Winter quarter summary

February and March were really bureaucracy-heavy for a lot of different reasons, sorry for falling behind on updates. Also thanks to everyone who contacted after Japan, as is obvious by now everything was ok here. Brian called us with kind of panicked unclear news that afternoon, leading to us stocking up on snacks and water in preparation for waves that turned out to be 10 cm high. (The tsunami warning snack of choice was Pringles, which yeah is a little worrisome. Also, you read right, 10 cm - I thought that was ridiculous too but did some research on how these things work. Kind of makes sense now).

The whole thing still felt very close to home and an article in the paper today pointed out that Taiwan is on the same fault line and that its nuclear power plants (all of which I've seen from a distance) are also all on the coast. There is no reason that a similar scale disaster could not happen here, so there is a lot of work to be done in terms of evaluation and prevention.

We are all thinking of Japan and those affected by the tragedy there. I know if you're in Taiwan, you can donate directly at the iBon machine at any 7-11.

I'm going to do a general overview here of the quarter which might be useful if you are reading this to see what 2nd quarter at ICLP is like or 5th year Chinese is like. Otherwise, I'll be back to regularly scheduled programming in a bit, check back in a few days. You can also skip to the last paragraph here which summarizes things that I think through more messily below.

Classes: As usual, I found the core book, Thought and Society, pretty boring. For awhile I also thought it was pretty useless because no one talks like that. Then I realized my grandfather talks like that and sometimes and actually uses phrases like 人生七十古來稀 (rénshēng qīshí gǔlái xī) - count as fortunate he who lives to seventy. ToS will solidify your academic Chinese if you learn it really well. It is really a great run down of the basic Chinese you would find in serious papers and journals.

Learning Chinese: I'm not sure that I learned it that well though...mostly because I found it a bit boring and unnatural to use the vocab and sentence structures. Story of my life. A lot of people take a review class of the book in the next quarter as one of their four classes...I'm not so I think I should probably review it on my own. I did think that my Mini Radio plays class was excellent (mostly because of having the most amazing teacher and class with just Cat since our other classmate never came) and News and Views was great (and helped me realize I could actually read news).

This is finally the level where you can really learn Chinese on your own, which is part of the reason why classes started to seem less and less important compared to watching TV, reading the news, skimming magazines, and picking up children's books. Our teachers seemed to agree that at this level our high level Chinese is pretty good and our everyday Chinese is terrible.

Rant (you've heard it before): That is because there are major flaws in the way Chinese is taught. Imagine if someone learned English just by studying the SAT/GRE. That is still basically what is happening to us. In essays we sound intelligent. In everyday speech, students at an advanced level of Chinese will have to ask how to say "circle". I get that this is a basic issue in language study, but there is no reason why we shouldn't be systematically taught some basic things in the way that children are taught: body parts, shapes, items at the drug store, how to describe basic motions. And drill on them through games or whatever until we sound normal. I took Spanish in Kindergarten and that is how we learned things, just because we are older does not mean we do not need basic words, in fact we need them more as the state of student's (regardless of whether they speak Chinese at home!) Chinese here proves.

The result of focusing on learning formal Chinese is that overall it STUNTS your Chinese learning. Let me explain why. All of the words you are supposed to spend time learning are as unnatural to use as their English equivalents ("anti-corruptionism", "the sole sentient being in all creation", "calyx", "to implicate", "substantially" - these are from randomly picking words out from the text just now). Many of them are super useful, but even in English I would only use them when writing something serious. That's a totally different type of thinking than the normal way you want to express yourself - such as telling a story.

If you tried to speak in this type of English to talk about everyday things, your English would be halting -- IT'S AN EVEN BIGGER PROBLEM IN A LANGUAGE YOU ARE JUST LEARNING. Unless you are a tool-bag, your brain just short-circuits if you try to talk like that. You store most of your SAT words in a different space than your useful words and the process of using them is different. On the other hand, I want to learn Chinese that I can access and use easily and naturally (脫口而出, if you will). So while I really appreciate having learned all these very important Chinese words when I do smart things, I think that an EQUAL if not greater emphasis should be placed on less intellectual, more natural Chinese at this level, such as Chinese used in narratives, if you don't want students (me) to hit a glass ceiling and never get any better at sounding normal.

Language learning: My attitude towards language in general has definitely shifted in a major way. One thing is that towards the end of the quarter I got pretty sick of language and of having difficultly expressing myself, more and more I'll begin a sentence and then just kind of wave my hands and hope that my audience understands what I'm saying. This is happening in both Chinese and English. I think it's just laziness and frustration at the difficulty, since I've also gone from someone who hates English grammar mistakes with a passion to speaking totally lazy unidiomatic English because my friends can still understand me. So, lesson learned: combat this attitude cause it sucks! And it's important to try to complete your sentences.

Another thing though is that I'm a lot less binary in my thinking about language. I started out thinking of the situation this way: I know English and I know it well. I do not know Chinese and so I need to learn it. Now I am realizing all the ways in which my English is weak and the weaknesses and strengths of my language ability in general. I've always been really bad at responding off the top of my head, and that is in any language. I'm awful at small talk, and that has really just been a refusal to learn the language of small talk. Or another example, a class that I considered taking, diplomatic Chinese, isn't there to improve your Chinese but to improve your tactful Chinese. Well my tactful English isn't too good either.

This isn't really a new revelation to anyone, I mean you can't write seminar papers in college without realizing that most of what you've done is learned a certain type of academese and how to employ it in a way others like. (It's been particularly obvious now that my academic Chinese has progressed this far - it's is really just like learning SAT words). But this is the first time that I've really focused on the language aspect of communication blunders, rather than the meaning aspect. In a way, it's a hopeful way to think about things - it's not simply that I suck at small talk or conducting myself in official situations, I just need to commit myself to learning the language of that situation, which is totally possible if still equally annoying. And in Chinese, learning to express myself or narrate stories now seem like a separate animal from learning my textbook Chinese. I also need to work on things like thanking people, something that is easy in English but freezes me in Chinese.

So breaking up language into different types of language ability (speaking, being tactful, listening, smoothing things over) and language for different situations (parties, meetings, debates) has both made it clearer 1 - what aspects of my Chinese I need to work on and 2 - what aspects of my English and communication abilities in general could also use some work. Whereas before the only thoughts that I would have on my English and Chinese language abilities would be that, based on standardized test scores and responses to my papers, my English is good and my Chinese is bad.

Language Exchange: Cat and I are doing language exchange with two different pairs of people. So far it's been amazing. I didn't do language exchange in the first place because my experience was that people treated it as a dating service. Doing language exchange together with a friend has been an awesome solution!

Teachers: Become friends with your teachers! Just do it. It is easier at a high level of Chinese because you can actually get to know each other as people. The majority of teachers will want to take you out to dinner or tea and get to know their students.

Papers and final presentation: Beginning last quarter, Cat and I would write totally ridiculous stories for our essays, but still employing the sentences structures and vocabulary. Due to the high volume of essay assignments and dryness of the textbooks, we really felt that this was the only choice. Well, all of the teachers thought that we were geniuses and wanted to know if we were creative writers (answer: no) and wanted to publish our not very good stories in the electronic newsletter.

So my final advice if you are reading this because you will be doing a Chinese program in the future is to be creative with your assignments. No one will really care about your grades and your Chinese will improve a lot more writing about what you want to write about (see rant above) rather than contrived essays on economics that are basically rewriting the textbook or making things up based on Wikipedia articles. I am happy about some of the essays I wrote but in general I have gotten a lot more out of my various creative writing endeavors and the teachers have been a lot happier and less bored. You get a little away from academese. And also I guess it is quite a new concept because there are still exaggerated expressions of shock at our creativity. Final presentation was a 3 person play about a ghostly love affair - a big success if fairly embarrassing

Basically: Winter Quarter went really quickly. Chinese continues to get better; especially, formal Chinese continues to improve while more and more holes in regular Chinese are revealed. Language continues to get more complicated and expressing myself is exhausting. New avenues open up and keep things interesting. Teachers and classmates are awesome, as are creative uses of Chinese. Last quarter is coming up Monday and I have way oversubscribed myself in terms of difficulty of classes. We will see what happens!!!