on chinese language learning

Modern English's "Melt With You" came through the headphones two weeks ago while I was nodding off on a subway ride from Taipei to Danshui, and I noticed for the first time how my method for learning melodies was similar to my method for acquiring language. Let me share this with you.

"Melt With You" has a simple, ringing guitar solo that plays under the vocals during the verses, and I was attempting to commit this to memory. This is how I did it: first, because used to have perfect pitch but three years of playing a Bb instrument ruined it, I designated the tonic note of the melody's key as C. I did this because I can identify relative pitches best if I take C as a starting point. Second, I listened to the sequence of relative pitches. Third, I sought a visual cue; I closed my eyes and imagined not a musical staff but black and white keys in front of me, and saw what the melody looked like mapped out on a piano keyboard. Fourth, I needed motor memory to supplement the visual and aural memory, so I imagined the movement of my fingers playing the melody, i.e., the first three notes of the melody I think of as E5-C5-G4, which would require me to cross my index finger over the thumb to hit the G. Even though the melody clearly sounds in the timbre of plucked string instruments, and my primary instrument now is guitar, I must recall the 88 black and white soldiers of my childhood instrument, not the indistinguishable notches on my fretboard.

What struck me as strange was that I had to refer to my other senses - primarily visual and tactile; I wonder if there is a way to assign tastes and smells to Rachmaninoff's "Prelude in G minor" - in order to recall the sound. I don't consider the sound analogue, for example, that the E5-C5-G4 series of relative pitches occurs several times in "Reveille." If I try to remember melodies by conjuring sound analogues, I just get tripped up; this explains why I have such difficulty remembering the Indiana Jones theme and the Star Wars themes in sequence, because they are both rousing, loud, uptempo melodies composed by John Williams emphasizing the tonic and dominant tones of their keys (which is strong, simple C, I think), and too difficult to differentiate by sound alone. I was so taken with this sudden understanding of my process for memorizing music that it was not until right now, in writing this entry, that I could delight at the small coincidence of the band's weird name and my thoughts on language acquisition.

Although I grew up with Mandarin in my household, it was only until I came here to study in earnest (for two weeks, at least; the last three weeks of my time here has been devoted to obsessing about my vitiligo, exposing my vitiligous skin in other parts of Beijing, and feeling nervous flutters of joy about flying off to New York) that I realized how limited my ability was. I could get by when making simple requests or broadcasting simple opinions, particularly frustration with one's parents' meddling, and although I had random vocabulary words for things that occurred in the course of a childhood in Palo Alto, like "screwdriver," "forty-four dead stone lions" and "pinky finger," I didn't know many basic words, like "recommend," "intend," "politics," "study," "about," "traditional," "weekend," "engineer," "government," etc. The latter are things one acquires in order not to sound totally inane all the time, to be able to say "This weekend, I intend to study Chinese politics" rather than circumlocute using only future tense to say, "On Saturday and on Sunday, I will read books about important things" (though apparently I still sound inane, as Wu Fei pointed out today that for half of the things she says I respond with either "Is that for real?!" or "Very interesting!" because I am too lazy to take the time to retrieve higher order reactions). I also could understand some words spoken to me, particularly conjunctions like "although," "however," "furthermore," "especially," "as expected," and different versions of "but," but had gotten into the habit over the years of just using familiar, simple conjunctions, so even my aural recognition did not translate immediately into vocabulary that I could make mine; my mouth was not accustomed to the rhotic torture of "而且."

I started off five weeks ago by putting the pot lid on my stew of Chinglish expressions. It had gotten very easy over the years to say things like, "我今天要去很fashionable的eighties party跟我的law school朋友," not that I ever announced to my parents that I was going to a very fashionable eighties party with my law school friends, but the point is that I would swap in English words for the challenging phrases, leaving me with the skeleton of an ungrammatical Chinese sentence fleshed out by English words. (I see also that learning another language cannot correct problems of the imagination; apologies for the cannibalistic mixture of metaphors in the above sentences.) There were other impediments, too; I could understand certain phrases but not the words out of that context, e.g., I understood the words for "pass" (过) and "time" (时) but I didn't immediately understand that those two words together meant "out-of-date"; or I knew individual words but couldn't manage to figure out why they fit in a sentence in any particular order, e.g., "到时我介绍你们认识一下" ("When it comes time, I'll introduce you all"); or, I knew the words but would say the tones all wrong when I opened my mouth. My brain held a bin of plush, glassy-eyed made in China words but the retrieval claw would tenderly fail to take hold of anything, over and over again.

I write about these problems as if they're past, but I think this simply may be a result of my sudden inability to conjugate English verbs - my five weeks of Chinese study seems not to have made me any better at Chinese, only worse at English - I actually mean to say that these problems are ongoing. Not to say that the barriers to my progress are disheartening. I actually find it very fun to try to get by with a combination of intermediate beginner Chinese, histrionics, paging through the dictionary, and my special version of Taboo. The last often entails me circumlocuting, sometimes in a totally off-the-wall manner, in order to make my point. When trying to explain the Western tradition of streaking college campuses to Wu Fei, for example, I couldn't think of the word for "costume mask," but knew the words for "Halloween," "face," and "zombie," so I said, "You run around naked and then put on your face the things people wear on Halloween to make themselves look like zombies." I think this also sometimes has the effect of making me seem incredibly profound, because I speak in tortuous Confucian metaphor rather than directly to the point. When trying to explain to Wu Fei how I wanted a relationship of equals, but couldn't find the words for "evenly-matched," I said, "A relationship should be like a tennis match; if one person is much better than the other, it's not fair; but if they can hit the ball back and forth, that's what people like to watch." I know the word for "euphemism" but not the actual euphemisms, e.g., for sexual activity, so I say, "They lay in bed, doing euphemisms." Wu Fei thinks its fun to listen to and guess my meaning, and I think it's fun and challenging to invent metaphors, so it's so far been win-win.

Chinese is a difficult second language to learn, for the reasons amusingly and accurately described here: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html. The biggest difficulty is that because the words are pictographic rather than alphabetic, there's no real way to know what a word will sound like. If I wrote, "lacanophobia," you could sound out the word even if you didn't know the meaning. (Fear of vegetables.) You don't have to memorize the way the word looks in order to be reminded of its sound. However, you could look all day at "鼻孔" and not even come close to its sound. (Bikong, nostril.) Chinese is a language requiring lots and lots of memorization.

Different kinds of memorization, at that. First, there are words I know how to read, write, say, and comprehend (aurally). No work to be done here except the task of figuring out its position in the grammarless, punctuationless Chinese sentence.

Second, there are words I understand aurally, but cannot write. The task is then to remember what the written words look like. Examples: 钥匙 (yaoshi, keys), 护照 (huzhao, passport), 麻烦 (mafan, trouble). For this, I generally compose a mnemonic that references the way the word looks. To remember the way the word 棒 (bang, good) looks, I wrote, "很棒的冰" ("very good ice") because "冰棒" ("ice good") means popsicle, and the word 棒 kind of has a verticality reminiscent of a popsicle.

Third, there are vocabulary words that I don't already know, like 修辞 (xiuci, literal) and 鼓励 (guli, encourage). These I cannot write nor say nor understand, so I must remember what the word looks like, what it sounds like and what it means. Most often these come up with conversation, not in reading. These are by far the most difficult.

I kept learning and forgetting the word for "weekend." All I wanted to do was learn the sound of the word; I didn't care about learning to write it; but even memorizing only the sound was proving very difficult. This is where the analogy between melody and language learning comes in. I realized suddenly that my previous method, saying the word over and over again to impress the motions into the muscles of my mouth, provided no mnemonic for future recall. I was relying on motor memory alone, but just as when learning a melody, here I needed visual and audio cues as well.

So this is the process I ended up with for learning vocabulary aurally. First, I listen to the word and repeat its sound, so that my mouth can remember the way the word forms. Second, I imagine the Romanization of the word, and the general shape of that word: weekend, zhoumuo, I remember to have a "z" and an ascender, and then two low sequences in the "ou" and "uo." Third, I search for the sound analogy. "Zhou" happens to be the same sound as "rice porridge," which I have no problem remembering. So I must make some stupid mnemonic, like "This weekend I'm eating rice porridge." Only with the combination of the visual, aural, and motor cues can I recall a word.

I applaud your patience, reader, for I am losing even my own attention. Let me turn now from one baffled monkey's idiotic comprehension of simple memorization to another aspect of language learning that I find interesting: how one's personality changes when presented in different languages. From Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course, Gass and Selinker:

"There are social psychological reasons for why adults learn languages less readily than children do. There are many different versions of this hypothesis. Some suggest that adults do not want to give up the sense of identity that their accent provides. Some suggest that adults are not willing to surrender their ego to the extent required to adopt a new language, which entails a new life-world."

(I would post the link but the online proxy server I use to access Blogger from China doesn't permit links; just Google the title if you're interested.)

In some respects, I agree that learning a new language entails accepting a new life-world. Chinese changes my personality. I think I am more obedient and traditional when speaking Chinese; Ana says my Chinese voice sounds less coarse than my English voice. This could be simply because I find it very difficult to think while translating, which in turn takes the bite out of anything I would want to say; Wu Fei asked me my opinions on abortion yesterday, and while fumbling for the words, I completely forgot my ideas and spewed forth some room temperature platitudes about morality, choice, and caution. I can say I want a memo book, or note pad, or sketchbook, or scratch paper, or a pad of virgin growth birch barks, any number of variations to tailor my request in English, but in Chinese I can only say, "I want a book" or "I want paper"; I can say "I'm conserving real estate in my stomach for dessert" when refusing to eat more at meal with English-speakers but with Chinese-speakers I can only say, "I'm full." The blunt instrument of my Chinese hammers out only the blobbiest fertility-sculpture likeness of my finely-chiseled personality, or something.

But the change in my personality also reflects the values in the culture, as expressed through language. I have this great book called "什么时候说什么话" ("When To Say What") which describes itself, in the preface, as teaching students about Chinese speech-acts (言语行为). Just as how in English the "Thank you"-"You're welcome" call-and-response is politesse expressing a cultural value (gratitude should be expressed, and also should be received), there are essentially scripted dialogues in Chinese that one is expected to follow to express your conformity to Chinese values. Take, for example, compliments. In English, the polite sequence is compliment ("You're great at playing piano!") and reception ("Thank you for the compliment."). In Chinese, the polite sequence is compliment and then refutation. Lesson 11, Compliment and Praise.

A: 这孩子真讨人喜欢。("Your child is really adorable.")
B: 哪里，你不知道，可淘气了。("Not at all, you don't know how naughty he is.")

A: 这顿饭好吃极了。("This meal is so tasty.")
B: 哪里哪里，过奖了。("Not at all, you're exaggerating.")

These are normal responses in Chinese, though in English they would be considered puzzling deflections, perhaps even rude. On the other hand, the English habit of simply accepting compliments with "Thank you" seems immodest in Chinese. What is graceful reception of a compliment in one language is not so in the other.

One of my goals in studying Mandarin in China was to learn enough vocabulary to become not inane, by which I mean I wanted to learn to say what was actually on my mind, not just be the polite, silent, possibly retarded, phenotypically-similar alien dropping chopsticks at gatherings of extended family. So on the one hand Chinese language expresses cultural values that are not exactly mine, and thus changes my identity; on the other hand, the expression of my non-traditional Chinese personality becomes stronger the more language I learn. Who knows how this equilibrium will actually tip.

K, who is much better and funnier with words than I am, just wrote an email to say, "I'm sure your Chinese is much less bad than it was when you arrived and your English is still beautiful." Thanks you, glorious hero K, warmings of the heart forever gladness towards long yearning! I apologize to all of you who have suffered to the end of this long, tiresome exposition on patently obvious things. I had hoped to reward you with some satisfying examples of Chinese wordplay, but now it is nearly dawn and I want to flush my language-stuffed head in the leaky toilet a few times and then go to sleep. I'll only offer this pleasing and utterly fatuous coincidence between English and Chinese: the word for cat in Chinese is "mao1," so you can swap out a word in Mao Zedong and make it have the same meaning as "Chairman Meow."