Tuesday, March 22, 2011

The Internot, the Other Great Wall, and Talking the Talk





It’s been some time since my last confession. I don’t remember these booths being so small... but OK, let’s get down to it.  I haven’t been blogging.  Let me explain...
As you may have noted from the title of this blog, I live in China, and China has the slowest Internet connections in the world. I mean, we are trying to catch up to Greenland.  That’s not good.  And, Shanghai has the slowest connections in China.  Why is that?  Great question, since it’s the most modern and the most Western city in the country, but the infrastructure can’t keep up with the exploding population. Shanghai has at least 20 million people, but only two wires, a pink one and a green one, and the green one is broken. And, our house has the slowest connections in Shanghai. No I can’t prove that, I just know it.  So it’s tough getting online at the best of times.  I’ve started to refer to it as the Internot (Noun -- A theoretical system of communication that you can never log onto). And then, there’s the GFWC, the Great Firewall of China. The government sees fit to protect its people from potentially, shall we say, confusing information by blocking such sites as the one you’re now reading this on.  So, we use circumbendibus routes to go around it, which means the all the tiny little bytes have to fly to the other side of the world and back before they appear magically on my screen, and by the time they get here, they’re usually pretty tired.  We were using a service with the unfortunate name of Viscosity, which suggests the very sluggishness that it indeed provided; we just switched to another, higher-priced alternative, which so far seems to be an improvement.  All of which is to say that, even if you have dial-up, maybe you should thank your lucky stars for your blazing dial-up connection.
The other big reason for my recent spate of non-blogging is that I’ve been working on learning Chinese, also know as Mandarin, or Hanyu, or Putonghua, or Zhongwen.  It’s notoriously difficult for Westerners to learn Chinese; usually people say this is because of the tones, and it’s true that the tones are extremely hard to hear or say clearly. Every word has not just a phonetic sound but an inflection assigned to it, so depending on how you pronounce it, a sound like “ma” can mean “horse”, “mother”, “same to you, buddy”, or “I want to massage your uncle”.  A deeper problem, though, is that there are a pretty limited number of sound combinations that make up words -- only about 1600, I’ve been told, whereas English has well over 6000. This in fact is why the tones are used to separate the limited number of available sounds. The result of this is that an extraordinary number of words sound alike, even without accounting for the tones. One small example would be the words “zuo”, meaning “left” and “zou”, meaning “do”, “sit”, and “walk”, not to mention “zui”, zai”, and “zao”.  But there are a phenomenal number of overlapping pairs, trios, or clusters of words like this -- xia/xian/xiang/sha/shan/shang, or wa/wan/wang/hua/huan/huang/guan/guang, or -- well, the hits just keep on coming.  So yeah, the tones are brutally hard, but the base sounds the tones are intended to distinguish are, I think, even tougher.  
Then of course, there’s pinyin.  Pinyin is the system of transliterating Chinese characters, or hanzi, into Roman letters, the ones you learned from Grover and Big Bird (Elmo was of no help to me personally at the time, but we have since made up our differences and he is living upstairs on my sons’ toy shelf).  I should be grateful for pinyin, because without it I would have no chance, but I’m not a good enough person to be grateful for it.  Instead I curse its creators, a team of sadistic Russian linguists who apparently meant it as a sick practical joke, or a booby-trap to lure later generations of capitalists into years of mind-shattering confusion. In pinyin, “zh” makes the sound “j”, “q” makes the sound “ch”, “x“ equals “sh”, “c” is “ts”, etc. The effect of pinyin is to add an extra layer of muck to an already complicated process --  I translate the pinyin into English sounds in my head, then into Chinese sounds, and then try to say the sounds with the right tones, to the dumbstruck incomprehension of waiters, ticket-sellers, and passersby throughout the city.  And we didn’t even get to the vowels, oh my God, I can’t talk about the vowels --this is a family blog.
And while we’re not talking about things, let’s not talk about Chinese grammar (think American Indians in John Wayne movies), Chinese syntax or sentence structure (i.e., “I tell story give my kids listen”, or “I this today evening before want”), or vocabulary (there is no Chinese word for “yes” or “no”.)
And there isn’t just one Chinese language, of course; To say “the Chinese language” is like saying “the European language.”  Putonghua or “people’s language” is an attempt by the P.R.C. to unify the speech of 1.4 billion people so they all talk like they’re from Beijing; as you might expect, it’s only partly successful, and the people in Shanghai can usually speak it, but they’d prefer to use Shanghainese. Unless they’re from somewhere else (at least as likely here as it would be in Las Vegas or Phoenix), in which case they might speak hunanese or guangdonghua or sichuanese, or you name it.
Allison’s metaphor for learning Chinese is “water on a stone”.  In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell says it takes ten thousand hours to master something; I’m averaging ten hours a week, so I should be fluent in roughly 2031.  I started with a computer program called Fluenz (a competitor of Rosetta Stone), and switched to a tutor about six weeks ago.  My tutor, Jesy, is great, but it’s still slow going.  Allison, because of her pesky job and all, has had limited time to study, but nonetheless she made it through the first thirty lessons on Fluenz, and the big coup is that this week, her employers are sending her to an immersion program at Berlitz, so she’s studying Monday to Friday, 9 to 4:30.  It’s only Tuesday, but she’s improving rapidly, though I think she’s a bit dizzy from exhaustion.  Kai and Keegan, meanwhile, are just picking it up along the way, with basically no effort.  Allison and I are debating whether to put them in local Chinese schools or in an international (i.e., private, lots of expats) school.  I dread the inevitable day that the two of them are chatting away, and Allison and I have no clue what they’re talking about.
We went to a talk at the Shanghai Literary Festival by Deborah Fallows, the author of Dreaming in Chinese (which is a terrific read if you want a short, fun take on the language).  Her core thesis is that, since language inevitably shapes thought,  just attempting to understand the language helped her to better understand the people and the culture.  So, despite the daunting challenges and the unlikely prospect of complete mastery of Chinese, she found the study of it to be richly rewarding; I hope, and I suspect, that she is right.
Now, for all the people wondering where the heck are all the links to the cute people, this paragraph is for you.  When not absorbed in linguistic study, we did find the time to try out a new park, Zhongshan Gongyuan, where I was unable to get our new shark kite airborne (yet), but we did get to see lots of people balancing sticks on their heads, so that made up for it.  We’re no longer freezing, but it’s often rainy these days, so sometimes we head across the river to our favorite museum in Shanghai, the Science and Technology Museum.  Kai and Keegan love the children’s area (video); a diagram of their time there would look like one of those neighborhood maps from the “The Family Circus” where Billy takes little Barfy on a walk. (Who could forget Barfy?  Don't answer that, it's rhetorical.) We’ve also been doing treasure hunts, where I hide clues around the house and the boys try to find them, in the spirit of Dora, Blue’s Clues, and Barbara (Grammy) Despard. Two notes for anyone attempting to watch the video: Kai has a heart taped to his shirt to cover up Oscar the Grouch, whom he does not like; and, the videographer, Allison, was carrying Keegan, and he isn’t missing any meals, so you may need a motion sickness tablet during the staircase sequence. And when we can’t motivate the troops to get to the park or the museum, we can always fall back on going into the backyard in our pajamas to splash in the puddles. 
That’s all for now -- I’ll try to be more diligent.  We’re going to Hong Kong for the first week of April, since Allison has some time off (an early Happy Sweeping Your Ancestors’ Graves Day to everyone!), and I’ll definitely blog about that.