Steiny Road to China: Step 7

Li Changdi, a.k.a. the Steiny Road Poet, has been caught up in Chinese homework and too "mang" (busy) to post to the blog. However, instead of going to a Halloween dance party, she decided to catch up her readers on her progress and adventures in learning Chinese.

Everywhere she goes, she carries along her character chart homework. Twice she was on the DC subway busily practicing Chinese characters for such words and phrases as wan fan (dinner), zhou mo (weekend--sounds like Joe Mo) hao jiu bu jian 好久不见 (long time no see--is this hip or what?), when she looked up to see a Chinese woman watching her. The first one who turned out to be Yang Yuge, a Chinese 101 teacher at American University, asked how long Changdi had been studying Chinese. At that point, it was six weeks. "No," the stunned laoshi exclaimed. She thought what Changdi was writing was too advanced for such a short time of study.

When Changdi reported this to her teacher, Laoshi Zhang Xiaoli said she also teaches at A. U. and could she please have Yang Yuge's email which Changdi had jotted down. Furthermore, Changdi learned that Laoshi Zhang teaches advanced Chinese studies at American and Georgetown University.

Backing up a couple of weeks before she met the Chinese women who complimented Changdi's ability to write Chinese characters, she went to a Renaissance music with Chinese pipa concert a the Folger Shakespeare Library. In their Great Hall, they had an exhibition called "Imagining China: The View from Europe, 1550–1700." As she stood with a friend looking at one of the showcases, she saw the Chinese characters for pengyou (friend) and pointed them out aloud. A Caucasian women standing next to Changdi nodded her head and so Changdi asked if she spoke Chinese. She did and she thought that Changdi was doing very well for someone who had only been studying Chinese for four weeks.

In Changdi's third week, she was attending a poetry reading and met Anli Tong, a Beijing research doctor who had just come to Maryland to work at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda. To make this woman feel comfortable, Changdi said a few words in Mandarin like Wo jiao Changdi—my first name is Changdi. Ching wen, ni gui xing? (May I please know your family name?) Ni jiao shenme mingzi? (What is your first name?) It turned out that one of the poets reading that night Deborah Ager had studied Chinese in high school and in the audience was an eight-year old who had been studying Mandarin in a school in Indonesia.

The point is that in urban American cities, there are many opportunities to encounter Mandarin speakers and to see Chinese characters. Only yesterday, Changdi met two neighbors, originally from Beijing, who had brought their sons to the condominium Halloween party where Changdi lives. (Changdi was assigned the job of taking photographs and posting them to the Condo's blog.) To these neighbors and with her tongue tripping over the words, Changdi said to each woman, renshi ni hen gaoxing (so pleased to meet you).

週末快樂 - Zhou mo kuai le! Happy weekend!

Steiny Road to China: Step 6

Laoshi Zheng was absolutely stunned. The average score on the first quiz was 64%. Most of the Asian students got the worst scores. Most the newbies got scores above the average. Changdi got a 71%. A week ago on Saturday night instead of going to the Spanish Ballroom at Glen Echo, she practiced writing Japan—Zhongguo,

..............................................the United States—Meiguo,







England—Yingguo,

.....................................................................................................................................
France—Faguo, and









Japan—Riben in Chinese characters.

She also practiced the words
laoshi (teacher), xuesheng (student), and pengyou (friend). Oh, and toss Beijing. The thing she has the most trouble with is hearing the correct tone.

The quiz had four parts: 1) dictation—write the Chinese word in pinyin with the correct tone mark, 2) translation—write what the Chinese word is in English, 3) write the pinyin & tone mark for 5 countries and for teacher, friend, student as well as the Chinese character, 4) write the pinyin & tone mark for 5 family members.

So Laoshi Zheng gave the class a worksheet with 34 words/phrases to write in Chinese characters! Some are words that the class was tested on but most are new. Learning ching wen (Excuse me or May I ask) is incredibly hard and what we have to learn is the simplified character set versus the fancier traditional character set. Changdi read a comment blog and found out that some students think it is easier to learn the traditional character set versus the simplified because the former has a story thread. Also the simplified character set is used primarily in mainland China. This might be why some of the Asian students in Changdi's class didn't do well on writing characters. One other thing she learned is that pinyin has become very important because of communication through email. Changdi's teacher thinks pinyin is hard also because she is more comfortable with the Chinese characters.

Steiny Road to China: Steps 4 & 5

While Americans believe the number 13 is unlucky—as in Friday the 13th, the Chinese believe the number 4 sì is unlucky because it sounds similar to the word for death sǐ. However, the number 4 must be "sung" with the fourth or descending tone and the word death is intoned with the rollercoaster of the third tone that goes down and then up. So for this post, Changdi (a.k.a. the Steiny Road Poet) has paired 4 with 5 because the Chinese say that good things come in pairs.

Last week, I had the experience of thinking in Chinese. My laoshi (teacher) was going to each student and asking for a response to a question she would pose to that person on the spot. She was asking, "Are you the teacher" (Ni shi laoshi ma?) or "Are you the student?" (Ni shi xuesheng ma?). She expected us to answer "No, I'm not the teacher" (Bu. Wo bu shi laoshi.) or "Yes, I am the student." (Dui. Wo shi xuesheng.) I was feeling anxious because my brain was bouncing around trying to keep track of how to say I instead of you and yes instead no. The words for teacher and student I had down cold. So when she asked me in Chinese if I was the teacher, I responded, "No, I am the student." (Bu. Wo shi xuesheng.) I certainly hadn't planned what I was going to say. It just popped out without any conscious effort. It also surprised the teacher and she stopped to ask the class if they heard what I answered.

This week the drill is to learn how to write the Chinese characters for five countries and a few assorted words like student, teacher and friend. Last week we needed to learn how to write characters for 1-10 as well as the pinyin. Our first quiz is next week. So far, I cannot hear the tone differences very well. Tone one, the flat sound to infinity, isn't so bad and neither is tone four which descends but the rollercoaster and rising tones are hard for me to hear unless the words are said very slowly.

Basically, my teacher thinks the answer to our student anxiety can be covered by this: ke kou ke le. This is the Chinese interpretation of coca cola and in Chinese, ke with the rollercoaster third tone means permit and le, pronounced with the descending fourth tone, means happiness. So, drink ke le (coke) and permit the mouth to rejoice!


长笛

Steiny Road to China: Step 3

My laoshi (teacher) Xiaoli Zhang said in the second class that she was going to assign us each a Chinese name if we didn't already have one. Over the weekend, the Steiny Road Poet, who has always been good at naming, decided she would look for a Chinese name that appealed to her as a poet. After looking at baby names for Chinese girls, she decided that was like looking for a needle in the haystack.

Shifting gears she thought of the book Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang, or is that Chang Jung? (Last names come first in China.) In that memoir, the author and her mother and grandmother have swan in their given names. OK, the Steiny Road Poet decided she wanted a name with a musical instrument and began investigating the translation of flute.

Actually there are many names for different kind of flutes in Chinese: dizi and bangdi are transverse flutes usually made of bamboo. Xiao is an end blown bamboo flute. Gudi is an ancient vertical flute made from bird bones. Paixiao are pan pipes. Koudi is a tiny bamboo flute. Xun is a clay ocarina.

In the Han Dynasty, the dongxiao (currently known as the xiao) was called a chángdí or long flute. During the Song Dynasty, the chángdí was renamed dongxiao. Chángdí is represented by two Chinese symbols. The first symbol looks like a fancy version of the Roman letter K and it means long in space, lasting, deep, profound. The second symbol means bamboo flute.


Ok, so the Poet also needed a Chinese sur name and so she picked Li. Chinese people didn't always have surnames but Li meaning plum is 3000 years old. here is the symbol: 李

Yours,
Li Changdi

Steiny Road to China: Step 2

On Thursday September 10, 2009, the Poet spent two hours in the language lab trying to nail down how to read pinyin, that's the Romanized phonetic spelling of Chinese which was developed by a government committee in the People's Republic of China and approved by the PRC in 1958. She used the expanded second edition of Integrated Chinese, a popular text book for teaching Americans the Chinese language. However, the Montgomery College Bookstore ordered the wrong edition and next week, the Poet will have to go back to the store and get the third edition. What's really frustrating is not having the CDs that go with this text book.

Her laoshi (teacher) Xiaoli Zhang now says it would be better to have the third edition but that the class should listen to any Chinese recordings to help their ears get tuned up. Yesterday the Poet listened to the CD she bought in Chinatown Philadelphia when she went by bus to hear poet Nathalie Anderson's and composer Thomas Whitman's opera A Scandal in Bohemia. She's about to jump out in the rain and do the same in a few minutes.

She is telling you these ponderous details because learning Chinese and working in the field of new opera are fraught with obstacles. The Poet is OK with this as long as there is some return on the investment.
Here's my ROI from last night's class:

1) The Chinese character for 'hao' is a combination of the characters for woman and child. Hao means OK, fine, good. You greet another human being by saying, 'Ni hao' meaning 'Hi, are you good, are you OK?' Have a look at the character for woman. The Poet had already gotten this character into her subconscious memory in the first class because this is how she is going to find the Ladies Room when she gets to China! Is this not extraordinary that well being engages around the creative act involving a woman with child?

2) Changcheng (the Great Wall) means long city/fortress and Chang Jiang is the name of the longest river, the Yangtze.