What Have I Been Up To?

Lately, all the e-mails you send me contain some variation of the following sentence:

"You haven't been updating your blog lately."

This confounds me. It's never a question, but rather a statement, which leaves me to assume that you believe I'm unaware of this fact. As though when you bestow this revelation on me, I am sitting at my computer thinking, "Whaaaaat?!? Really? Because I have a very distinct memory of conceiving, writing, and posting an update recently . . . well I'll be. I GUESS I DIDN'T DO THAT AFTER ALL! It's a good thing that I have this attentive individual to remind me of what actions I have and haven't taken recently."

Or perhaps you imagine, foolishly, that such a statement will fill me with guilt at not keeping you better informed.

NO DICE! Those that know me well know that I am a remorseless non-informing machine. I will keep you in the dark forever, even concerning information vital to your well-being. We could be married, and I would suddenly disappear for months at a time and return just as abruptly without ever explaining where I've been, where the new scars came from, or why I'm covered in Bearnaise sauce and red Skittles.

However, your mewing and braying has become so wearisome that I thought I might jot out an entertaining little update just to keep the passive-aggression at bay. Then I thought it would be even better if I just wrote an update that was so boring, so numbingly insipid, that you would never ask me for another. BINGO! See, you never go with your first instinct.

So that brings us to our topic: what I've been up to during my vacation. You keep asking me, and I keep telling you: "studying Chinese". Evidently you don't believe me, because the follow-up always comes: " . . . and? What else?" Well, as you are about to learn, nothing else! What follows is an incredibly dry account of my day-to-day existence over the last month. It involves no exotic locales or tales of derring-do. Rather it involves manila envelopes and educational software. Don't bitch to me. YOU ASKED FOR THIS!!!

I get up every morning at seven thirty, right around first light. Breakfast is my immediate task, followed perhaps by some cleaning, and then e-mails (OH! . . . the e-mails). Then it is time to start studying.

Chinese is purported to be the number one most difficult language for an English speaker to learn. That seems about right. You can't approach a language like this without a plan, you will only end up embarrassing yourself. One well-known linguist said, "Studying Chinese is a six-year lesson in humility." I'm not sure what "humility" is, but it sounds like something I'd prefer to avoid, so intend to learn Chinese within that six-year limit.

People make the same mistakes studying Chinese as they do studying English. Both languages are rather irregular, highly idiomatic, and organized in unpredictable ways. And yet, folks seem to think they can learn such a language by memorizing grammar rules and analyzing sentences in a textbook. What this leads to is language output that is easily understandable, but highly unnatural. I don't want to get too deeply into this topic, just believe what I'm telling you. This is how my kids have been learning English for seven years. When they speak and write English, they make sentences that are grammatically perfect, but don't resemble any English I have ever heard. This is the result of studying a complex language from the outside in.

I intend to study Chinese from the inside out. I attempt to grasp it directly, like a child does when acquiring their primary language. I don't use textbooks - the sentences and vocabulary they use are cherry-picked and purposefully altered so as to be less confusing. The natural language won't spare you like that. Languages are confusing. People who have no tolerance for mystery and ambiguity are better off writing Hollywood screenplays (ZING!). Many students think they've mastered Chinese (or English) because they understand every sentence in their stupid textbook, and then receive a rude awakening at the unfeeling, calloused hands of reality. Chinese, like English, requires direct experience, not abstraction, to be understood.

Okay, fine, so how is it done? I've decided to start with reading and writing. Literacy is a powerful aid in acquiring a second language, as one can better inspect and absorb large amounts of written language. Of course, Chinese ups the ante significantly with their 8,000 god-damned characters (I'll explain how I deal with this later), but that's the nature of the beast.

Reading, reading, and more reading of natural sources leads to an intuitive grasp of a language, whence TRUE fluency is born. While I'm learning to read, I will neither speak nor write any Chinese. Why not? Because producing output before you're ready only creates and cements bad habits. Ever met an immigrant who has lived in America for 15 years yet still has a heavy accent and repeatedly makes the same grammar mistakes? Know why? Because that's how they said it the first few times they spoke, and habits are hard to break, even with consistent correction. You're much better off doing something right the first time, and that goes for more than just languages.

Even though I'm not speaking, I incessantly practice Chinese pronunciation. Most language learners ignore pronunciation, and this is a terrible mistake. Pronunciation is incredibly important, even if it doesn't affect understanding. Why?

Because unless it's purely a hobby, an individual learns a spoken language for one reason and one reason only: to influence other people. Language students hate to admit this, but influence is undeniably the desired effect of language acquisition. Otherwise you're just doing it for fun. Given that, absolutely nothing makes a better impression on a native speaker than speaking their own language to them with a perfect, natural accent and intonation. Nothing. You can have a poor vocabulary, and even a weak grasp of grammar, but people are always blown away when you are able to flawlessly reproduce the sound of their language.

So what is my ultimate goal? I call it the "telephone test". The telephone test is simple - can I conduct a conversation with a native speaker over the telephone without them ever realizing that I am not a native speaker? If I can, then I've passed the telephone test. Oh, and also a real test. The HSK. I want to take the intermediate level next year, so I'll need to know at least 3,000 characters by then.

Damn, this got long in a hurry. And I didn't even get to the pictures. Okay, I'm going to have to break this up into two parts. The next part will have pictures. Yes, pictures! Of learning!

What's that you say? You're bored? Poor you. Just remember - you asked for this.