“A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.” – Chinese Proverb
“Yeah, that’s like why I so totally want a video iPod. It would fit in my pocket, too.” – An anonymous American 9th grader, in response to the above proverb.
One of the things I do when I work with students who speak little or no English is to ask them how to say some basic things in their language, such as, “hello.” At first, this may seem like a strange thing to do, but what inevitably happens is that students learn how to say these things in English while working with me, but they do so in a way that makes them feel more like expert in something, rather than someone who can’t even say basic things in English.
This year I had a new student, whom I will call “Bob,” from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). He knew some English but had trouble speaking and listening. So I tried my old tricks. Now, I knew about Mandarin Chinese, and everything I knew convinced me that Mandarin was extremely hard to learn—it doesn’t have an alphabet, but uses intricate characters for each word, and it has a complex system of five tones differentiate words made up of the same sounds. (For example, the word “ma” can mean “mother,” “horse,” “hemp,” and “to scold” or indicate a sentence is a question, depending on which tone a Chinese speaker uses.) I could never learn Mandarin Chinese, I was sure. But it didn’t really matter—the point wasn’t for me to learn Chinese, it was for Bob to learn English. But I soon found myself surprised.
Bob showed me that there was an alphabetic system in Chinese; the Chinese government had developed the “Pinyin” system as a way write Chinese using the Roman alphabet and accent marks. It is used for various reasons, including teaching slow foreigners (like me) Chinese.
You can use it to help you read basic materials and to learn how to pronounce the words that characters represent. I stumbled into a website that helped learners to practice the tones and I noticed with a fair bit of work, I was able to distinguish between them and then to (very roughly) produce them, albeit only one syllable at a time so far.
The TPI Room suddenly found itself in need of Chinese-English dictionary (for some mysterious reason), and I bought one. I practiced drawing a few very simple characters and discovered that it wasn’t so terribly hard, and that the Chinese government had actually produced a simplified version of many of the more ornate characters. (I never imagined I would owe the Chinese Communist Party so much!) Most complex characters are built on simpler forms, called “radicals.” There is a system of writing them that makes it much easier as well.
Some of the characters tell wonderful little stories in a way: The character for “peace” (安) is a combination of the symbol for “woman” (女) under the symbol for “roof.” The character for “good” (好) is a combination of the special characters for “woman” and “child.” The character for “home” (家) is a combination of the character for “pig” under the character for “roof,” as it dates back to when many Chinese raised pigs at home. (I bet someone could make a really funny joke out of those facts, but I’ll leave that to Jim Kelly.)
The symbol for rain is: 雨. If you look carefully, you can see raindrops running down the side of a wall. Each word is a miniature work of art!
Chinese culture began to draw me in too, for to understand any language, one needs to learn something about the culture of its speakers, as the two are inseparable. For example, there are no Chinese words for “brother,” “sister,” “uncle,” or “aunt.” Chinese-speakers must use a specific word, one which indicates if the person they are talking about is their older or younger brother or sister, or if the uncle is the older or younger brother of their father or mother. Obviously, Chinese people take their families seriously! Of course, I read some history and was captivated as well. Did you know that during the nineteenth century, a man who thought he was Jesus Christ’s younger brother launched a rebellion that eventually controlled a large part of China and led to twenty million dead before it was over? I was amazed I had never heard of it.
On a spiritual note, I was challenged by a three thousand-year old spiritual tradition that interweaves Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucian ideals but did not require its adherents to necessarily believe in a personal God.
And so, I am hooked. I don’t know when or if I will ever really speak Chinese. But that is not terribly relevant to me. The experience has shown me something about the value of a teacher keeping an open mind and maintaining a healthy sense of intellectual curiosity. For years I have taught Chinese people and never realized what they could teach me if I opened my mind. And “Bob” has become my proud teacher as well. In fact, he insists he doesn’t need anonymity and wants me to print his name in the article, so here it is: 刘宇恒
