Colour change for the fire engine (USA)

Michael Boyle was doing his MA in S.E.Asian History at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) when I was doing my BA there.

    We kept in touch (by snail mail) after he graduated and returned to Connecticut.

    He told me one day that he was writing a guide book for Connecticut (with recipes for traditional New England dishes and all that). This entailed driving around to all the different places, looking around, then doing a write-up for each one.

    Travelling around America is not easy without a car, and since he was already driving around the state anyway, I might as well grab the opportunity of catching a lift, so I invited myself over. (In return, I helped him with taking photos, one of which got used in the guide book, cooking his vegetarian meals [Chinese stir-fry], and typing up his notes [on his IBM electric typewriter] for the publishers to turn into a book -- no self-publishing in those days, or not in the form as we know it today, anyway.)

    It was fantastic timing too, being in New England in autumn with all the harvest (mainly apples, pumpkins and Indian flint corn [multi-coloured kernels]) and the landscape ablaze with colourful trees everywhere.

    Just before my arrival, the authorities (don't know if it was just Connecticut or the whole of America) decided to change the colour of their fire engines from red to bright yellow.

    Apparently, research at the time showed that the yellow colour stands out much more than the red colour, so it'd be quicker for people to spot yellow fire engines dashing to somewhere and give them the right of way.

    I said, "But with all the yellow trees around, a yellow fire engine might not stand out that much!"

    Michael's typically-ever-so-quick quip was, "Well, if you were to see a yellow tree coming down the road at you at 100mph, you'd certainly get out of the way FAST!!"

(Connecticut, USA, 1983)

"Huh?!?" attitude: 03 (English speaker about Mandarin)

"English people don't go for rote learning."

    The above is my paraphrase of what an English student of Mandarin said in response to my offering her a learning strategy -- pick a particular problematic sentence (whether it's the word order or the pronunciation), and go through the rest of the week repeating it.

    I've been using my own experience with French numbers to show my students how it's worked for me: when I go up/down the stairs in my block of flats, I count the steps in French, aloud.

    Only problem is: one flight is seven steps, the other is 11, so I'm fluent only up to 11, but I can now do it without having to think.

    The other (and potentially serious) problem is: being extremely clumsy, I'll trip over / walk into / stub my toes on anything, so there's always the risk factor to consider -- don't end up having an accident while trying to practise a problematic sentence.

    This student has been saying, increasingly over the months, how she's unable to get the Chinese language right.

    This is someone who's been doing Mandarin since the 90s (not all of those years, though), used to teach English, is learning Russian at the moment, and already knows French and Spanish. It just goes to show how difficult Mandarin must be for a non-Oriental. I totally sympathise.

    One issue is numbers, especially in listening exercises, which is another of her weaknesses (and of most learners of a foreign language -- from my own experience and from what I've heard).

    One week, she said she couldn't get her head around 十二 / shí èr / "ten two" (for 12) and 二十 / èr shí / "two ten" (for 20) in a listening exercise.

    Another week, she said it was most unhelpful starting the listening exercise with a sentence involving numbers because it fazed her. (The sentence was: "I'd worked in Taipei for two years 1975–1976.") I said one can't tell native speakers in real life how they should start the conversation, so one needs to learn how to cope, which was the point of these exercises.

    When she gave Chinese sentences mirroring the English way of saying things, I said she had to leave her English hat behind and go round repeating Chinese sentences aloud, rather like with songs or tunes. That was when she said, "English people don't go for rote learning."

    I then presented the following to her:

1. English irregular verbs and nouns, e.g., "eat ate eaten" instead of "eat, eated, eated"; "drink drank drunk" instead of "drink drinked drinked"; "child children" instead of "child childs"; "woman women" instead of "woman womans"; "goose geese" instead of "goose gooses" --> she would've had to learn them by rote, I'm sure;
2. song lyrics and tunes --> she would've had to learn them by rote as well, unless she had a photographic memory and could remember a tune and the lyrics after hearing them just once.

    So, my "huh?!?" is about why she says English people don't go for rote learning.  How else had she herself remembered English irregular verbs and nouns, and song lyrics and tunes?  (Yes, she said she does sing.)

    I've checked with another English person (in her early 70s) who used to be a teacher as well.  She said this student might've meant "English people are not taught rote learning at school".

    Hmmm...  Even if the student had meant that, it's still the wrong attitude to take when it comes to learning another language (or anything foreign, e.g., cooking), but I shall leave that for another blog, or this one will get too long.

    My ultimate question is still:  how did she remember irregular verbs and nouns in English, and song lyrics and tunes, if not by rote learning?  It's a puzzle I'd like to find out the answer for.  (I'm not going into things like historical dates and mathematical formulae, because she might say she'd always been bad at those.)

(London, 2026)

"Huh?!?" conversations: 08 ("1975–1976 is 1.5 years")

Last week for the Tuesday group lesson, I started a listening piece with the line, "我一九七五年到一九七六年在台北工作过两年 / I'd worked in Taipei for two years 1975 to 1976."

    One of the students immediately challenged it: "That's not two years. That's a year and a half."

    Huh?!?

    I would've understood if she'd said it was one year, but how on earth had she arrived at the "half" bit when I didn't say which part of 1975 to which part of 1976? Did my primary school maths lessons miss out on something??

    This being an anarchistic group (more in a separate blog), another student (who has trouble with numbers in Chinese even after 30 years of learning the language*) said, "It's most unhelpful to start a listening piece with a line mentioning numbers."

    I had to point out to her that in real life, one cannot predict how the native speaker will conduct the conversation, so it's all good practice.

    Over the decades of teaching Mandarin, I've had to point out to students that no native speaker will first ask them how much Chinese they'd learned and what textbook(s) they'd used, before entering into the conversation at the appropriate level.

    This is why I try to expose them to real-life obstacles like unknowns (vocab, grammar, speed) -- to a reasonable degree, of course, or they'll be so disheartened they'll just give up.

(London, 2026)

* This is an observation, not a criticism. Numbers are always problematic for learners of any foreign language (myself included):
https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/05/learner-friendly-language-in-some-ways.html.

"Huh?!?" conversations: 07 (Challenging an English name)

For the listening comprehension with the Tuesday group this week, I was telling a story featuring an English friend's experience in an anarchists' bookshop in the Angel (a district in north London) in the 80s.

    The friend's name is Guy. One of the students (English, in her 80s) immediately said, "How can a person be called Guy?"

    I replied, "You will have to ask his parents."

    At least she posed the challenge in Chinese, I noted at the time. So maybe I should go and find more material that the students will object to, to make them speak more in Chinese...

    I've been calling this group of students anarchistic (more in a separate blog), so her challenge was most in character.

    It was also most appropriate that she should've been making the challenge (which I interpret as being done in an anarchistic spirit) about a story set in an anarchists' bookshop.

(London, 2026)

"Huh?!?" conversations: 06 (Non sequitur)

An ex-student from Malaysia who'd moved to Bristol was coming to London for a weekend.

    She suggested meeting up for a S.E.Asian or Chinese meal, so we started looking online, separately, for somewhere central enough.

    Kings Cross showed up with a few, one of which I thought rang a little bell.

    I texted another Malaysian student (let's call her Susan), who's in her early 80s. She'd once told me about some Malaysian or Hong Kong friends taking her to a place near Kings Cross, mentioning that the service was a bit surly and abrupt, which I thought might be the place near Kings Cross I'd seen online. So I thought I'd better check with her, as I didn't want to end up going there and spoiling my outing.

    Texted Susan with: "Ex-student coming over from Bristol and wants to go for a S.E.Asian or Chinese meal. One of the places I've found near Kings Cross is Restaurant xyz. Is this the one you'd told me about a few months back?"

    Back came Susan with, "I can't go, because my son is visiting from abroad."

    Huh?!?

    (Susan had an English education -- over here actually, came over in her teens -- so I don't think it was a language problem.)

(London, 2024)

"Huh?!?" attitude: 02 (English speaker about Mandarin)

"I don't see the point of the 把 / bǎ construction."

    (For a quick superficial dip into the 把 bǎ construction, see: https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/06/huh-attitude-01-english-speaker-about.html.)

    This came from another student, who had taught English in a few places abroad, including Singapore and China.

    It's surprising not so much because she's been learning Mandarin for over 30 years (not continuously). It's astonishing more because as an Englishwoman with English as her mother tongue and first language, she would have had to wade through the inconsistencies and complications in the English language -- presumably never questioning or protesting about them, just accepting and learning them by rote as they are thrown at her. Yet she queries the point of the 把 / bǎ construction.

    When students ask "why" about a Mandarin linguistic point, my most frequent response is, "You'll have to go back a few centuries and ask the early Chinese. We just have to accept these things as they've been passed down the generations."

    I then went on to give her a few examples in English as a comparison:

* Verbs: Why can't English verbs all simply behave consistently and have an "-ed" added for the past tense right across the board? Why throw a spanner into the works and do "eat, ate" rather than "eat, eated" / "go, went" rather than "go, goed" / "sing, sang" rather than "sing, singed" -- just to give a small handful of examples?

* Nouns: Why can't English nouns all just behave consistently and have an "s" added at the end? Why make life difficult for the learner and do "child, children" rather than "child, childs" / "goose, geese" rather than "goose, gooses" (and yet, just to wrongfoot the learner further, it's "moose, mooses", not "moose, meese") / "man, men" rather than "man, mans", etc.?

    In Chinese, the word for the people of a particular country is simply and consistently the name of the country with "人 rén / human, person" added:

China: 中國人 / 中国人 / Zhōngguó-rén / "China person"

England / Britain: 英國人 / 英国人 / Yīngguó-rén / "England/Britain person"

France: 法國人 / 法国人 / Fǎguó-rén / "France person"

Holland: 荷蘭人 / 荷兰人 / Hélán-rén / "Holland person"

Laos: 老撾人 / 老挝人 / Lǎowō-rén / "Laos person"

Poland: 波蘭人 / 波兰人 / Bōlán-rén / "Poland person"

Singapore: 新加坡人 Xīnjiāpō-rén / "Singapore person"

Spain: 西班牙人 Xībānyá-rén / "Spain person"

but look at the English versions:

China  → Chinese

England/Britain → English/British

France → French

Holland → Dutch

Laos → Laotian

Poland → Polish (but "polish" is a verb and a noun for something else, although it doesn't sound the same)

Singapore → Singaporean

Spain → Spanish

    Africa seems to be the most consistent as a group for the near-universal generic ending in English. Some examples:

(in alphabetical order)

Algeria / Algerian; Egypt / Egyptian; Ethiopia / Ethiopian; Gambia / Gambian; Ghana / Ghanaian; Kenya / Kenyan; Mauritius / Mauritian; Moravia / Moravian; Nigeria / Nigerian; Zimbabwe / Zimbabwean. (Congo is one of the exceptions: not Congoan but Congolese.)

    So, how can an English speaker complain about Mandarin when English is equally hard work for the learner? How can a student say of the language s/he is learning: "I don't see the point of ..."

    (I must say again here that I'm not being defensive on behalf of Mandarin because I'm from that background genetically [in part]. This is a purely pedagogic discussion.)

(London, 2026)

"Huh?!?" attitude: 01 (English speaker about Mandarin)

I had an American private student in the 80s who was in London because her husband got transferred here for a stint of work. She was in her 20s, I think (or early 30s at the most -- I'm very bad with age).

    She was planning to apply to Columbia University for a postgrad in Business Studies. One of the criteria was knowing a second language (just like for the London Business School MBA programme, where I taught Mandarin to the students for a couple of years). As this was the 80s and China was opening up to the outside world after the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), she decided to go for Chinese as that second language.

    The Chinese language is mostly SVO (Subject Verb Object) in structure, e.g., 我喝茶 / wǒ hē chá / I drink tea. This matches English, so lots of English speakers do not have a problem with it.

    One problematic structure for lots of Mandarin learners is the 把 bǎ construction, with the (for Mandarin) unusual word order of S 把-O V (e.g., 我把茶喝了 / wǒ bǎ-chá hē le / I took the tea and drank it).

    This American student struggled with this, and said, "What a stupid language!"

    I was stunned by this attitude: calling a language "stupid" just because she couldn't cope with a construction that does not conveniently match English that she's comfortable with.

    I say "comfortable with" for a reason, because English is not the most consistent of languages, yet English speakers don't object to this, because they grow up speaking it -- what I call the osmosis effect: it all seeps in and stays under the skin, without the speaker noticing it.

    As a lot of my students will know, I'm constantly sympathising, and empathising, with them, calling the Chinese language a monster, which makes them laugh (and feel better about their own struggles), so my feeling shocked about the attitude of this student was not in defence of the language at all, and certainly not because I'm from that cultural background.

    My concern is purely from a pedagogical perspective, which I always explain to the student: "Taking this attitude is counter-productive. Since you've launched into it (learning the language), you have to block out all negative thoughts, or it'll hamper your coming to grips with an already challenging task which you can't do anything about but to devise coping strategies for. Or give up."

    When students say that they're too old or too stupid to learn such a hard language, my immediate response is, "The first thing you should do is try and stop taking that attitude. If you say it often enough, you'll start to believe it -- this way, the battle is lost before you've even started."

    I give the same advice even when I hear people talking about being too old or too stupid to learn anything else.

    Of course, I'm not saying that just thinking that you can become fluent in Chinese or German or French will immediately remove all the obstacles. We have to be realistic and recognise (/acknowledge) that some of us are not cut out for certain things in life, e.g., being an Olympic athlete, or a UN interpreter. Some people are born with a talent for music, some for carpentry, so one has to be aware of one's limitations, it's true.

    This American girl was aiming to do an MBA with Mandarin as her second language. With such an attitude about the language (calling it "stupid"), she wouldn't get very far, I feel... (With learning the language, I mean, not in life, although her attitude would probably also throw a lot of self-created obstacles onto her path through life.)

(London, 1987?)