| If you're reading this, I'm sorry, but you're probably wasting your time. You should be trying to learn Chinese-- if you already have, my respects to you, you can just keep reading without feeling any guilt, although you might get bored. Yeah, learning Chinese is a lot of fun but takes an inordinate amount of time to make progress in. Basically there are several challenges involved in it that maybe you've already thought about. First of all, there are no roman letters, so the characters all look like this: 我的中文不太好. Which is fine, but of course if you're used to deriving pronunciation hints from the written language like most of us literate people from the west, it gets annoying because it's really hard to remember which character sounds like what. Secondly Chinese is tonal, which means if you aren't careful, you can call your best friend's mother a horse by accident just because you breathed in at the wrong time. Thirdly, if you want to be able to write in Chinese by hand, you need to remember how to correctly write the characters, otherwise it's really difficult to look up characters that you don't know in the dictionary. But why do I say that you, Anglophile and reader of my "blog," should learn Chinese? "Why should I bother", you ask yourself. "Most people in China can speak a little bit of English, and if they can't, well, I can just talk with my hands. That usually works. And I will probably never go to China anyway." Sure. But if you do, you will find yourself in a tremendous advantage if you can at least speak a little Chinese. The crazy thing here is that while a lot of people here have learned some English, most of them, from what I can tell, have learned it astoundingly poorly. Now of course as someone who is far from a master of Chinese, I really appreciate the effort. But let me give you an example. I was in a bookstore the other day looking for Chinese learning materials. In the language learning section they had an English learning program for children that was basically a silent cartoon with English subtitles beneath it. But every sentence had at least one glaring mistake; I think the worst was when it highlighted the word "sister" as an important word for children to learn, but unfortunately, they spelled it "sisiter." Sigh. A dog house was referred to as a log cabin. It was a train wreck. Anyway, like I said, you can't criticize the effort; in China everyone wants to learn some English to help them get ahead. It's an impressive campaign. But there is obviously such a dearth of contact with real English that the mistakes get regurgitated over and over again. I will not bother with sharing some humorous mistakes here... they are everywhere. But to be honest I've completely stopped laughing at them... now I just find the English to be a distraction, because many times it doesn't truly represent the real intent behind the message. |
