Efficient glass cleaning
Courtesy Shanghaiist – a cleaner at Pudong airport (animated gif):
Google/China
With my other job dealing with Internet censorship, I’ve been very interested in Google’s stoush with the Chinese government the last few days. My take on the affair can be read on my main blog here.
Posting in Chinese
Since I’m currently in Melbourne, I’m not going to have any hilarious China stories for the time being. So I’m going to start posting in bad Chinese for Chinese friends to read. I need all the practice I can get.
Not sure when I’ll be back yet. Got my Expo and plush Haibao urging me on though!
Bad Chinese strategies, photos and an update
My experiment with learning Chinese was more or less a failure – I’ve definitely made some improvement, but squandered the opportunity by not putting enough time and effort into it outside of the lessons. Partly laziness and partly the constraints of having to live a busy life. (Apologies to my teacher, Elaine.) I’m not giving up, but I’ll have to really think about what strategy I will use in the future. So I can add to the list of Chinese-learning strategies that don’t work:
- Doing nothing and feeling guilty about it
- Living near Chinatown
- Getting a Chinese-speaking girlfriend and hoping for the best
- Watching Crouching Tiger and Gong Fu over and over
- Having daily lessons but not doing the homework and vocab review properly
Water calligraphy at Lu Xun Park
China’s Education System
The following was written for me by Cherry, to explain a bit about the school system here. I’ve asked for some followup on the more interesting tidbits – such as the “manager students.” I don’t know who they are, but I bet they weren’t popular. (Edited to ad a paragraph on sudden death).
There are more people interested in China’s education with the increasing number of Chinese students studying overseas. Although China used to have famous educators like Confucius who still has a far-reaching influence in today’s world, China’s existing education system incurs (warrants) some criticism. (more…)
Back in Shanghai, and what are those bags?
Made it back to Shanghai after a fantastically busy week. Melbourne, to Oxford for a workshop, back to Melbourne, then on to Shanghai while trying to catch up with work and even go on a date. As a result, I ran out of time, leaving the house a complete disaster and forgetting lots of things including toothbrush and the all-important deodorant.
While I was being screened in quarantine for a runny nose (honesty is the best policy), I was checking out the passengers coming into the country, and it struck me how often Chinese bring in these bags of goods. Nothing wrong with bringing home stacks of stuff, but there’s a particular style of bag – like a heavy-duty plastic bag – that you always see in these situations. What are those things called? Do they have a name?
Google street maps misaligned in China
When I first got to Shanghai, I felt confident that I wouldn’t get lost very easily thanks to good old Google Maps, a fantastic web application and perhaps the most useful of all the iPhone apps. Indeed, it has been helpful, but there are a couple of issues. Firstly, I soon realized that when in China the iPhone was geting map data from ditu.google.cn which had only Chinese labels; on the other hand, maps.google.com.au was only showing pinyin (roman letters), and I wanted both. Happily, this seemed to change after I was there a while, and last time I checked the iPhone had both pinyin and 中文 labels on the streets.
The other problem is larger and more annoying: The street maps aren’t aligned with the satellite view or the GPS coordinates. This means that when using the GPS feature on the phone, the blue dot is actually about 500m away from your real location. This leads, as you can imagine, to a lot of guessing and mistakes.
I assumed that this was a temporary glitch and somebody would notice and fix it, but not so. Searching Google yielded no information. I got to wondering about it again today, though, thinking there must be more to it. After some searching, all I was able to find was a tiny snippet in a forum post 58 pages into a thread: ” Most maps available for China are misaligned by ~300-600m.” The poster claimed this was a government regulation.
I couldn’t find any confirmation of this, and besides, I’ve seen Chinese cars with GPS in action. Can anyone else explain why the Google maps data provided by Mapabc in China is off by such a large amount and nobody, apparently, can do anything about it?
Tweet turned into comic
M and MX, who have an interesting site about China, Chinese and Shanghainese I often check out, turned a tweet I made into a bilingual illustrated comic. That’s pretty wacky. As one friend pointed out, being big in Japan is now passe, it’s cooler to be big in China.
As another friend pointed out, my alter ego has more hair than me…
God and pronouns
(Update: See note below, it’s even more interesting than what I wrote initially, which is a bit wrong.)
It’s interesting to me that English now lacks a common feature of many languages – a polite version of the pronoun “you”. As you may be aware, we used to have one – “you”. We were so polite that the familiar form, “thou”, and its verb conjugations, has fallen into disuse. (For some reason, English speakers imagine that “thou art” is more polite. I suppose because it sounds old-timey, harking back to an imaginary era when people had some god-damned respect.)
It can be tricky when learning a foreign language to remember to use the polite form or to know when to use it. We’ve all made a few mistakes with Usted, vous or Sie. And there can be a few surprises. It’s pretty clear what to use when you greet a customer, headmaster or prime minister. What about your parents or grandparents? In European languages, and in Chinese, the parents seem to get the familar treatment. (After all, we would think a kid who called his dad “Sir” had an unusually strict upbringing.) In Chinese, though, grandparents get the more respectful term. Not surprising in a culture where age is respected – even revered.
What about God? The traditional Lord’s prayer tells us that in English we historically use the familiar form (“who art in heaven… thy name”). This hadn’t occurred to me when I discovered that Germans use the familiar form, “du” for God. It seemed to me that if you are talking to God you probably believe in him, and if anyone deserved respect, it’d be someone who could decide the outcome of your latest war or give you an aneurysm without working up a sweat. But we Westerners seem to have a more casual relationship with the almighty – “Dear God: Hey buddy, please make sure my pizza gets delivered soon, ‘k, thanks.” The same is true in Spanish, for instance – although you probably wouldn’t say “tu” to God, the conjugation of the verbs indicates familiarity. The Chinese on the other hand are a bit more cautious – God gets the 您 (nín) polite treatment here. What does this say about the respective cultures?
I’m especially curious how this all works in Japanese, which is famous for many levels of formality and a plethora of pronouns. Can anyone enlighten me?
Update: Actually, asking some more Chinese, I’ve been contradicted on both the grandparents and God situations- it apparently varies, and seems to be a generational thing. For instance, someone told me you would never address a grandparent with 您 (nín, polite) or 你 (nǐ, familiar) at all – only by “title”, such as grandmother, which I admit makes little sense to me. What’s even more interesting, though, is there is a separate pronoun just for God that I wasn’t aware of – pronounced the same, but with its own character. Thanks to leyan for pointing me at John Pasden’s excellent write-up at Sinosplice.