Further Adjustments

So, I'm getting up around 6am every morning, since I have an 8am class. This is taking some adjustments, since, well, I'm used to getting up (and staying up) much later. I have to get up two hours earlier because it takes more than an hour to get there by bus. I was even late twice last week due to the traffic. Ok, I also got off at the wrong stop the first day. I thought it was the right place, even after wandering around and asking a few people, so I was a little perplexed when I (eventually) wandered to the metro station that I thought was in the opposite direction. I just got off at a different branch of the school. The next couple of days I took a bus and the metro, which is much quicker, but I was still late once because of the traffic (really). Since I have a graded dictation every morning right at the beginning of class, I completely miss it if I'm late. So, the only way I to get to class on time was to get up even earlier, around 545am, to get the bus at 640am. Or so it seemed...

YT's cousin, who lives just down the road, heard about my plight from my dad, and he said that he drives past my university everyday on his way to work. He leaves every morning just after 7am. So, lucky for me, I have now been enjoying a chauffered ride on the highway with my cousin-in-law and his wife and child, who also have work and school in that area. It also means that I can, to my extreme delight, sleep a bit later and still get to school half an hour before class starts. I miss out on some quality NPR (podcast) time on the bus ride there, which I was really starting to appreciate, but I still squeeze it in on the way back. It's been working out pretty well so far this week, and it's nice getting to know more of YT's (extensive extended) family, most of whom live in the surrounding area.

Another point of adjustment. As I'd mentioned earlier, I haven't studied Chinese in about five years, and it's taking some time to get back up to speed, especially in terms of writing. This will be the last time I complain about this (I promise), but I not only have to learn the new characters in the lesson, I have to retrain myself to write the characters I used to be able to write, which in some cases are now completely different and much more complex. Since I had been in China earlier, I had more exposure to simplified characters, and so I learned to write those. In Taiwan, as in most places outside of mainland China, they use traditional characters. For those of you not initiated into what this (very significant) difference means to me right here right now in the middle of the expression of these thoughts...

Though I first learned to write the following character (ji3: how many, several, some) in two strokes


I now have to write it in 11 strokes, like this:


Or while I learned the following character (me: a particle) in three strokes


I now write it in 14 strokes as this:


Please don't get me wrong, I appreciate the complex characters as they seem more 'lexically complete', if that makes any sense. However, usually people (with foresight and brains) learn traditional characters first, because it's easier to move to the simplified version later. I mean to make no judgments on the value of one system over the other, it's just a pain to learn simplified characters first. And I mean that literally, since my hand is starting to get tired from all the repetitive character-writing, which is really the only way to learn. But, I'll get used to it.

Okay, that's all the complaining about language study I'll do. Honest. YT is also tired of me talking about it, too, but it may just be because she doesn't like simplified characters all that much. Politics. Anyway, till next time. I have more writing to do.

Your dear family member, friend, or random bloggist, BB

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.

A little bit of guanxi [關係] helps the student settle in

Hey ya, now that I just finished my first week of classes, I have a bit of time to recuperate. In case you didn't know, I'm in Taiwan through a Foreign Language and Area Studies Scholarship (FLAS), by which I am (officially) studying Chinese at the Mandarin Training Center (MTC) at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) in Taibei. Things are starting to settle in, though it did take a few days. Without help from a friend, it would have been much more difficult. Allow me to explain (dot dot dot).

To begin with, it feels good to be studying Chinese formally again. The last (and actually, the first) time I studied Chinese was in an intensive summer program about five years ago. So, my skills have deteriorated a lot since then, and I really need a good review. As a new student, however, I was assigned (based on a screening interview and proficiency exam) to a level that, I felt, wouldn't offer much more than that. After the first day, I knew I wanted something more challenging, and the teacher said I could switch classes. I found out that moving to a different course meant finding a class with available space, or a teacher willing to admit more students.

ENTER, my friend. She had been a teacher at the MTC before, so she knows the ins-and-outs quite well, and she had already told me to call her the first day of class to help me settle in. She is now getting her PhD at NTNU in Applied Linguistics, and still has a lot of contacts among the teachers here. She had also been a teacher in the summer program where I had studied before, so since she knew what level I had already completed she had a general idea of what course here might help me the most. My friend arranged, with a good friend of hers, for me to sit in on a higher level course without having to change my registration, to see first if it would suit me. She also said she is energetic and friendly and a good teacher. The course turned out to be a really good fit, so I officially changed classes right away.

I realized what sort of favor I received when, that day and the next, different students kept knocking on the door to see if they could join our class. In each case, our teacher apologized and said the room was already too full. They then had to go off to find some other class to join, while I continued learning in peace, thankful that I didn't have to go through all that trouble. So, that was very helpful, and it's not the least of it (dot dot dot).

As part of the FLAS requirements, I have to be enrolled in a language course and an area-studies course. I'm essentially at the MTC because they apparently offer both, while another program I wanted to attend (ICLP at NTU) only offers language. Early on, however, a problem arose in that the culture courses listed on the MTC website were deemed, in the words of the FLAS administrator at Pitt, too "Mickey Mouse". Not at all related to an animated rodent, as you might think, but too hands-on or how-to, such as 'calligraphy' or 'cooking'. Though they allow you to experience and commune with traditional cultural practices, they don't really offer all that much content in the broader academic sense.

With further digging into the website, I found other more in-depth culture-related courses, though they were still oriented to language teaching rather than 'cultural content'. It seemed they might work though, especially the courses at the higher levels. My friend offered essential help here, too. She told me that though the courses are listed on the website, they aren't necessarily offered every semester, or at all. Obviously, that was a good thing to know in advance. The solution was that I could take one of the classes individually if there were no other options, so it was decided best to just come and see and figure things out after I got here.

So, after registering at the MTC, it was apparent that only the non-area-studies qualifying classes were being offered, and I would need an individual course. I could have tried to manage through official means to arrange things if I'd had to, but I think it would have been a difficult and time-consuming ordeal. I'm just another student out of hundreds. My friend knew my situation and what I needed, and found a good teacher for me by the third day. She said she had to ask a lot of her friends before finding someone agreeable, and I know it would have been a particular challenge to do on my own. I don't know if I would ever have been able to set up the individual course without my friend's help.

So, a little bit of guanxi (~connections) goes a long way. She's already helped me a lot before this, as well, and I owe her a lot. After thanking her profusely, she said "don't worry, I was already thinking of asking you for help with my English essays next semester." No problem, that's just sort of the way things work here sometimes, and I am very grateful. More later.

你親愛的朋友或家人，
白睿恩
(BB)