What is the German for 'KimChee'?

A little bit more about the MTC and my class. According to the orientation materials, there are over 1600 foreign students learning Chinese here. Almost 70% of them, naturally, are from Asia. Only about 17% are from any of 'the Americas', and 12% are from European countries. I'm more as likely to hear Spanish or Russian spoken around here than I am English, and Korean or Japanese are definitely more dominant.

My own class somewhat reflects these demographics as well. Out of 8 students, I am one of only two native English-speakers (both from the US). The others are from either Vietnam, Indonesia, South Korea, or Mongolia. So, it is a new feeling to converse with others where neither I or they speak Chinese as a first language. It felt like a new bridge where one hadn't existed before. "What a great opportunity to learn from people of different cultures," I thought to myself, "all thanks to Chinese." Ha ha ha, duh (...).

Yesterday, while I was speaking and learning from a classmate from Indonesia, I saw that she had written a strange combination of Roman letters in her textbook by the vocabulary list. They made no sense to me. "What is this strange combination of Roman letters that to me makes no sense?" I thought to myself again. I quickly recognized, of course, that it was Indonesian, her native language. The textbook is Chinese-English, and she had to translate some of the new vocabulary words to be sure what they meant. With this came the striking realization that my fellow students are essentially studying Chinese through, yep, you guessed it, English.

So, if you need another example of the power of English and it's influence as an international language, look no further than my textbook. It is developed here by the MTC, and all the vocabulary and grammar points are explained in English, and the dialogues are set in the US. Even though me and my kind make up less than 17% of the apparent audience (I don't know if the book is published overseas), I feel like it has been marketed to me. I tried to imagine what it would be like to go to Germany to learn German, and all the textbooks are in, say, Korean, and set in, say, the Korean cultural milieu. Sorry, just a slight obstacle, but if you want to learn German here you have to be proficient in Korean first. How do you say 'kimchee' in German, anyway?

I know, I know, of course it's in English, you might say, what other language should the MTC use to publish their book? Anything but English would marginalize a whole swath of students who don't speak, say, for instance (again), Korean. There would also be a lot of prestige lost, because using English means much more and says much more about you worldwide than does knowing (say) Korean. It would imply that the MTC is competing on a regional basis rather than the global market, or second- rather than first-rate. I just sort of took this for granted, and I'm pretty sure that my classmates did/do too. That is the pervasiveness and power of language ideologies, or unquestioned assumptions we have about the use of language. "It's just the way things are," one could say, without being further bothered to ask why or how come. I thought I should be more enlightened than that, though.

So, my bubble has been popped (once again), new light has shone into the darkness of my day-to-day assumptions, and I see again the advantages that I have and take for granted. Chinese is hard enough to learn as it is--I'm glad I don't have to do it in a different language. Kudos, and a deeper sense of respect, to my fellow students.

BB

Briefly, and on a different note, the other night I was awoken by a weird feeling of a rumbling under the bed. It felt like the subway train passing by underneath, which is quite strange because the metro is nowhere near here. YT woke up, too, and she said "dizhen [地震]", which means 'earthquake'. I said, "Oh, dizhen [地震]", then went back to sleep two seconds later, once the walls had stopped shaking. It turns out that (according to my teacher) it was the third strongest earthquake to hit around Taiwan, but the epicenter was about 46 miles off the coast, so it had weakened considerably by the time it reached here. It was still strong enough to wake me up in the middle of the night, though no damage was done here. Here's more info if you want it, or for a wider selection, click here.