Speaking in Tongues

Last week I went to a nearby jiaozi (dumpling) joint with some of the trainees in my class.  An older lady in a blue Hui hat came out from the kitchen to get a look at the first foreigner to ever enter her restaurant.

"Ni hao," I said in quite passable Chinese.  It means "Hello."

"Ting bu dong," she said, looking helplessly at the young woman beside her.  "I don't understand."

"Ta shuo 'ni hao'!" laughed the young lady.  "She said 'ni hao'!"

"Ah, I thought she was speaking a foreign language!" said the old lady and we all shared another "Ni hao" and a good laugh.

This is so common in China, especially in places where foreigners are rare.  People have absolutely no expectation that they could understand anything that comes out of a white person's mouth, and therefore they don't, even when you speak to them in good Chinese. 

If I looked Chinese, I bet I'd get understood about twice as often.

Fool me Once, Fool me Twice

Today in my Chinese class I learned a new phrase:

再一再二不再三
(zai yi zai er bu zai san)

It means, "Once again, twice again, but not three times again!"

(Another similar phrase I learned was 事不过三 (shi bu guo san) -- "Anything up to three times" or "You only get two chances.")

We were talking about the concept of 忍 (ren), which means "tolerance" or "forbearance."  My teacher said that we should tolerate other people, but ren has a limit.  If someone keeps wronging you, you only have to give them so many chances.  "Once again, twice again, but not three times again!"

It reminded me of the story where Peter asks Jesus how many times he must forgive a brother who sins against him.  "Seven times?" he asks.  Jesus answers, "I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times." (Matthew 18:21-22)

When I tried explaining this to my teacher, I used the word ge ge (older brother) and she was like, "Well, of course you have to forgive your family unlimited times.  But for people outside your family, like strangers or enemies, then there is a limit."

So I told her Jesus didn't mean "older brother." He just meant anyone.

She thought for a minute and said, "Ah, this is how Western culture is different from Chinese culture."

But I told her it's not our culture.  It's not anyone's culture to tolerate or forgive without limit.  It's only through Jesus.

林爱丽

Let me introduce you to a girl named 林爱丽.  She is 27 going on 28, lives in China, and loves cookies.  She is me!

I don't think I've blogged about my Chinese name before, but I've had it for over two years and use it from time to time when I meet people who don't speak English.  I also use it for my renren (facebook knock-off) account because you need a Chinese name to join.


It is pronounced lin ai li (leen eye lee).  林 is my family name.  I chose it because it sounds like my real family name ("Lentz.")  爱 means love and 丽 means beauty.  I chose this given name because it sounds like my real given name ("Alison") and because it has a nice meaning: loves beauty.

At first I didn't love my name, but it grew on me.  It's easy to write, except for 爱, and it ends with two fourth tone syllables, which is kind of fun to say.

Here's my team Christmas card, in which we all did our darndest to write our Chinese names.

Changes in Tomb-Sweeping Day

Last week we had a holiday: Tomb-Sweeping Day (aka Qing Ming Festival or the Day of Clear Brightness), which I briefly mentioned here.  This is a type of memorial day in which people show respect to their ancestors by visiting and cleaning their tombs, and also by burning paper houses, cars, clothes, and especially paper money for their spirits to use in the underworld.  Apparently, in a rare (for China) flash of environmental fervor, many people are trying to curb the burning in order to clean the air.  One of my students reports:

Tomb-Sweeping Day comes this week.  My family went to pay respects to my grand-pa at his tomb yesterday.  We took some papers made to resemble money and burned as an offering to the dead as usual.  But when we got to the city of the dead, we found a group of volunteers of my age.  They stood in front of the gate and came forward when people entered.  Their aim is to exchange our papers with their flowers.  Because the burning of the papers can cause lots of pollution to the air.  CCTV 1 gave a report that the total amount of burning papers can achieve tons every year in this holiday years ago.  So the volunteers want to make contributions to reducing the amount of air pollution for the environment.  They exchanged the papers with the flowers – chrysanthemums.  My family supported this idea and were willing to help the environment, too.  We use the chrysanthemum instead of the paper.  More and more people in China realized this point and make their own contributions to protecting the environment.  I think what we can do for the environment is infinite.  We can think about every aspect n our life and we may find many ways to protect our environment like the flowers in this Tomb-Sweeping Day.  This is a big change in Tomb-Sweeping Day, I think.

Notes on Language Learning

I just finished up my last Chinese lesson of the year. The lesson was titled "Nar you piaoliang guniang xue houquan de?" ("How could a beautiful girl learn monkey boxing?")

Today I just want to share a specific observation I have made in the past semester of studying Chinese:

Cultural context is important. This point is specifically related to listening. Sometimes my tutor gets caught up in an explanation and starts talking really fast, using tons of vocabulary I don't know. The only thing that saves me is if I already have some cultural context for what she's talking about. That happened in my lesson today. She started explaining the origin of monkey boxing (whatever that is), which is related to the classic Chinese story of the Monkey King - a good and powerful shape-shifting superhero. I don't know much about him, but I knew enough to understand most of her 5-minute long story even though most of the vocabulary was unfamiliar.

Another example: I can never remember the word for minorities, but I do know there are 56 recognized ethnic minorities in China. If I can catch the number "56" in the stream of Chinese flying by, then I know there is a pretty good chance we are talking about minorities.

I can think of many more examples of times when I didn't really understand the language, but because I already knew about the topic, I could guess what the person was saying. (the lunar calendar, the college entrance exam, the Olympics, Spring Festival, etc., etc., etc.)

I think this small observation has reinforced for me the importance of teaching and learning culture. Not only can it help language learners interact appropriately with native speakers, but it can also boost their listening comprehension. Cool!

Cocky Confidence

In the last two months, I've experienced a little Chinese language burst.  In a short time, I went from stumbling through short phrases to stumbling through short conversations.  This makes a huge difference in quality of life in China.  When I was traveling with my family, I was surprised at how often I could find some way to ask the question I was thinking of, and sometimes even understand the answer! 

By the way, travel is great language practice.  It takes you away from your comfortable routines and from the people who normally translate for you.  Partly for this reason, I try to travel about once a month (if only to Beijing).

I returned from my recent travels feeling pretty confident with my blossoming Chineze skillz.  True, I am still illiterate, can barely write my own name, and do most of my communication with some combination of the words "this," "that," "what," and "OK?"  True, I often smile and nod when I have no idea what the person just said.  (Example: A woman at the Great Wall asked me if I liked to smoke. I smiled and said yes.)  But, nonetheless, I got cocky.

...for about a day.  This week, my Chinese doesn't seem to be working for me at all.  I bought sunglasses today and didn't catch even one full sentence that the salesgirl said in my 15 minutes in the store.  In my Chinese lesson on Friday, my tutor would teach me a word only to have me forget it .3 seconds later.  "We just, just studied this!" she kept saying in friendly exasperation.

So, while I'm thankful for my improving communiation skills, I think God may be teaching me a lesson about humility.

A Chinese Language First

I had my first telephone conversation in Chinese tonight.

It's always been my opinion that second languages and phones don't go together.  When I studied Spanish in high school and college, I never got to the point where I felt confident on the phone, in spite of being perfectly capable of a face-to-face conversation.  I've also had dozens of misunderstandings with international friends over the past few years that have arisen from them having to speak their second language, English, on the phone with me.

Here's a little bit of trivia that they told us in telemarketing training: Only around 40% of our communication is conveyed through words.  The rest is through facial expression, body language, and tone of voice, so you have to work doubly hard to get a point across on the phone.  (Did you know I was once I telemarketer?  Well, now you know.)

My phone call tonight was from the guy at the train ticket office, and it went like this:

Me:  Hello?

Train guy:  Wei, ni hao.

Me (in Chinese now): Sorry, I don't speak Chinese.

Train guy:  A whole bunch of Chinese.  Did he say something about my train ticket being ready?

Me:  Tomorrow?

Train guy:  More Chinese.  Too much Chinese to be agreeing with my idea that I come tomorrow.

Me:  Now?

Train guy:  A little bit of Chinese.  Agreement, perhaps?

Me:  I come now.

Train guy:  More Chinese.  I caught the word "now."

Me:  Good, good.  Thanks, thanks!

Train guy:  Zai jian.

So I grabbed my keys and tripped off to his office, where he was waiting with my train tickets to Beijing next week.  It wasn't pretty, but my first phone conversation in Chinese ended in success.