Back to study

People are too nice here when I manage to say any word in mandarin. The answers range from the utter surprise at me being able to say or to read anything, to the ones that very kindly appreciate that I might know some more complicated word and praise me for doing so. If you ask me, I think I should know much more after staying one year in Taiwan. Of course, I only started studying a little by myself in the summer and I sure noticed I was getting better; but I had not done too much after Christmas. Progress is then very slow.

One good thing of this linguistic immersion that I am experiencing is that I continuously reinforce through different channels what I learn and, little by little, I get better. Besides, I am very used to listening to mandarin and I am sure that that helps, even if I only understand a fraction of it. In fact, since several months ago, I can make out parts of sentences and, sometimes, full ones. Maybe I am too critical with myself, but I must spend more time studying mandarin if I want to break through, because it is too different from the languages I know and it does not seep through so easily.

So, a couple of week-ends ago, I started again with the lessons I was taking. It is not the first try I make, and it is not going so well lately, but I intend to get farther than the last time, because now I should be able to practice more. The goal is to get into the habit and then it will be easy to keep. Until I reach the rudimentary level that I can manage to get, of course.

Spring Is Here

Some day in February, and later on, I started seeing this symbol, black over a red background, in many places: on offices' doors, on corridor walls, on some doors on the street, even in taxis.

What is so special about it?. Not much until you realize that it is the same character that means Spring in Chinese (chūn) turned upside-down. I got an explanation the other day —and I really hope I remember it. The inverted character is similar to, or means, dao, which has the same sound as to arrive and, thus, these symbols hanging on the walls mean that Spring is already here. Simple and nice, isn't it?

Introductions

As I probably commented already , the first or second day of my arrival, Chien Chou, the student that shared the office with me, wrote me a list of chinese characters, and their approximate pronunciation, related to food.

It was not a long list, nor with much variety, but it was very useful at the beginning to allow me to look to a menu and be able to distinguish some of the ingredients of the dishes, if they were based on rice or noodles, what kind of meat or if it was fish, which made my choices much easier. Of course, that only gives you an approximate idea of what you are ordering, but fortunately it is not very usual to have those long descriptions so common now in the West.

I have enlarged my vocabulary a little bit since then, but this was my first real chinese lesson in Taiwan.

Writing

I read somewhere on the web last week that the number of syllables in Mandarin is approximately 1700, much less than in English (around 8000), and I guess other indoeuropean languages. I am not sure if they count the tones there, but the truth is that you notice that really fast and makes it hard to remember the words.

I also read that making use of that, a chinese writer, Zhao Yuanren, wrote a book only using the sound shi (with different tones, it can be to be, ten, stone, lion, etc). As a result, the book is readable, because the characters are different, but it is impossible to understand if it is read out loud. As it happens, a couple of days later, while I was having dinner with people of my group here, one of the students was smiling as he was reading a newspaper. When I asked him why, he showed me a short text, two or three lines, that was an example of that book. Yes, I could recognize several characters that sound as shi.

Anyway, that is like those french books by Perec —a book written without using the letter e, the most frequent in French, or one where the only vowel used is the letter e— or so many other experiments. It is a human constant; we like to play with words and we are sick in the head.

Intensive

Today, I have spent more or less seven hours listening to Chinese non-stop. For some reason that escapes me, I am probably sick in the head, I went to a meeting of several taiwanese astronomers that are preparing a big proposal of several projects to ask the taiwanese government for money to fund them. It has been very interesting to see the projects they are working on, or about to start, and the amount of money they need, or ask for. And it is a lot of money. But with the exception of a talk, that I suspect has been in English because the speaker is a Cantonese-speaker, everything has been in Mandarin. Fortunately, the slides of most of the talks were in English, it would have been impossible for me otherwise.

Anyway, it was very interesting too. Aside from being able to read some chinese characters, I could understand a word now and then, even some simple sentences; I could tell how different accents or ways of speaking allowed me to make out more sounds —maybe not so many words— from one speaker to another; and the best was the large quantity of English words they put in the mix. Some, as everywhere, are technical words. I have seen that many times since I started doing this Astronomy thing, even if I do not agree with it, because I think that you can find as good a word in any language as English does. But I am wondering since six months ago, why they use so many English words when Chinese probably has an equivalent word since centuries. I have heard some spectacular examples today. And I do not think it is because I was there.

Translations

How many times have we tried to translate a word to another language, but it seems that we don't really find it?. Having a translator in the family, I have seen it a few times, even with professionals. I witnessed an exaggerated example of that last Wednesday. They are about to establish a joint center of several of Taiwan's universities in order to prepare for the use of ALMA, and they were looking for a translation of the English word Advancement, in order to translate its name to Chinese. So, they started throwing in ideas. As you can see in the picture, they found more that twenty different ways.

I cannot say how close the meaning of the proposed words were to the English one or if they were more or less acurate approximations or were only poetical. They also told me that they were not only looking for a word close enough, but it also had to sound right, even with some special added quality. All in all, very difficult.

They told me today that they finally found the word. It didn't look like that to me on Wednesday. The funnier thing will be the acronym they may end up using. It will be partially my fault.