Plaintive Mewling

I’m typing this from my dorm room at Dalian’s Liaoning Normal University rather than the comfort of my own home because I wanted to immerse myself in Chinese to increase my fluency. Has it worked? I think so, but I am honestly not quite sure.

I find myself using vocabulary words that I never had reason to use before, certainly, but I still pause and stutter a lot and very often completely fail to find the words to say what I want to say. For example, after I mentioned that I work with computers for a living, someone asked me exactly what kind of programming I did. How to say “I maintain the caching software we use to reduce our database load” in Chinese? No bloody idea. I can get as far as “I maintain” and it pretty much stops there, so I end up stumbling through something like, “The things you see on a web page, I don’t write, but I help the computers that make the things you see on the web page work faster,” and hope the general idea gets across despite the fact I’ve mangled my grammar beyond all hope of repair.

But today I went out for lunch with a Korean classmate and with only a couple of exceptions, we spent the entire two-odd hours speaking nothing but Chinese. So I guess that’s a good sign, even if I can’t describe what I do for a living.

I’m actually generally pleased with how well I’m doing in random situations outside of class. I can have not-totally-trivial conversations with people I meet, and although I rarely understand everything they’re saying to me, I think I at least get enough of it that my responses don’t evoke puzzled looks too often.

Class is interesting. It is 100% in Chinese. That has one huge plus: I think my listening comprehension has improved dramatically, much faster than I expected. After just two and a half weeks I can follow nearly everything the teacher is saying, which was definitely not true the first week. I can pick up substantially more of the content of conversations I overhear on the bus or elsewhere than I could when I first got here, though a lot still goes over my head. The TV news is still utterly impenetrable to me — as in, if I don’t watch the video, I can listen for five minutes and come away with absolutely zero idea what any of the stories were about — but I can sort of follow some drama shows and understand a lot of ads. I credit sitting in a room for three hours a day listening to a teacher speaking nothing but Chinese.

But teaching the class in Chinese has some big downsides too, mostly in the area of efficiency of learning. Sometimes the teacher will explain some new vocabulary word or grammatical structure and, after the explanation, I will still have no idea what the heck it means, because the explanation itself required vocabulary I haven’t learned yet, or because it’s something hard to explain in words. Last week we had “荷叶”. The teacher explained that it was a plant, something that grows from under the water and flowers above the water. She spent several minutes trying to zero in on exactly what it was, but I (and, I assume, the other people in the class who didn’t already know it) had only a very general idea. It wasn’t until after class that I looked it up in my dictionary and in a fraction of a second learned that it means “lotus leaf.” That sort of thing happens less often than I’d expect, but it’s always a bit frustrating when it does.

The other point of frustration is just due to this being a school that doesn’t have a lot of foreign students. There are a total of four classes, divided by level. The beginning and advanced ones probably don’t have this problem as much, but in intermediate land, there is enough of a spread of skill levels among the students that it’s hard to settle on an appropriate pace and language level for the class. Sometimes the teacher will tell the class stuff like, “Now the left side of the room will read, and the right side will listen to their pronunciation.” Invariably, at least one person on the right side of the room blithely reads along with the left siders, clearly not having understood the instructions at all.

According to one of my classmates, the taught-all-in-Chinese classes at the big schools in Beijing don’t have that problem nearly as much; they have hundreds of foreign students at any given time and can subdivide people into much more narrow skill level groups. But all things considered, I’d rather spend a month in Dalian and put up with the less-than-optimal class structure; it’s an amazingly pleasant city.

One thing that’s interesting is that some of the students seem to be happy to chatter away in their native languages at every opportunity, while others try to stick to Chinese unless there’s no choice. I have actually intentionally started going out to lunch with a mixed group of Koreans and Japanese rather than with the other two Americans, just because I am forced to speak and listen to Chinese if I want to hold a conversation. Nothing against the Americans — they’re both perfectly nice — but it’s too easy to slip into English, and if I wanted to speak English I could have stayed home!

Reading is my biggest problem. I recognize a bigger percentage of the characters I see every day than I expected to, so that’s good. However… I knew I was slow before I got here, but wow, I did not have a visceral realization of just HOW slow. A couple examples.

Most of the family-run restaurants here have their menus posted up on the wall (most often on a white posterboard with red letters printed in the exact same font, oddly). When a customer comes in, the owner points out the menu, gives them a moment to look at it, then asks what they want. The Chinese customers quickly scan the menu and find something good. But I’m usually only done deciphering the third or fourth menu item by the time the owner asks what I want. I’m not just a little slower, I’m at least one order of magnitude slower, possibly two orders. Just about every time I try a new place, I scan a few items at random and order the first one that I can read and that sounds decent. And very often, ten minutes later, having read the rest of the menu, I say, “Damn, if I’d known they had that, I’d have ordered it instead.”

When the bus passes by a store, I am rarely able to read the name before the sign has passed out of view. Unless the name is made up entirely of very simple characters, I’m still stuck on the first or second character, trying to (a) mentally convert it from whatever cursive style it’s written in to the standard form I’m used to studying, (b) recognize it as one of the 1800 or so characters I’ve learned already, and finally (c) recall the meaning or the sound, or both if I’m exceptionally lucky. If any one of those steps fails, which happens often, I’m stuck. When I read just about anything I go through the same process for each character, one at a time, then combine the characters into words, then pull the words together into clauses and phrases.

At some point I hope my brain’s ability to recognize larger patterns will start to kick in more substantially than it has so far. There are some sequences of characters I recognize as groups rather than individually, so I know it is possible, but they are far too small in number so far. The only solution for that is just to read, read, and read some more. I was actually hoping that walking around town being surrounded by Chinese signage would help me in that regard, but honestly it doesn’t seem to have — perhaps my time here has just not been long enough yet. I think I’m just as slow and baffled by signs now as I was when I landed, with the exception of a couple specific common ones I’ve learned to recognize.

So, um, yeah. The writing system definitely makes Chinese a challenge to learn. If you want to get comfortable in a new language quickly, I highly recommend Spanish. A completely phonetic writing system, what a concept!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 6:07 am and is filed under Chinese. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.