Feel pretty proud of myself this morning...had my first outing where I spoke and, more importantly, understood everything in Chinese. Was your basic conversation with the dry cleaner, but still. Will recount it here:
Me: Zao.
Dry Cleaner: San jian yifu?
Me: Dui. Li bai ji?
Dry cleaner: (counting on her hands) Li bai wu, yi dian.
Me: Xie xie.
Am not thinking that I'll ever be able to hold a meaningful conversation in Chinese, but not being totally lost felt good. In class yesterday, we learned that the word for food is fan , which also happens to mean cooked rice. The word for rice seeds is something else, for rice in the field is another word and so on. There are 26 different words for rice in its various forms, kind of like how the Eskimos have 32 words for snow. We also learned that the word for "work" is shi. That sounded like the same sound as the word for the number 10, and I asked her if that was correct. The teacher said that not only was it the same, but the sound shi has 70 different characters (and meanings) and that there is a famous poem where the writer used only that sound Read aloud, the poem sounds like shi shi shi...but when read it is quite beautiful. How can a white boy from the valley ever hope to learn a language like that? They are always so proud with the characters...like when the kids grandfather gave them their Chinese middle names, was told they were very beautiful and poetic. Am starting to think that this poetry thing is just cultural pride and that they would tell me that saying that "one needs to take a dump" in Chinese would be considered poetry. Sure, mine are certainly works of art, but is the act itself poetic in Chinese? Hope to find out next semester.
Another conversation we had in class yesterday was about learning how to read and write the characters. One of my classmates was telling us that she looked in on a class that taught people how to read/write, and that it was full of elderly Chinese people. The teacher got a puzzled look on her face and thought that was odd, and I offered a guess that maybe that they didn't take the schooling as seriously as they do now when these old people were school age? She said no way...as far back as she knew, if a kid missed school for more than a day, the teacher would call on the family to see why not. If the child's absence stretched for three days, they would send the police around to make sure that the kid had a good reason, or to get him back in school if not. As with anything I hear about the Chinese culture, I take it with a grain of salt and try to independently verify, but even if this is remotely true...damn. I know that wouldn't fly in the States with people's individual liberties and the fear of big government involvement, but can't help thinking where the US would be if it had a semblance of that kind of devotion to learning. On that note...Paul related a conversation he had with one of his baseball team mates who told him that "the Chinese superiority in school peeks in the 8th grade" and that it all goes downhill from there. We'll see if that's true, but maybe the reason that this kid thought so was due to the fact that he happened to be in the 9th grade.
We're heading off to Italy for vacation on Friday, but have been taking some photos and hope to post one more time this week with some images and impressions of Christmas in Asia. If I don't get to it...Zhu ni sheng dan kuai le.
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