the bull session, that joke gets repeated again and again by the native Sinophones at the table. It's the most hilarious thing they've ever heard, and our guy is The Man for the rest of the night. Keep studying, dude, you're kicking ass and taking names. He goes home drunk and content.
But he wakes up the next morning and thinks about why it fell flat the first time. A third check of grammar/vocab/pronunciation affirms no problems. And so he's wondering what the hell happened back there. Obviously it wasn't the language, so...what was it? The Joke That Died is a parable, and it tells us something besides language proficiency is impacting communication.
Don't you dare tell me "Chinese people have a different sense of humor." You put that thought away right now, because that is the biggest non-answer in the history of armchair Sinology. No, it's a lot more complicated than that. It's a lot more nuanced than that. It runs straight through the talks about how xiangsheng and sarcasm play differently in the West and East and the oriental preference for blatant slapstick, turns around, punches that debate right in its stupid face, flies right back through it and does a run around sociology and group and communication psychology, makes a left at intercultural sensitivity, stops and does a Chinese fire drill at the light on the corner of memetics and body chemistry, then takes the acoustics interchange onto the bell curve highway, merges into the fast lane, and rams into your brain at 70mph.
The answer is actually simpler than that - 1st time wrong audience, 2nd time right audience. And in English, we know that. We, as language learners, are also at least peripherally aware of all the things that can impact communication beyond language proficiency. We know that taken to their extreme, the definitions of culture and topolect leave all of us swimming in a sea of hyper-local languages and social settings that we struggle to adapt to even in our native language. And we're aware of the fact that that is how the world works, right? We know that no matter where you go, you're going to meet people with different personalities, different ways of speaking, different styles of learning, different tolerances for obscenity, and that even in the same person, those conditions vary over time. Now scale those principles to groups of people in a culture you know nothing about. Now imagine the number of people on earth. If this post were a movie, we'd have a trippy montage here about the incomprehensibility of infinity or something.
Pleco and a list of words can't help you with that. But the foreign language-learning community, especially the Asiatic ones, seem a little blind to those facts. So many people, so much of the time, get frustrated in their study process because of things that have absolutely nothing to do with language proficiency. The foreign language-learning community (for reasons I can partially understand, there are only 24 hours in a day) doesn't even seem to address these things.
And if you think that's a plate of beans, consider the ubiquitous English student. They seem a little crazy because, in my opinion, they are. They drink Li Yang's koolaid because English, combined with the stress of tests and jobs and the lack of an environment in which to practice it and the love-hate relationship the media and the culture has with the developed world turns English into an 800-pound gorilla that's rampaging around the room, NOT sitting quietly in the corner. I had one student, 40+, happily single, smart as they come, an architect, smart dresser, well-traveled, the lot. She had her shit together. Yet in 10+ years of going from tutor to tutor and textbook to textbook (post-college), she hadn't ever once communicated effectively beyond greetings. So I said come practice with me. Come meet my friends, they'd like you. Come to a Bookworm lecture, come read some websites I like. It's not like her vocab and listening weren't up to it...but she wouldn't. Just wouldn't. No. She was so nervous when an English-speaking friend of mine showed up that she cried. An extreme example, but you cannot tell me that those non-linguistic frustrations don't affect us.
It's like losing weight or dating in the US. People don't understand it, feel like they can't control it, and bullshit abounds. Li Yang and Crazy English are the Atkins and Taibo of EFL. Countless numbers of people give up and get frustrated. People feel deflated and worthless because of it. That "laowai pride" you'll hear Chinese people talk about might be, in part, caused by the fact that we feel we don't fit in here. Some people have crazy compensation mechanisms, and a lot more people just give up and go home.
How much of those frustrations have to do with language proficiency, and how much have to do with something else?
And alright, let's say you're not afflicted by the crazy. Let's say you're perfectly good and sane and aren't having an identity or confidence crisis (however small) because you're frustrated with trying to reach out and communicate across the cultural gap. The same principles still apply:
good thing your chinese is so freaking sweet you can read a book when all the "plebian masses" get sick of listening to you.
How'd you know? They do get sick of listening to me. My wife, however, seems not to. Then again, she's the woman who was wandering around with me the other night (remember she won't touch anything unhealthy, no alcohol, no caffeine, no drugs of any kind), asking strangers if they wanted any of Aunt Flo's Sprite. If you don't want to talk about the kind of communication dynamics that fudge up 2L acquisition, the communication dynamics that make that funny to her (and me) are just as interesting.
Personally, I'd call it a frame of reference issue. And I'd wager that whatever your reaction to that might be, it's not boredom (well, ok, you had to be there). It's the kind of intimate, ingroup-affirming communication that friendships and relationships are built on. The larger your frame of reference, the more capable you are of forming those connections. So how do you expand your frame of reference to things outside of language proficiency in such a way that they're helpful to you in communicating across cultures, or subcultures, or whatever in-groups you aren't a member of yet?
Well, for me, it was The Rage. Really. I have no secret to learning a language. Instead, I have...anger issues. We need not go into the details of how I got them, but suffice it to say I got them early and got them alongside a pleasure in details. And that makes me: a snob. I am the hate camel, and I hate with an attenuation impenetrable to the average angermonger. I hate tech house, I hate Ben Gibbard, I love garbage house, I love American Analog Set. I hate fish on the bone and will not eat it, but gimme that tuna. I don't share a lot of love for The Onion, but I love McSweeney's like nobody's business. xkcd is passe, achewood is timeless. I am compelled, I am driven, I am addicted, I must analyze and separate and compartmentalize and then, ever so gingerly, turn my nose up. Obviously that didn't earn me many friends, but it did leave me with a stronger sense of self and a deeper connection to my culture. I cling to my sarcasm and my classification systems in English - to survive as I was in China, I had to learn to do the same. I came into China with linguistic goals entirely different from most. My goalpost was (silly, I know) to criticize, to be smarmy, to be a cultural critic the likes of which they'd never seen.
And that's it. That's my secret. An immature desire to be better-than-thou, even if I had to do it in a 2nd language. Referring back to my own culture doesn't work. Europe tried that in the colonial era...and it didn't work. They came out looking like asses and rightfully so, what with all that racial typology and bullcrap about civilizing other cultures. So that's right out. No, I was out for pwnage and lulz, pure and simple. Pwn the world.
Well...I didn't really manage to do it. But I did learn a lot in the attempt. And in my attempts to pwn China, I learned that the dynamics of their own culture are just as varied and complex as my own, and that I had to get up to speed if I was going to even come close. The ways of the pwn are myriad and profound, and they deserved study. But the rules governing the pwn are the same that govern all human interactions, and they are, as the reams of ineffectual eloquence on the internet prove, not limited to language proficiency. And that's why I knew, when I preened a joke for 3 hours and it fell flat, that it was probably not the joke. It was the frame of reference that needed fixing, not my grammar.
So. The takeaway from all that is that if you want to really learn a language to the point where you can use it effectively, for pwning and other purposes, you have to get inside the heads of people who speak it. Then, and only then, can you circumvent the culture gap. Until you do, your interactions are limited not only by how well you speak the language, but by how well you can engage your listener's frame of reference. Communication suffers when you can't. Books...are generally the easiest way to do that. Once you've had a conversation about all the kinds of 韭菜 there are with the lady who makes your dumplings, what do you have in common? Shared humanity? Please. You and 6 billion other people. I'm sorry, but it gets boring after awhile. Shared humanity is a good start, but it only gets you so far.
So what's to be done? Books are probably the easiest solution. Seeing as you're learning Chinese and are in China...
was my point.
okay. that was mean. and i do think you're making a good point in here somewhere. as someone more eloquent than me said:
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/you-dont-have-a-foreign-language-problem-you-have-an-adult-literacy-problem
it frustrates the hell out of me, too, when people say, "oh, i'm not learning the characters, they're too hard, and i can talk to people just fine without them." they are hard, but that's no excuse to stay illiterate and expect the people who did learn the characters to have sympathy for you when you can't read a menu or find your way on a subway map.
more often than not, though, the part of me that gets pissed off at those people is the same part of me that gets pissed off at MYSELF for not be able to keep up with a conversation that goes over my head or running into a character that i know i've seen a million times and can't quite place it or a chengyu that i can't make heads or tails of. there is no need to put other people down to make ourselves feel better. because they only bug us because they ARE us, however many years of dictionaries and flashcards earlier.
-nick
That last entry of mine really seems to have hit a nerve, and it's best expressed by this comment. I guess I've always had to answer this question one way or another, so here goes.
"How did your Chinese get so good?" Locals and expats alike feel the need to inquire about this several times a day, even as my Chinese is nothing I feel like I have any qualification to wave around and club other people with. The trigger for my last post was an unsolicited message on my long-warehoused OKcupid account where I posted a snarky dogwhistle-type screed in my profile in Chinese, and a less-so one in English. I got a message from yet another college student in the States who was all "OMG you learned Chinese I'm so jealous". I answered as nicely as I could, with a "Yeah, kind of, but it's never something you're done with, so don't get all idol-worshippy, I'm always down to hang if you make it over." (For the record, yes my profile says in big loud letters that I'm married and mean it).
But I sent it, and then I looked at it, and then I squinted at it, and then The Rage came upon me. GRARGRARLAOWAI and I let The Rage loose upon an unsuspecting internet, and I guess I should have expected what came next. But the thing is, people ask me that question, and they don't know about The Rage. They don't know how crucial it is to my language-learning process, and what lessons they should take away from that. It's not something I can explain in 5 minutes in a bar. I can say read a book, I can say the key to remembering vocabulary is forgetting and remembering, I can say it takes patience and determination and you've gotta get yourself in that headspace...but it's the rare man who actually listens. You can find all that crap anywhere in the CFL sphere, on blogs and advice sites and forums. Nobody needs that advice from me.
Don't be all looking at me like I'm James Frey, yo. The Rage is my secret, and it's intensely personal, and it's hard to generalize from it lessons and advice that you can take home and use. 99% of it is about me and my personality. And the 1% of it that you can use is a real long fucking roundabout. But now that I've posted it, I do owe an explanation in language that doesn't expect you to be inside my frame of reference.
First, the register I wrote that post in was put there partly because I'm frustrated with the EFL and CFL and foreign language studies all over the world. When you open your textbook and learn Chinese, Yuehan goes to the supermarket and comes home where Xiao Hong cooks dinner. And then they go to the museum and Tiananmen. The article linked in the comment above does a good job of expounding on how I feel about that:
Most learners of a foreign language - any foreign language - remain, like a novice skater to the wall of the rink, glued to their textbooks: a boring, sanitized, artificial, mutant subset of their target language. As a result, if they get good at anything at all, they get good at handling a boring, sanitized, artificial, mutant subset of…you get the picture. Their exposure to native materials is insufficient at best if not non-existent. And their language skills suffer accordingly.
That article also does a good number on the history of Western views of Eastern scripts, which...I mean, can we get over that already? They are not better or worse, just different. And yet, from both sides of the gap, I encounter such bullshit as would make a Kemp's cess pond blush. Chinese learning English say it's easy but never think about the spelling and whine about their inability to remember words while their only mnemonic tool is a list in a notebook, Anglophones learning Chinese say it's hard with the characters and tones and bitch about the tones and whine about how Pleco doesn't work on their iPod.
And then there's always that one dumbass on the language forums who tells the story of the joke in Mandarin he labored over all afternoon to get just right. He tried real hard and checked the grammar books and asked his pals on QQ and it just fell flat at dinner, none of the "Chinese friends" (I hate that term so much) laughed. Oh, sure, he explained it and the Chinese friends then chuckled politely and corrected him and told him how it could have worked and consoled him with affirmations that it's not easy to get this far and that his pronunciation is A++ and told him to keep studying and that one day they'd laugh for sure.
But what rarely, if ever gets posted is the followup to that story. That is, this guy then goes home, sulks for a few days, goes back to his textbook, and then stumbles on a grammar lesson explaining the very principle his joke turned on. So he goes back, and looks at the joke again, and...what do you know, it still looks sound. So he dusts it off and gets ready to tell it again, probably after a few beers with people he knows and trusts and likes. Now we're loosened up, the alcohol's tearing the nervous sheen off his Mandarin, and he's rolling. He hesitates, then lets rip with a joke that nearly brings down the table it's so funny. The waiters have to come over with extra napkins and for the rest of the bull session, that joke gets repeated again and again by the native Sinophones at the table. It's the most hilarious thing they've ever heard, and our guy is The Man for the rest of the night. Keep studying, dude, you're kicking ass and taking names. He goes home drunk and content.
But he wakes up the next morning and thinks about why it fell flat the first time. A third check of grammar/vocab/pronunciation affirms no problems. And so he's wondering what the hell happened back there. Obviously it wasn't the language, so...what was it? The Joke That Died is a parable, and it tells us something besides language proficiency is impacting communication.
Don't you dare tell me "Chinese people have a different sense of humor." You put that thought away right now, because that is the biggest non-answer in the history of armchair Sinology. No, it's a lot more complicated than that. It's a lot more nuanced than that. It runs straight through the talks about how xiangsheng and sarcasm play differently in the West and East and the oriental preference for blatant slapstick, turns around, punches that debate right in its stupid face, flies right back through it and does a run around sociology and group and communication psychology, makes a left at intercultural sensitivity, stops and does a Chinese fire drill at the light on the corner of memetics and body chemistry, then takes the acoustics interchange onto the bell curve highway, merges into the fast lane, and rams into your brain at 70mph.
The answer is actually simpler than that - 1st time wrong audience, 2nd time right audience. And in English, we know that. We, as language learners, are also at least peripherally aware of all the things that can impact communication beyond language proficiency. We know that taken to their extreme, the definitions of culture and topolect leave all of us swimming in a sea of hyper-local languages and social settings that we struggle to adapt to even in our native language. And we're aware of the fact that that is how the world works, right? We know that no matter where you go, you're going to meet people with different personalities, different ways of speaking, different styles of learning, different tolerances for obscenity, and that even in the same person, those conditions vary over time. Now scale those principles to groups of people in a culture you know nothing about. Now imagine the number of people on earth. If this post were a movie, we'd have a trippy montage here about the incomprehensibility of infinity or something.
Pleco and a list of words can't help you with that. But the foreign language-learning community, especially the Asiatic ones, seem a little blind to those facts. So many people, so much of the time, get frustrated in their study process because of things that have absolutely nothing to do with language proficiency. The foreign language-learning community (for reasons I can partially understand, there are only 24 hours in a day) doesn't even seem to address these things.
And if you think that's a plate of beans, consider the ubiquitous English student. They seem a little crazy because, in my opinion, they are. They drink Li Yang's koolaid because English, combined with the stress of tests and jobs and the lack of an environment in which to practice it and the love-hate relationship the media and the culture has with the developed world turns English into an 800-pound gorilla that's rampaging around the room, NOT sitting quietly in the corner. I had one student, 40+, happily single, smart as they come, an architect, smart dresser, well-traveled, the lot. She had her shit together. Yet in 10+ years of going from tutor to tutor and textbook to textbook (post-college), she hadn't ever once communicated effectively beyond greetings. So I said come practice with me. Come meet my friends, they'd like you. Come to a Bookworm lecture, come read some websites I like. It's not like her vocab and listening weren't up to it...but she wouldn't. Just wouldn't. No. She was so nervous when an English-speaking friend of mine showed up that she cried. An extreme example, but you cannot tell me that those non-linguistic frustrations don't affect us.
It's like losing weight or dating in the US. People don't understand it, feel like they can't control it, and bullshit abounds. Li Yang and Crazy English are the Atkins and Taibo of EFL. Countless numbers of people give up and get frustrated. People feel deflated and worthless because of it. That "laowai pride" you'll hear Chinese people talk about might be, in part, caused by the fact that we feel we don't fit in here. Some people have crazy compensation mechanisms, and a lot more people just give up and go home.
How much of those frustrations have to do with language proficiency, and how much have to do with something else?
And alright, let's say you're not afflicted by the crazy. Let's say you're perfectly good and sane and aren't having an identity or confidence crisis (however small) because you're frustrated with trying to reach out and communicate across the cultural gap. The same principles still apply:
good thing your chinese is so freaking sweet you can read a book when all the "plebian masses" get sick of listening to you.
How'd you know? They do get sick of listening to me. My wife, however, seems not to. Then again, she's the woman who was wandering around with me the other night (remember she won't touch anything unhealthy, no alcohol, no caffeine, no drugs of any kind), asking strangers if they wanted any of Aunt Flo's Sprite. If you don't want to talk about the kind of communication dynamics that fudge up 2L acquisition, the communication dynamics that make that funny to her (and me) are just as interesting.
Personally, I'd call it a frame of reference issue. And I'd wager that whatever your reaction to that might be, it's not boredom (well, ok, you had to be there). It's the kind of intimate, ingroup-affirming communication that friendships and relationships are built on. The larger your frame of reference, the more capable you are of forming those connections. So how do you expand your frame of reference to things outside of language proficiency in such a way that they're helpful to you in communicating across cultures, or subcultures, or whatever in-groups you aren't a member of yet?
Well, for me, it was The Rage. Really. I have no secret to learning a language. Instead, I have...anger issues. We need not go into the details of how I got them, but suffice it to say I got them early and got them alongside a pleasure in details. And that makes me: a snob. I am the hate camel, and I hate with an attenuation impenetrable to the average angermonger. I hate tech house, I hate Ben Gibbard, I love garbage house, I love American Analog Set. I hate fish on the bone and will not eat it, but gimme that tuna. I don't share a lot of love for The Onion, but I love McSweeney's like nobody's business. xkcd is passe, achewood is timeless. I am compelled, I am driven, I am addicted, I must analyze and separate and compartmentalize and then, ever so gingerly, turn my nose up. Obviously that didn't earn me many friends, but it did leave me with a stronger sense of self and a deeper connection to my culture. I cling to my sarcasm and my classification systems in English - to survive as I was in China, I had to learn to do the same. I came into China with linguistic goals entirely different from most. My goalpost was (silly, I know) to criticize, to be smarmy, to be a cultural critic the likes of which they'd never seen.
And that's it. That's my secret. An immature desire to be better-than-thou, even if I had to do it in a 2nd language. Referring back to my own culture doesn't work. Europe tried that in the colonial era...and it didn't work. They came out looking like asses and rightfully so, what with all that racial typology and bullcrap about civilizing other cultures. So that's right out. No, I was out for pwnage and lulz, pure and simple. Pwn the world.
Well...I didn't really manage to do it. But I did learn a lot in the attempt. And in my attempts to pwn China, I learned that the dynamics of their own culture are just as varied and complex as my own, and that I had to get up to speed if I was going to even come close. The ways of the pwn are myriad and profound, and they deserved study. But the rules governing the pwn are the same that govern all human interactions, and they are, as the reams of ineffectual eloquence on the internet prove, not limited to language proficiency. And that's why I knew, when I preened a joke for 3 hours and it fell flat, that it was probably not the joke. It was the frame of reference that needed fixing, not my grammar.
So. The takeaway from all that is that if you want to really learn a language to the point where you can use it effectively, for pwning and other purposes, you have to get inside the heads of people who speak it. Then, and only then, can you circumvent the culture gap. Until you do, your interactions are limited not only by how well you speak the language, but by how well you can engage your listener's frame of reference. Communication suffers when you can't. Books...are generally the easiest way to do that. Once you've had a conversation about all the kinds of 韭菜 there are with the lady who makes your dumplings, what do you have in common? Shared humanity? Please. You and 6 billion other people. I'm sorry, but it gets boring after awhile. Shared humanity is a good start, but it only gets you so far.
So what's to be done? Books are probably the easiest solution. Seeing as you're learning Chinese and are in China...
was my point.