Zhujiajiao water town
Last week I made a day trip to the “water town” of Zhujiajiao. I call it “the Venice of the Eastern Zhejiang region” – which, if you aren’t familiar with Mandarin, may be easier to say – and it’s not hard to see why. The canals and bridges are very scenic indeed. A friend drove me there through the fiendish traffic in lovely autumn weather.
Unfortunately, not much weird stuff happened to me there, which is kind of nice but doesn’t make for great anecdoting. Here’s the best I can do. Firstly, we caught a toad. Secondly, I ate snails on a boat (they weren’t good.) Thirdly, I visited a Qing-era post office, where a security rule that the original rider had to come with the message occasionally resulted in corpses being lashed to horses along with the mail. Other than that, here are a couple of photos.
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Absence makes the brain grow fonder
My lifestyle is not perfectly conducive to language learning. I have a busy job, several time-consuming extra-curricular activities, and a fair bit of travel. The study is still a priority for me, but occasionally life gets in the way and I fall behind. The last month and a bit I spent in Australia and England, and though I managed to do some Skype lessons with my teacher, I did virtually no review, listened to very few ChinesePod lessons, and did very little homework of any kind.
The result must inevitably be a decline in my facility with the language. The feeling I had, especially on returning to China was quite the opposite – I felt more relaxed and confident speaking Chinese than I did a month before when I had been studying every day. This happened to me once before after a long hiatus. What’s going on? Is the brain using the time to recover and reorganise, or, more likely, one forgets how much one doesn’t know and just gets on with the business of speaking?
I’d really like to know the answer, because it may prove valuable to take breaks from time to time and recover a bit. In the meantime, back to the vocabulary list.
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…
Chinglish Roundup
It may seem a tad unfair to make fun of foreigner’s attempts in good faith to helpfully add English to signs and products, but many of the attempts are rather poor – and weird language tickles the humour centres of the brain so nicely. I collected quite a few examples of Chinglish in the last few months, but here are a couple of highlights.
The Gold Articles is Monoplied
Another store has been spotted with “is monoplied” in the name – it’s probably a dodgy entry in a popular dictionary like Powerword.
Compare to insurance expert
Are insurance experts dissocial? I don’t know, but there’s nothing less fearsome than a dragon that can be compared to one.
Adding ethereal oil
This is the menu from a massage parlour nearby. What I like is that I can pretty much guess what adding the ethereal oil foot cave means, and it doesn’t sound too bad.
No psychotic ragamuffins
This classic is from the gate of Shanghai’s most visible tourist attraction, the Oriental Pearl Tower. Although this will presumably be fixed soon in advance of the Expo, in the meantime its ban on ragamuffins, effluvium and baleful biology is a classic.
Finally, this isn’t Chinglish but I like how they omitted the fate of this “flight pioneer”. Surviving acocunts vary on whether he actually acheived lift-off before dying, or was simply immolated on the ground. 
Tone and Colour
Another interesting post over at Sinosplice today on the subject of using colour to learn tones in Mandarin. It seems plausible, but not proven, that colour might be a better way to encode tone information visually than he traditional tone marks – plausible, but not proven.
I’m planning to put it to the test – I’m assembling two vocabular lists which I will study as flashcards only, one list will be colour coded and the other with tone marks as usual. After a week, I’ll see if my retention rates have differed. In general, if I can remember a Chinese word’s spelling but get the tones wrong, I don’t mark it as “known”, so if this method increases retention of tone information, my scores should reflect that. I’ll only test English-Chinese, so I can’t see the colours until I look at the answer. We’ll see if I can glean any useful data. Unfortunately iFlash doesn’t support colour, so it will take a couple of days to make the cards as images.
Interesting to see how the brain works.
English Corner
People’s Park, in the centre of Shanghai is pretty busy on weekends. Some people (including me) go to see the lotus blossoms when they’re in bloom; most people there seem to be parents looking for a match for their children, as I’ve previously mentioned. There’s a section of the park, though, informally known as “English Corner”. Locals go there to practice English, so if you show up as a foreigner you’ll quickly gather a flock of Chinese conversationalists ranging in age from small primary school kids to octogenarian professors.
English Corner at People’s Park
Many people ask where I’m from (“guess!” is my reply), what I do, how do I like Shanghai, and other such banal but useful topics. I quickly get bored with discussion of my job, and at least half of the people practicing seem to be computer programmers or engineers, which makes the problem worse. We had a discussion about porting the Linux kernel to embedded systems, which is interesting but probably not good vocabulary for a general audience. It’s easy to change the topic, as the speakers aren’t shy – “How much do you earn?”, “Are you married?” and the ubiquitous “Do you want to marry a Chinese girl?” have to be parried (“I’m not rich”, “No”, and some good-natured wisecrack).”Do you like Mao”, “what don’t you like about China”, these questions require more delicate handling and I generally deflect those too.
Some learners have a (literally) encyclopedic knowledge of Australia which borders on the bizarre. A few people have been there, but some have only studied the country’s geography, so will ask me where I’m from, then list the states and territories of Australia and name landmarks near my house. “I’m from Melbourne, MEL-BUN,” I might say, to which the reply might come, “Oh, I like Londsdale Street,” or “Bendigo! Ballarat! Geelong!” Last year in Germany I ran into a woman who lived in Clayton while working for Bosch, and this year met one or two students who studied there at Monash University, so it’s funny to think of that rather unexciting suburb as a world city, but there you go.
There are a few characters – short bandanna-guy (pictured) seems a self-appointed organiser and facilitator, often shepherding reluctant learners and shy children towards expats. A garrulous English teacher claims to have swum the Yangtze for four and a half hours as a child, started English Corner, and can act, sing and dance like a pro. Dissident guy likes to talk only about the poor human rights record of the Chinese Government, causing – perhaps in my imagination – the other learners to glare and shift impatiently.
The kids are especially cute. They are often pushed up by eager parents, dreadfully shy, and then, after overcoming the stage fright, launch into their routine: “Hello-my-name-is-Alice *pant* I-am-in-the-5th-class-where-are-you-from-do-you-like-Shanghai?” Last time, a boy from Harbin who must have been seven or eight years old spoke conversational English with perplexing ease – “Are you married?” “No.” “Oh, so you’re available?”
Perhaps I should be practicing my Chinese, but where else can I simply stand around and have people flock up eager to talk to me, be my friend, and pry about my life? It’s like being a minor actor in an episode of Star Trek show and going to a Trekkie convention, only without the figure-hugging Lycra uniform.