I drew this diagram to help with studying Chinese directions. By the time I was done with it, I didn’t need to study them anymore, so I may spend more time in front of the computer. Outside is 外 = wài, the same character as in Japanese. It’s used in both languages for foreigner: 外国人 = wàiguórén/gai(koku)jin.
We went to a Sichuan restaurant last night. The first menu page showed a picture of moist, shiny chicken in a clear sauce. English name: Saliva Chicken. The characters read mouth water chicken, which I find less objectionable, but it turns out that Saliva Chicken is the standard name for this dish. They also offered Acid Kidney Beans and Quick Stir-fried Grandma.
Over the weekend I did several small things on my own in Chinese: mainly asking for directions and directing taxis. The exchanges were painless, and a big improvement over my attempts to navigate the city in my first two weeks. The early attempts usually involved getting the hotel concierge to write my destination on a card in Chinese.
I have several pages of notes on directions in Chinese, both cardinal directions (north, south, etc.) and taxi directions (left, right, stop here, you are going the wrong way). The minimum fare in a Shanghai taxi costs only $2.00 and will take you all the way across town, so it’s pretty cheap to practice.
I learned yesterday that Chinese say “Cold hands, warm heart” just like we do. Considering the telegraphic syntax, it could be originally Chinese. This is just a way of saying that it’s still cold here, in spite of today’s sunny weather (the first sunny day in three weeks).
I was chatting with a conversation partner who used “88″ to sign off. This turned out to be a numerical representation of a Chinese approximation of an English farewell:
88 = 八八 ＝ bā bā = “bye-bye”
Because “I”, “you”, “be/am/are/is” and “love” all have close approximations in Chinese digits, you can actually say a lot. Some super-methodical person put up this list of Chinese codes and their translations. My favorite is the self-refuting
8006 = 不理你了 = “Not paying attention to you anymore”
I learned today that in the local Shanghainese dialect a left turn is called a “big turn” (because you cross half the road) and a right turn is called a “little turn”.
In class we learned buy (mǎi; 买) and sell (mài; 卖). The characters differ only by one component and the pronunciation differs only in the tone. I asked how traders confirm buys and sells on the phone, but our teacher didn’t know. I was at a CFA happy hour over the weekend with Andrew and we found a member who could tell us: they add an extra character to each: “buy in” (买 进) and “sell out” (卖 出).
One of the challenges in learning Chinese is remembering the tone for each word, but I’ve come up with a fool-proof method to learn tones in just a few seconds per word.
Use visual memory
Since the tone numbers (and even the tone symbols) are more or less arbitrary, you can substitute something more memorable for them. I assigned the following objects to visually represent the five tone contours in Mandarin Chinese (four tones plus “unmarked” tone):
The tower and pavement images are motionless because the tone contours they represent don’t change. The others incorporate motion (imagine the jet taking off, the swing falling then rising from left to right, water plummeting down the waterfall).
I also assigned colors to each object to give my memory another feature by which to “index” the tones and to let me use highlighter pens to flag ones I want to remember. Since any color association would also be arbitrary, I assigned the primary colors in ROYGBIV order (with one exception) to yield the following:
Pavement is the exception (grey instead of indigo), but it’s appropriate both because this symbol is supposed to represent no tone and grey is kind of a non-color, and because pavement is generally grey.
To remember a word’s tone, mentally picture the word with the appropriate object (or combination of objects if it’s a multi-syllable word). You can try it yourself: “Horse” in Chinese is mă, and it’s the third tone. To remember the tone, create a mental “story” associating a horse with a swing and/or the color green. The crazier, sillier, more action-packed, or violent the image, the easier it is to remember, so don’t just imagine a horse in a green swing (though that is probably silly enough). Instead, put the horse in a latex suit, and put the swing in a circus, S&M dungeon, or superhero training camp.
Update: MDBG, an online Chinese dictionary, has introduced the same color scheme I suggested above (except that it continues on to indigo for the the 5th tone/no tone instead of using grey).
This idea owes a lot to Harry Lorraine and to James Heisig.
Here are some other strategies for reinforcing your tone knowledge:
I got the letter today: I’ve been admitted to Jiao Tong University’s Chinese language program beginning next semester. Since I applied (Prometheus-fashion) for a dual-entry visa, I now have everything I need to start studying in February. I still need to find a place to live, but if a serviced apartment doesn’t open up before I return, I can just stay at the hotel for an extra $100 above the monthly cost of my own place.
We went to XinTianDi again this evening and ended up at the bar featured on the cover of the Lonely Planet Shanghai City Guide (TMSK), where we were privileged to pay $12 for a drink. We practiced saying 555,555,555.55 and 111,111,111.11 in Chinese (not easy), and tried the following tongue-twister:
shí sì shì shí sì
sì shí shì sì shí
shí sì bú shì sì shí
sì shí bú shì shí sì(fourteen is fourteen
forty is forty
fourteen is not forty
forty is not fourteen)
For the record, the hardest tongue-twister I know in English is:
The Leith police dismisseth us.
The hardest tongue-twister I know, period, is one that Imme taught me:
Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid und Blaukraut bleibt Blaukraut.
([A] Wedding dress remains [a] wedding dress and cabbage remains cabbage.)
If you have some free time (which you clearly do if you are reading this blog), check out http://www.hanzismatter.com for examples of misused Chinese and Japanese characters in tattoos and advertisement.
Today I saw a car with its own tattoo:
Part of the reason I took a picture, though, is because the car brand is Megane, produce by Renault. Every time I see one, I have to laugh — Megane is the Japanese word for “glasses”, a silly name for a car.
These are a little puerile, but I’ve collected some other “brands” that don’t travel well: A German travel group, a small town in Germany near Nürnberg (all the inhabitants are blind), and the Freiburg Traffic Association.
[Update: June 2009]
I originally had a list of bullet points on this page highlighting the cultural insight or potential economic benefits learning Chinese can bring. But after being in Shanghai for about half a year now, I realize that the main reason I like studying Chinese is that it is so different from any language I already know. Even Japanese has many, many English (and Portuguese, and German) loan words. If you don’t know the Japanese word for something, you can quite often just say the English word with a Japanese accent and you will be right. This applies for simple words like “door” and “service” and to specialized terminology from the domains of finance and computer science.
Chinese doesn’t really offer any clues to a native English speaker, so everything you come to understand without having explicitly learned it is a kind of pure revelation. I think that’s what I really like about learning this language. Now that I have a foundation, I am looking forward to some more travel to see how much I can build on it.