Learner-friendly language in some ways: 00 (An introduction)

(This is my simplistic summary, not a serious pedagogic thesis.)

The Chinese language has a fearsome reputation in general, with so many seemingly insurmountable hurdles in the way of the learner who is brave enough to venture into its realm.

    The script is unique (the overlaps with Korean [pre-1970s] and Japanese [post 4th/5th centuries AD] are borrowings by those languages).  A lot of European languages share the same alphabet, which generally makes it easier for people from one European country to learn the language of another European country.

    The sounds:  Chinese is a tonal language, which most non-Chinese people have trouble managing.  (I'm only thinking of Mandarin which has four main basic tones [vs, say, Cantonese which has six], and standard readings [not tone changes when uttered in combination].)

    The grammar is not unique (in some ways, it's similar to German and Japanese, e.g., with the main verb coming at the end of the sentence -- my simplistic summary from my own limited knowledge), but it does vary quite a bit from English, the language that has been the global language.

    Now for the good news before you decide to give up on the language altogether:  there are elements to the language that make life much easier for the learner of Chinese (than for the learner of English).

The nature vs nurture of food: 06 (Saltiness)

 

I’m from a S.E.Chinese dialect group, Teochew (Cháozhōu / 潮州), whose speakers eat their food quite bland on the whole.

    As a child, I’d hear these generalised statements, “The Cantonese eat their food very salty and oily.”  (True or not, I’m just reporting what I’d grown up hearing the adults say.)

    The Brazilian friend, who’s mentioned in the other Nature vs nurture blog (on the size of the cooked ingredients), dipped into a Chinese dish I brought one day and said, “You didn’t put any salt in it??!!”

    She and her Portuguese husband love Chinese cooking, and Chinese cooking ingredients (e.g., soya sauce).  They don’t just add soya sauce to the food while it’s being cooked (which is what the Chinese do).  They would also sometimes actually drizzle soya sauce fairly liberally over their Western cooking at the dining table.

    She even makes what she calls “ramen”: Chinese egg noodles with a stir-fried mixed veg and meat.  Yes, I did find it too salty for my palate.

    So, it’s very much nurture when it comes to saltiness and other flavouring intensity.

The nature vs nurture of food: 04 (Offal)

 

(MBP dictionary) Offal

Quote 

the entrails and internal organs of an animal used as food

Unquote

I grew up with a saying or joke that’s supposed to be said by the rest of the Chinese people about Cantonese speakers:

Quote

The Cantonese will eat anything that has four legs except a table, and anything that flies except an aeroplane. 

Unquote

    Prince Philip’s version, repeated on a visit to China, was that it was about the Chinese people as a whole.  He got criticised for making a racist joke /comment.

    I’m not quite sure why it should be considered racist.  It could be a matter of “half full or half empty”.

    One could interpret it as:  that saying/joke could be praising the Cantonese/Chinese as being eco — economical (frugal) and ecological (not wasting).

    Given China’s food history, with the famines and frequent floods (the Yellow River bursting its banks with all the silt brought downstream, just to name one) causing hunger and hardship, it’s terribly wasteful to be so selective about food.

    I was in a long distance relationship with a Swiss chap in the late 80s.  On my first visit to Zürich, he took me out to a restaurant, and asked what I’d like to eat.  I said, “Traditional Swiss food, of course!”

    Turned out, surprisingly, to be offal.

    Why surprising?  Because Switzerland is a Western country, and my experience of Westerners in general is that they don’t tend to eat such things, considering them not “proper” food, even if not downright “disgusting”.  (Maybe I got that from the Brits and only those I'd come into contact with, not all Westerners.)

    Also, I’d always associated Switzerland with money, being a country of numbered bank accounts (rich people hiding their identities and all that), and therefore wealth, which implies the people do not have to eat foods that are fairly typically considered undesirable (for their image and status, I feel, more than because of the actual taste of the items themselves).

    So why is offal traditional Swiss food?  They were a country of peasants historically — think cows and alps.

Timing it right (London)

Staff lunch at the Chinese community centre where I’m teaching Mandarin and English.

    Bobby the raconteur was telling story after story about being a civil servant in Hong Kong.  

    I said to the group (all from Hong Kong) that it should’ve been video’d as it was all so witty.

    One of them said to me, “You seem to be able to understand all the profound Cantonese expressions he uses.”  

    I said, “Not really.  I just know how to laugh at the right moments.”

(London, 2022)

Linguistic reefs: 01 (Singapore)

It’s the linguistic False Friends that are the hidden reefs.

    One example I cited to my Chinese community centre Mandarin students:

    In my dialect (Teochew / 潮州 / Cháozhōu), the word for “stingy” is “kiam siap”.

(kiam = 鹹 / 咸 / xián / salty;

siap = 澀 / 涩 / sè / tart*)

(*“tart” is the word the dictionary gives for 澀 / 涩 / sè, yet the Chinese for this sensation is more “unsmooth”, like the furring-up effect on one’s tongue when one eats unripe fruit, especially persimmon / kaki / Sharon fruit, rather than “sour / acidic” which is more like “tart” as in unripe apple.  澀 / 涩 / sè is also used for describing wheel axles that don’t turn smoothly and therefore need oiling.)

    One day, a Teochew speaker tried to describe, to some Cantonese speakers, a man (who was present) as being “stingy”.

(BTW, this was done good-naturedly, as the Chinese tend to go for what I call “rough humour”, i.e., the closer one is to someone, the freer one can feel about giving that person a hard time — in a teasing spirit, not in a bad-tempered way.)

    The Teochew speaker simply converted the two Teochew sounds of “kiam siap / salty tart” into the Cantonese pronunciation “haam sap”.  

    Unfortunately, “haam sap” in Cantonese = to be lecherous, so the Cantonese listeners all looked at the poor man in disgust.

(Singapore, 1960s)

Sibling rivalry (Worldwide)

Growing up in Singapore as a child from the Teochew (Cháozhōu 潮州, S.E.China) dialect group, I’d hear derogatory / pejorative remarks made about other dialect groups.  

The Cantonese (S.E.China) put too much oil and salt in their cooking.  

The Hokkiens (from Fújiàn 福建 Province, S.E.China) are uncouth — they apparently have the biggest range and the most vulgar of swear words and phrases, so vulgar I didn’t dare listen, never mind repeat.  

The Hainanese (from Hainan Island, S.E.China) were called “white stomach”, which is a kind of sea fish: it has a white underbelly and floats in the water upside down, white underbelly facing up, thus making it very easy for fishermen to spot and catch them, hence stupid.  

Similarly, there were jokes / comments about the Malays and the Indians.

When I went to work in Taipei, I heard similarly critical comments about three regions (there must be others):  people from Anhui Province (further north of S.E.China, inland westwards from Shanghai) are fierce;  people from Sichuan Province (S.W.China) and Hunan Province (central China) are fiery (because of the hot food they consume) and can outdo anyone in a row.

Coming to London, I came across jokes about (and labels for) the Irish and the Scots, sometimes about northern English people.

When I started going out with a Swiss man, I heard that the Swiss have jokes about the Austrians, and the French have jokes about the Belgians.

It then dawned on me that it’s geographical proximity (and therefore familiarity) that decides who the targets of disparagement would be.  

The Chinese community in Singapore in the 1960s consisted mainly of Hokkiens (the biggest group at the time), the Cantonese, the Teochews, the Hainanese and the Hakkas.  It’s not a coincidence, I think, that they’re all from S.E.China.  There were no derogatory remarks about people from Anhui, Sichuan or Hunan, because we didn’t have them in Singapore at the time.

Ditto the English jokes/comments about the Irish and the Scots.  Ditto the Swiss and French ones.  They’re all neighbours, or close enough.  I have a feeling there’ll be Scandinavian ones about each other. 

I call this “sibling rivalry”.  

It can also be applied to people from the same sex:  in my experience, women tend to be more competitive with (and often, catty about) other women, and men with men, rather than across the sexual divide.

An example from my personal experience: when I started my relationship with the Swiss man, I told a good friend, Bernhard, about it, adding, “And he’s a German speaker, too!”  Bernhard, who’s German, said, “That’s what he thinks.”

Update 271117:  An ex-student’s father, who’s from Tianjin, China, said last night when I told him the Hainanese story: "People in mainland China think people from Hainan are very clever."  Proves my Sibling Rivalry theory, I think — Tianjin in north China is much further from Hainan Island in the south-east, therefore no bitching...

The old man in Chinatown (London)

Being very early for a late morning job interview in Chinatown, I was walking around to kill time when I spotted an old Chinese man with a white stick heading up a ramp which ended in a vertical drop.  (I think the ramp led to the stage door of a theatre.  Chinatown is full of theatres, btw, for those who don’t know.)

    So I went over and asked him in my best Cantonese where he was going, to which he replied, in Cantonese, that he was going to XYZ Chinese supermarket.  It was in the opposite direction, I told him, still in Cantonese, and he happily allowed himself to be herded away from that ramp by the elbow.  

    We reached the edge of the kerb, which I hadn’t anticipated, so I instinctively called out in English, “Mind the kerb!”  

    The old man stopped abruptly as if I’d slapped him in the face, and said, in Cantonese, “啊，你係鬼婆！ (Oh, you’re a Westerner! — literally: You are devil old-woman)”  

    He then yanked his elbow out of my grasp, as if I was an untouchable or too disgusting for him to come into contact with.  

    I said, once again in Cantonese, “No, I’m not a devil old-woman.  I’m from Singapore.  It’s just that I’m a Teochew [dialect] speaker, so my Cantonese is not very good.”

    He visibly relaxed and once again allowed me to steer him by the elbow for the onward journey towards XYZ supermarket.  

    He asked if I was a student, to which I said, “No, I’m a teacher.”  

    He stopped in mid-track, and clapped his hands like an excited child, beaming from ear to ear in obvious approval: “啊，你係老師！(Ah, you are a teacher!)”

(London, late 1990s)

See also: https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-status-of-teacher-in-chinese.html