Who here has spent time in China?

[Little Brother]

Hi Bill,
Lived there for over a decade. Traveled to all major cities and the smallest of villages in rural areas.

Any specific questions, subjects or things you are thinking of?
As China is huge, and is very extreme in many ways. It has so many different cultures and languages within it's borders.

People are friendly, but hard to connect to on a deeper friendship level. They work very very hard, (not so efficiënt) but always keen on making money.
They love food. Cook it, share it, talk about it, know all regional specialties.

So much to tell, about so many things....
I would need weeks of writing

[Arcturian108]

I have been to Hong Kong twice, once in 1967, and again in 1990. The first time what I noticed, having grown up in New York City, was that Chinese food was better in New York than in Hong Kong. Better ingredients, and better cuisine. Clothing was cheap and well made. I spent about a week in Hong Kong at that time. The British were still there, so it felt like a very cosmopolitan city, clean and attractive. In 1990 the glow was gone. It felt dreary and forsaken. Most foreigners had left. Things were more expensive, and the former bargains were gone.

[onawah]

The other factor at play, though certainly less pleasant to consider, is that things have radically changed in China since 2012 when XiJinping became the ruler.
And since visitors to China now are much more restricted, personal accounts of visits there since then will not reflect present conditions realistically.
Though if you have kept up with the news about China even in the last 5 years, it's clear how much things have changed there.

Mod note from Bill:
If you've not been to China, please don't post on this thread.

The reason I started this new thread was to see if we could collect some propaganda-free direct personal experiences from sources I felt we could absolutely trust — i.e. Avalon members who have been there.

At the moment, though the thread is only a few days old, I'm feeling I'm learning more about China from these extremely interesting posts than from any of the other China threads, which often feature articles, tweets or videos from people with strong opinions, or posted strong opinions from members themselves.

The factor at play here is that while we are all entitled to our opinions (and to express them!), opinions — about anything at all — that aren't based on some degree of personal experience may have slightly less value.

And this will be my last post on this thread.

[Theone2050]

I am chinese.The forum certainly had Hong Kong and Chinese members before. Now the US propaganda against China is only to create conflict and confrontation. If you want to know, we already know each other through the Internet ten years ago.

[Theone2050]

Most of rgray222's comments are correct. I learned about Avalon through a blogger who researched and moved a lot of foreign awakening content. I saw Bill Ryan's video about the virus made in the United States infecting China ten years ago, but the prediction was wrong. The real extinction is the vaccine, and China and the United States belong to the same conspiracy group. The new coronavirus was made by China. We are not seriously different, and the life of ordinary humans is also difficult. Although different people's political positions are very different, or they just don't understand and choose to lean towards domestic public opinion. But the news here is very closed. Ten years ago when I was a junior high school student, few people around me knew about the Internet blockade, and only I and a few others knew. And the major events happening in the country are usually unknown, and they often use VPN to understand. I think this is ridiculous. But now most people know. Due to the contribution of domestic quarantine workers, the high-quality video content and large number of views on YouTube can be seen.
Regarding material wealth, my concept is very different from that of the older generation. I can choose less money but more free time. But I think this question is ambiguous. Enjoying material wealth is also enjoying spiritual wealth. But I am more eager to turn dreams into reality, and even change my life to get a better experience. People here all choose materialism by default under official rules, but
most people also generally recognize the rationality of the existence of divination, fortune-telling or other supernatural phenomena, and now People's differences have become greater. Those who believe have more evidence and theoretical support, those who oppose are still stubborn, and those who are neutral are still neutral. However, due to the controllers, many paranormal experiences and supernatural research theories have been deleted and blocked on a large scale.
Online trolls and robot comments are indeed very serious. All content involving damage to the government's reputation is controlled. There are 100 million fake comments under a video. People around me generally hate and spread the coronavirus. Even supporters know that they have done a lot of bad things, are generally corrupt and dictatorial, and join the party or group for profit and promotion.
Here, due to low income and large population, there are many labor-intensive industries, which makes goods cheap. However, due to the epidemic, foreign trade has caused industrial blows, and many people have lost their jobs, and the consumption level of ordinary people has decreased a lot.
Now English is a compulsory course for most students, and most students can at least understand ordinary sentences. And there is translation software.
I think Taiwan is now an independent country, even if it is not recognized as a fact. In fact, the connection between China and Taiwan is very active, and the same language is used, but the font is different. I dare say that the contribution of creators from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan to modern Chinese classics, popular songs and film and television works accounts for more than half.
The Tiananmen Square Massacre was an evil atrocity. In the past decade, there have been countless online trolls wanted for fraud, kidnapping and related deletions. Now the public opinion environment has deteriorated in 2016 and has completely become cancerous in 2020. Now there is no basic attention to politics. If there is anything, just learn about it quakly and leave. The comments are all fake.
The VPN distributed by Falun Gong through the Internet has awakened many people, including realizing the threat of the world and domestic history destroyed by the Internet. But they themselves are also a group of crazy climbers, who promote the founder in a personality cult style. What they write are all spiritual cultivation methods for socializing, most of which are garbage. They just collect the better content in the event theory and become the collection and processing center of overseas Chinese news. They have no merits.

[Wilbur2]

I have spent the last 16 years living in China.

This morning, at about 4am, I sat at the side of the road, watching the world go by. It was quiet, as it often is at that time in the morning. A guy in his late teens/early 20s walked past, to get snacks from the local shop: 6ft 4 inches tall. Five minutes later, another guy walks past: 6ft 2. Another few minutes go by, then another, slightly inebriated, guy walks past: 6ft 6.

I live in what is supposedly one of the "short" provinces in southern China. Before that, I lived around the Shanghai area. In that area, people are, on average, even taller than they are here.

Whilst living near Shanghai, one day a boy stopped to stroke my dog. The boy had the head of a ten-year-old, but was over six feet tall. So I asked him, in Chinese, his age. I was exactly right: ten years old.

This gigantification of the men in China has been going on ever since I got here. When I arrived in 2009, there were already a number of tall people, but there were also plenty of short people. Since then, the height distribution of men in their late teens/early 20s has steadily hiked upwards. In fact, I notice on a month-by-month basis the average height getting taller.

Two or three years ago, the girls started getting taller. The average height now still varies by province, but what I've noticed is that, for the men, the height distribution is bi-modal. What has been changing over time is not just the height itself, but the probability or frequency of people in the taller distribution. You can still find the short people, but they are increasingly scarce.

Now here's the odd thing (if you don't think the above already odd). The old people also seem to be getting taller on average. Now I realise that as time moves by, the identity of those in (say) the 50-60 year age range changes. I think I'm taking account of that in my reckoning. It seems to me that the 60-70 year-olds now are taller than the 50-60 year-olds were ten years ago.

I started commenting on this to other foreigners in China some time ago. I then started commenting to some of the Chinese themselves. What I found was that, none of them really seem to have noticed it. I mean, they see it, but they don't, if you know what I mean. If pushed, they say things like, "oh, it's because we drink milk now"; or "because we play basketball"; I've even had, "because there was a famine"; yes, but the last famine was more than 50 years ago!

Chinese men, almost to the man, smoke cigarettes, in varying quantities. Many of them (but by no means a high proportion) smoke from the age of around 13. They also eat junk food. The other difference I've noticed is that, whereas 15 years ago you rarely saw an overweight Chinese person, now there are plenty. A large number of university-aged boys are also obsessed with going to the gym and building visible muscle.

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Wilbur2 (here)
I have spent the last 16 years living in China.

Can you share anything you've witnessed or experienced personally about the economic, social, and/or political situation there? (Thanks!)

[Wilbur2]

My experience of living in China has made me feel like I am living in some kind of Truman Show, or like I am that man in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, who can see that the people around him are not human. Like he is the only one left. It feels like I am being gaslighted, and I have found myself questioning my sanity. One thing I have learned is that the majority of people don't look with their eyes at all; they look with their ears. They are told what to see, directly or tacitly, and that is what they see. Although they presumably can see strange things going on around them, those things simply don't register in their consciousness.

I harped on and on about the giant thing to an expat friend of mine, a trained chemist. He thought I was nuts. But a few months later, he came back to me, and started acknowledging that I was right. I had managed to impinge upon him, at some length. So I asked him, how is this being done? I discussed this with him and other colleagues, all of whom are scientifically trained. One theory I got from them was, "oh, it's the hormones in the water". I pointed out that Chinese people boil all of their water before they use it. I don't know what the disintegration temperature of somatotropin (growth hormone) is (does anybody here know?), but I somehow doubt that it survives boiling.

I have established that the Chinese themselves don't seem to know how it's being done. A few weeks ago, I chanced to see a baby that looked like it was under one year old. It was gigantic. So I am assuming that whatever is being done to them is being done while they are still infants. I am tempted to collect some hair samples of these giants, to explore whether they are genetically human. However, I don't know anyone who could perform the relevant tests.

[Michel Leclerc]

Wilbur 2 thank you.
Except for the body snatcher impression (a little unkind to my hosts, I would judge such a statement if I said it here in France) your first paragraph matches my impression of the younger generations in all the countries I know of. Independent thinking has become a rarity.

I am from Belgium. In a beloved country just to the North of it, the increase of the average height has been such over a period of a few decennia that they have had to change twice I think the standard height of prefab doors. Plenty of food (although not the best imaginable) and gym jogging or jog gymming before work, in the middle of work, and after it. Recognisable in China, where after all they had had to learn how to grow in spite of recurrent famine?

[Wilbur2]

Yes, the economy is er, how do I put this politely? ferked. When I first arrived in China, there was oodles of wealth sloshing around. It was evident to me that China has been playing the West. They joined the WTO in the early noughties, but it's obvious that they have never played by the rules. I knew a local Chinese guy here who runs a store importing foreign goods (foods and alcoholic beverages). He had to do quite a lot of fancy footwork to manage to import stuff. There's more than one way to impose a tariff. For example, if you don't grease the palms of the right people, then your stuff just gets tied up at the border, and you never receive it. This is just anecdotal, and I don't have concrete evidence of it, but one forms an impression of what is likely going on. I experienced this kind of thing personally on a small scale, on many occasions, ordering books from the US or the UK. The US books especially, NEVER arrived. They would be tracked by Amazon to the Chinese border, and then disappeared.

Anyway, the middle class Chinese were FAR richer than the British middle class, and they are numerous. That's still the case. The number of very expensive cars driving on the roads here beggars belief. The generation in their 40s and 50s, in the middle class, are very wealthy. For their children, however, it's a different story. I have heard several stories from university students about their once-rich parents losing their businesses over the past two or three years. The unemployment rate amongst fresh graduates seems to be climbing precipitously. There's also this phenomenon now of youngsters "lying flat", meaning they don't want to participate in the job market. Usually it's because their parents are wealthy enough to support them, so they are unwilling to work the long hours that getting a job entails in China (plus it's increasingly difficult for them to find work).

Generally, Chinese people are very nationalistic. In the province where I currently live, it's obligatory to hate Japanese people. If I want to jokingly insult one of my friends here, I call him Japanese. I have also encountered a lot of people who are quite robotic in their thinking. There is a remarkable ability to hold two totally contradictory thoughts in mind, without seeing a contradiction. For example, I have had many a conversation with a local who has assured me that "China is very safe." They use a particular sentence to describe this, and never vary this sentence even by a single word (for those who know Chinese, the sentence is 中国很安全). There would be several ways that one could vary this sentence in Chinese, in natural speech. I've noticed it never gets varied. So I surmise that it's coming from some kind of propaganda.

It is true that China is much safer now than when I arrived here. There used to be a lot of petty theft (I got a bike stolen within three days of buying it, when I first came to China). Now, NOTHING. You could probably leave a laptop lying around in a coffee shop, and come back half-an-hour later, and it would still be there. Even girls will happily walk the streets at night, without fear. There used to be a lot of beggars, some of whom were aggressive and dangerous. This has all completely gone. This is all good. But the sudden change is somewhat bizarre.

I think I have managed to figure out what happened to all the beggars. About a year ago, I befriended a young guy in his early 20s. He's Chinese by birth, but spent much of his childhood being educated in Fresno, California. He has psychological problems. He's now back in China. Anyway, he attempted suicide a couple of times (before I knew him), and had spent some time in mental hospitals in China. He told me that many of the homeless people, beggars, etc were held in the mental hospitals he was in. But I got the impression they don't stay there indefinitely, so I can only speculate about what happens to them after that. One thing is certain: they don't end up back on the streets!

During the Covid escapade, things were dreadful here. We were basically prisoners in our own homes. Metal fences were erected everywhere where I lived, and, in order for me to walk to the local supermarket, I had to walk along a metal coral, basically all the way to the supermarket. You couldn't hang around outside for any length of time. Every third morning, I had to queue in my local living area to be tested for Covid, which was somewhat ridiculous, since queuing would significantly increase the risk of it spreading, but it was made very clear to us all that we were just cattle. I suspect that when the economy gets very bad here, these same kinds of control lines will be used again.

[Wilbur2]

Yes, sorry if my comments sound racist towards Chinese people. This is an unavoidable liability of describing a country and its people, from one's own perspective. Chinese people have many characteristics that I like, also. Inevitably, I'm only describing here the stuff that I find very strange.

So, do you think that a person can basically choose their height, by the amount of exercise they do? Because that's what the claim that basketball (as the Chinese claim) or running (as you claim) is the cause amounts to. If you can vary your height by 8 inches just by the right exercise, then that amounts to basically being able to choose your height.

[Wilbur2]

I have had a lot of bizarre conversations with people recently. So for example, I've had a teenager tell me "China is very safe." Ten minutes later, after asking me whether I carry a knife, he's showing me photographs of a friend of his who was almost killed in a knife fight recently.

About a month ago, I saw a large crowd of teenagers, including a group that I know from the local area, who were obviously involved in a fight. Before the police came and arrested a bunch of them, one boy went and hid a huge machete. After the police released him in the small hours, I bumped into him again. He had retrieved his machete. The same boy had previously had the same "China is very safe" conversation with me. And yet, they are right. China is very safe, if you are not a participant in the gang fight.

I also get a lot of Chinese people saying things to me like "You English people have such-and-such a characteristic", or "You must eat bread and potatoes, because you're English". It's remarkable in the internet age that locals seem to have a knowledge of the wider world that has obviously been read from a textbook. A lot of the teenagers are fixed on playing games on their phones; some will gamble (with money they don't have); and there is a culture of recording yourself doing basically nonsense (dancing, wiggling your butt, or whatever) and filming it, and then putting it up on social apps that other people watch and vote on. I have sat with teenagers into the small hours, observing them, and they will happily look through short videos of people doing this for hours and hours and hours. I don't know whether this is what Europeans and Americans and other teenagers spend their time on now. It would bore me silly staring at my phone for hours, but for these teenagers, that IS their life. They don't read books.

It's also very easy to befriend Chinese people. They are curious about foreigners, in a way that most British people (and I imagine most Westerners) aren't. If I were so inclined, I could probably be fed, and drunk, every evening of the week here for free. Also, the impecunious teenagers here (I live in a poor province, so extreme wealth exists alongside poverty) are very good at sharing. If they have cigarettes or snacks, they will share them with me without thinking. However, amongst the poor, there seems to be little ability to distinguish the value of money: there's little difference in their minds between $10 and $1000. I know this from observing how they spend money.

In the province where I live, if a Chinese person regards you as being inside his circle of friends, (s)he will look after you very well. Strangers are ignored, but if they think you are starving or need help, they will approach you and offer help. It's basically impossible to starve in Guizhou province. That's not the case in the richer provinces, though, where poor people are ignored by those who don't know them.

[Wilbur2]

When I first arrived in China, the economy was hot, and a lot of foreigners were coming to China. Finding teaching or research positions in China, at any level, was easy. There are basically two significant university partnerships in mainland China between a British university and a local Chinese partner, one with Liverpool University and the other with Nottingham University, both of which have full campuses in China, plus a lot of little lesser-scale partnerships. There are also at least two or three similar partnerships between US universities and local partners. If I am not mistaken, every foreign university must have a local partner, but these partners usually operate behind the scenes, rather than prominently.

Over the last two or so years, the number of western academics being recruited at the two UK universities has dropped drastically. When a western academic leaves, they are usually replaced by a local Chinese now. This is even true of the English language teaching departments - there is a preference now to replace them with locals. At the same time, interest in coming to China by western academics seems to have plummeted. It seems likely that those two UK universities will end up being essentially run only by local Chinese. If the political situation were to deteriorate, I could envisage them even breaking away from the UK parent university. The ability to get a degree from a UK university whilst staying in China has been considered very valuable, and much cheaper than going to the UK. However, that advantage can be wiped away with the stroke of a government pen. The Chinese government maintains lists of universities that are considered acceptable for government jobs. If the govt ever wants to force the UK unis to close their campuses in China, it can do it with the stroke of a pen. I do not know whether this will happen. However, it seems clear at the moment that there is a push to localise the faculty at the UK universities at least.

[Wilbur2]

Posted by Wilbur2 (here)
My experience of living in China has made me feel like I am living in some kind of Truman Show, or like I am that man in Invasion of the Body Snatchers...

I should perhaps clarify that my Truman Show feeling relates basically to the giants phenomenon, and not to my other experiences of living in China.

[Michel Leclerc]

A question to you Wilbur2. I assume you read and speak Chinese – which I would applaud as a great accomplishment –... I suppose you speak Mandarin then. But – and you do not have to give specifics if you prefer to remain unidentifiable.. – do you master to a degree one of the other branches of spoken Chinese: such as typically Yue Chinese from the South or Shanghai’s Wu Chinese?

I am asking the question because in a way China appears to me not so much as one country as many countries within an empire or many linguistic cultures within a civilisation. In a way resembling Europe with its various language families, or India with English as an overarching lingua franca, or Russia with Russian playing that role – whereas the Chinese overarching element would then be the shared set of ideograms.

If we assume that (correct me if I am mistaken), then it would be understandable that a primary interest of an average Chinese citizen would be the exploration of the Chinese cultures (and obviously internal travel and discovery) – as it used to be in classical times: the consciousness of its own civilisation as supreme and sufficing itself with splendid isolation.. So being a non-Chinese amidst Chinese, one would always be somewhat of a curiosity, whose own interest for all things Chinese would be taken for granted as well as inexhaustible. Such a curiosity would then be something to be cherished and taken good care of.

Is that correct?

May I also ask the question to other members having stayed in China and having learnt Chinese to an extent?

[Wilbur2]

Michel,
I have only learned Mandarin to any significant degree. I would love to learn Cantonese, but I don't really have a good enough reason to learn it, given that it's not routinely spoken in the province where I currently live.

I am also picking up a bit of the local dialect where I currently live. The local dialect for the province where I live (actually, a group of related dialects) is like the Chinese version of a Geordie (= Newcastle upon Tyne) or Liverpudlian (= Liverpool) accent, which also has its own vocabulary added in. It's quite amusing listening to it (and, to me, it's a lovely-sounding dialect). Soon I may have the Chinese equivalent of a Geordie accent.

It's fascinating being able to read and converse in Chinese. It still fascinates me. I listen to myself conversing in Chinese, and I can watch the process from outside of myself. I find it bizarre. The Chinese language doesn't function in the same way as Western languages, at all.

Yes, Chinese people like travelling, both inside the country and, if they are able, abroad also. But unlike most countries, Chinese citizens need a visa to GET OUT of the country. That's before they even obtain a visa to get to their destination country. Although, for some strange historic reason, Chinese people can go to Indonesia without obtaining an exit visa (or maybe it's just that you can obtain the exit visa immediately for Indonesia). I discovered this a few years back when travelling with a Chinese to another country. They didn't have the right exit permit, so we ended up re-booking our flights to Indonesia!

Because of the CCP, and the need to be the best country in the world, China spends far more on highly-visible projects like trains than any western country could justify spending. I remember decades ago they built an ultra-high speed train link (one of those things that floats on a cushion of air) between Shanghai airport and the city centre. They must have spent gazillions on it. Whenever I used it, there was hardly anybody on it (it was very expensive relative to the normal routes into Shanghai, but not ludicrously expensive in absolute terms). Which is really saying something, given the density of people on the normal metro trains. It was a ludicrous waste of money.

Anyway, public transport is very cheap in China, including trains, so it's very easy to travel. Personally, I have avoided going to Xinjiang and Tibet, because it's not really worth going there as a foreigner. You can't stay in the same hotels as a local Chinese, and you are restricted in where you can actually go, in those provinces. I've no interest in going to visit a Potemkin Village.

If anybody here is a Tibetan Buddhist, from the West, they might know that there is a large Tibetan Buddhist community in Sichuan Province, which avoids all the political nonsense associated with going to Tibet.

I would say that it's correct that many Chinese see their own country as an inexhaustible source of travel and interest and cultural learning. However, at the same time, they would, I think, just as readily go abroad if they can spare the time. Your point about the ideograms being the shared lingua franca of sinophones is a very important one. I even recall myself going to Japan after learning Chinese, and deciphering bits of Japanese signs based on my knowledge of Chinese at the time.

"So being a non-Chinese amidst Chinese, one would always be somewhat of a curiosity, whose own interest for all things Chinese would be taken for granted as well as inexhaustible. Such a curiosity would then be something to be cherished and taken good care of."

Yes, that's correct. If I wanted to cynically take advantage of Chinese people, I could play them like a fiddle just by showing sufficient interest in Chinese culture, making sufficient noises about how Taiwan is a part of China (of course it is! Do you need a passport to get there?), the Japanese are evil because they didn't apologise about something that didn't happen within living memory, blah blah blah), and denigrating the West. But that doesn't seem to me to be an honest way of interacting with people.

The Chinese language is fascinating. But it is also ridiculously inefficient to learn. Once you've learned it, it is quite compact (a page-worth of English can probably be squashed into half-a-page of Chinese), but the amount of effort involved in learning Chinese, even for natives, is ludicrous. If anybody reading this is contemplating learning the Chinese language I would say the following. First, I am fascinated by Chinese, so what I am about to say, I say as someone who is the best of all ambassadors for the Chinese language....

Don't bother learning it, unless you have a VERY compelling reason for doing so, and that reason should include a strong interest in the language. Otherwise, it's simply not worth your time. The time I have spent learning Chinese, I could probably have learned French and Italian and German, and had some room left for a smattering of Portuguese and Spanish.

The time spent learning Chinese to a sensible level of proficiency could be spent becoming a nuclear physicist. I knew an English language teacher in China. He knew 6 or 7 languages, which he'd accumulated on his travels around the globe. I would see him at the weekend clutching a Spanish novel or some French classic of literature. After 10 years in China, he barely knew a word of Chinese. He gave up. He presumably compared his progress on Chinese with the progress he'd made in Arabic and French and other languages in the past, and thought, "nah, not worth my time." And he was right.

Interestingly, in China I have noticed that those who have multiple other languages under their belts quickly give up on learning Chinese. Those who become very competent in Chinese usually haven't learned other second languages first.

I'm not sure I've really answered your questions very well, but there you go....

[Wilbur2]

One great thing about living in China is that things are still affordable here. In the UK, where I'm from, I go out of my way to avoid getting in taxis, for example. When I return to my home town, I will get out of the train, and then drag my suitcase for a mile to get home, because I don't think £7 for a one-mile journey is reasonable. I think that, as economies become sclerotic (= the government and its various organs get their snouts into too many troughs, making it too expensive for the private sector to function) things get more and more expensive relative to value added. In China, although the government controls every large corporation one way or another, it doesn't seem to have yet started extracting the eyeballs of smaller businesses, in the way that western governments and councils do. In the UK, the only businesses that can afford to function on high streets now are charities, because they are exempt from business rates (business property taxes).

In China, in the province I live in at present, I can eat for about RMB12 (about £1.50 or maybe $2), and I can eat WELL for double that. I had a pizza hut pizza and fries the other day for RMB61 (maybe $9 or so), and that's expensive food here.

[Michel Leclerc]

Bill, I want to thank you for the idea of this thread. I think it should be protected, because it has very high value. People who have been to a country know more than from any form of hearsay (what “just reading about it” basically is). People who have lived in a country for a year, for many years, know infinitely more.

It may be biased, but then it will be biased “living content”. They may be “influenced” by the local authorities, but then they may still have a lot more of value to convey than, e.g., a Belgian who “knows” China without ever having been there but is paid by secret services to “warn” Belgians against China (they exist).

For that reason, dear moderators, may I request you to keep this thread “clean”?

Of course – says I who quite often have introduced elements to a thread which may have been quite alien to it – I think I am correct in assuming that members who want to enter into dialogue with the members who have posted about their time spent in China, “asking for more”, or just for qualification, are always welcome.

Dear members who have contributed postings without direct relationship to the idea of dialogue with members about their experience in China, may I humbly (says a seasoned derailer) request you to post your postings on the more adequate threads? This creates clarity. (I am very much interested in what genuine China specialists have to teach me and am obviously able to read it there.)

[Michel Leclerc]

Thank you Wilbur2 for your very interesting explanation about your acquisition of the language and about learning it.

I have a few questions to ask and may do so in a few different postings – starting with one in this one.

But at first I want to introduce myself professionally, so that you can know “where my questions come from”. Part of my education and academic curriculum was acquiring languages, which I have continued doing since, so that I speak four fluently, three more well, am a student of two to three more and can just read quite a few more (with the help of a good dictionary). This is not (just?) boasting: everybody is supposed to acquire a skills set to make himself useful here. However, I need to add: my professional life in part consisted of founding and managing, with my now deceased friend, a top-tier language learning consulting company in Brussels (probably the most competitive environment in the world in that field, at a par with Moscow and Salt Lake City). As such our business developed a few unique and proprietary tools to assess language learning ability and progress.

For that reason I will, in another posting, ask you a few more precise questions aimed at qualifying your (in my professional opinion) “criticisable” statement about whether learning Chinese is worth the trouble.

I hope you will not feel offended by those questions – I believe they may have personal value for you as well as for other members. They may nourish our “love of things Chinese”.

For now, I would like to ask you if you would mind developing your quite interesting statement

The Chinese language doesn't function in the same way as Western languages, at all.

I am asking you this because, obviously, as a linguist I can start and bestow quite a few meanings to your statement according to the aspect considered (such as, at the minimum: speaking, reading, writing) – but you may, as a non-linguist (I guess), have something in mind which I am not aware of.

So if you would be so kind and elaborate a little, that could clear the ground for a more thorough conversation on learning Chinese.

Thank you in advance for giving this a thought.

[Wilbur2]

Dear Michel,

I'd be happy to discuss this. Your guess is right - I'm not a linguist, and Chinese is the only "second" language that I have learned to any significant degree. I did a course to get kick-started with Chinese, before I came to China, but the vast majority of my Chinese learning has been from sitting with friends and listening, and then gradually speaking more and more with them, along with some reading. My reading has been very lazy, to be honest. I should have native-level reading skills by now. In fact, my 8-year-old daughter is way, way beyond me already. Part of the reason for me sometimes going a couple of years without doing any Chinese reading is that reading in Chinese, for a learner, involves spending most of your time in the dictionary. Looking up Chinese characters manually is VERY slow, and Chinese dictionaries are not very good. Often, fairly basic words are simply missing from the dictionary, or else they are there, but you can't find them unless you know the pronunciation already. On several occasions I have said to my wife, please look up X word in the dictionary for me. I already know she's not going to be able to find it, because the dictionaries are not constructed with the same care that would be given to, for example, an English dictionary.

There are basically three ways to look up a Chinese word in a dictionary. If you know the pronunciation, you can look it up as you would in an English dictionary, using alphabetical order. That's the quickest way. Otherwise, if you just have the characters, then you can look the first character up in the dictionary by counting strokes. The standard way, which all dictionaries have, is to find the main "radical" of the character, count its strokes, and look up the main radical. Once you've found it, you then count the remaining strokes in your character, and look in the entry for the radical that has that many strokes. So for example, the character 明 has two possible radicals, 日 and 月. It's almost certainly going to be the left-most radical that is THE radical for the character. So I find that by counting that 日 has four strokes, and looking in the list of four-stroke radicals. Once I've found 日, underneath it will be, in number-of-strokes-order, a list of possible characters. 月 has four strokes, so 明 is going to be listed under characters that have 日 as the radical, and have four strokes in the remainder. (Knowing how many strokes there are in a character requires some prior experience in writing the characters. A beginner might assume that 日 has five strokes, but once you have written a few characters, you quickly realise that it's four; one of the strokes involves drawing a right-angle.)

This is very time-consuming. Often you get there, and still can't find the character you want. Maybe you've selected the wrong element as the radical, so you try a different one (in the present example, looking up 月 instead of 日). Sometimes, even that doesn't work, and on those characters, I have often challenged my wife to find the character in the dictionary using that method. Of course, she already knows the character, and so can look it up from its pronunciation, but sometimes she can't find the character using the above method, because the dictionary is flawed - this applies to every dictionary I own.

So in SOME dictionaries (but far from all), there is a third back-up method, which is simply to count ALL of the strokes in the character. So, for 明，I'd count 7 strokes, and I'd go to a list at the beginning of the dictionary that lists out EVERY character with seven strokes. That's a long list, and takes a lot of time.

Now imagine that, even for me as someone who has been in China for years, in any given paragraph there will be a whole bunch of characters or words that I don't know. It takes FOREVER just to look up words in one paragraph. So it becomes incredibly tedious, and is slow.

More recently, I've managed to find electronic versions of books. That has been an absolute boon for me. Because I can select a character or word, and use a software tool to give me the pronunciation and meaning of the word. That is SO MUCH faster than messing around with a manual dictionary. I only started doing that a few months ago, and it has meant that I can now realistically read a whole book (providing it's not too complicated). So, the writing system is one reason I say that Chinese functions differently, and is tedious to learn. However, with software now, that particular problem gets easier to surmount.

I won't post more in this post, and I'll have to give some thought to why I think that the spoken language functions differently from other languages. But for now I will say that, it is often the case that I know what every word means in a written sentence, and still have no idea what the sentence means. Just the way things are expressed is often totally different. It gets easier with experience, but that takes a long time. Often now, I will take such a sentence to my wife and ask her what it means. When she tells me, it's like "oh, yes, I see." But prior to asking her: no idea.

I hope we haven't hijacked Bill's thread. I doubt he had linguistics in mind when he started this thread. Perhaps all of this linguistics discussion should be put in a different thread?