Dear Language, I Guess I’m Just Not That Into You: Notes on Being the Worst Student Ever

I’ve got a cold and I’m cranky. With my hot, cotton-wool stuffed head expanding outward through my eye sockets and nasal cavity, and my sad little lips fever burnt and ever so slightly frowny, I’m coasting on barely 3 hours of restless sleep.

I thought I ought to make that clear before I keep writing. As I was reminded in the comment section of my last post, lamenting my scattered last gasps of creativity, Mr E. Hemingway had encouraged us self-declared creative types to write drunk, edit sober.

This is something somewhat akin to that.

 

Hey sexy laydeee!

 

Yesterday, when my cold first raged forth after a tentative few days incubating, I wanted to go to a pharmacy to buy a decongestant so I could stop mouth breathing. I lay in bed with most of a box of tissues jammed into every orifice in my face, ear canals whistling from the pressure, and searched my many dictionaries for the word decongestant in Mandarin. I couldn’t find it.

Several years ago, I had done the same under similar circumstances, except I’d hauled my miserable corpse out of its sickbed and attempted to explain in my phrasebook Mandarin to the staff at the pharmacy up the road what it was that ailed me and what it was I needed: stuffy nose, clogged nose, miming sinus pathways, sneezing to punctuate, snorting a few times to illustrate my lack of nasal breathing. The lady looked at me, wide eyed, and handed me a box of pore strips, the ones used for ripping black heads out of your nose. I left empty-handed, wishing I was still in Turkey, where I was fluent in malaise and medical emergencies.

This time I didn’t even bother with the pharmacy because I just didn’t have the energy to try to find that exact combination of words that would make sense  in Mandarin, a language that is so deceptively simple at first glance (aside from the tones, but more about that later) but which is actually oddly and inflexibly precise a lot of the time.

 

They always understand what I mean when I talk about vinegar.

 

An example of this: vinegar.

We like that really dark, strong vinegar that you get at certain Chinese restaurants. When we eat out, we always ask for two little bowls of it, to dip our veggies and whatnot in. Vinegar is 醋 (), and sounds a bit like stomping your foot whilst saying tsu. We’re fluent in vinegar– or at least we thought we were until we tried out a new Hunan place a few weeks ago.

Over the course of two visits, we tried and repeatedly failed with a number of baffled looking wait staff to request a little side dish of dark vinegar. Initially they had brought us a plain, light rice wine vinegar, so I asked them (with character and pinyin open on my phone’s dictionary as illustration, in case my pronunciation was too startling) if they had dark vinegar (baffled look), or maybe black vinegar (even more baffled look), or perhaps strong vinegar (they abruptly left without a word). At some point, we were given a bowl of soy sauce.  The next time we went back, we went through an identical routine, with further descriptors: fragrant vinegar, dumpling vinegar, aromatic vinegar. None worked.

We had failed, apparently, to find that one specific descriptor which would give the waitstaff the clue as to what we wanted.

 

Literacy would be nice.

 

A few years ago, I studied Mandarin intensively for a while. A real course. A structured course, 4 hours a day, every day, for weeks and weeks, until my brain exploded! I did well, too! I got something like 95% on my mid term and final speaking exams, and in a controlled environment (read: classroom), I could have long conversations about fruits and vegetables and clothing sizes and the bitter unfairness of high prices in the marketplace. I could give directions clearly in full sentences! I could name key places in a community (the bank! the shop! the market! the school!) and explain where I was going or where I had been and why.

Outside of the classroom, it was a different matter. My full sentences were frequently met with blank looks or a shrugged, dismissive ting bu dong (usually followed up with the cab driving away without me), so I ended up dumbing it down to key words carefully enunciated in the local dialect (mostly glossing over certain consonants and talking from the back of my mouth) and miming.

The only full sentences I regularly use in Mandarin these days are at the train station booking office when I politely declare that I’m going to Destination X on the Nth of Month Y and returning on the Zth. One passenger, 2nd class, here’s my passport, thanks, ta.  I back it all up with a carefully researched sheet of paper, which reads something like this, neatly copied from the railway timetable website:

 

SH——> HZ 2012/09/17  G7107 10:00-11:05

HZ——> SH 2012/09/18 G7505 18:05-19:10

 

So yeah, it probably isn’t my precise sentence structure or crisp tones that account for the fact that I’ve successfully bought 2-3 sets of train tickets every month for the past 3.5 years from monolingual ticket agents.

I’m pretty sure I’m tone deaf, which may account for some of my struggles with the language. I struggle to hear any difference between the tones and fail most of the time. I hear words I think I recognize popping up in sentences all the time, but they’re probably a totally different word, with a different tone, because they make no sense.

What I hear in Mandarin is a lot like this version of English. It should make sense but it usually doesn’t.

In the past half year or so, I’ve found myself slowly giving up on properly learning to speak Mandarin, instead focusing more on learning to read the characters. After all, if what emerges from my clumsy laowai maw is so baffling, I might as well have something more controlled to back it up with.

I find the characters more soothing to deal with. I can sit and meditate on them until I’m ready to move on to the next one. No one’s barking at me, expecting a response. No one’s asking why I’m still really crappy at the language after nearly 4 years in Shanghai. No need to feel humiliated yet again.

 

I just might be tempted.

 

The thing is, this isn’t new.

I got it in Turkey too, and I had made a huge effort to learn Turkish on my own, in between teaching and trying to make a life for myself there. I just wasn’t very good at it.

After 6 years, I had babbled and self taught myself up to somewhere in the low intermediate level, enough to do everything I needed (clearly and accurately, for the most part), from getting electricity hooked up in a new flat, to giving detailed instructions to a taxi driver who was lost, to following a marketing meeting (listening mostly, but occasionally interjecting).

My Turkish was great for tasks and small talk but failed in long, thoughtful conversations. My listening was a lot better than my speaking, which was great for keeping tabs on what my students were saying. My reading was pretty good because I had spent years carefully scrutinizing everything I saw: signs, posters, headlines, menus, graffiti.  But still, my hesitation to speak much led to years of being told how lazy, ignorant and possibly stupid I was for not being fluent yet.

It all comes down to speaking.

And, frankly, I’m not big on speaking.  But more on that later.

A month or two ago, I was contacted through this blog by some folks who were running a writing contest of sorts. Big prizes- lots of cash, iPads and whatnot. They thought I’d be well qualified to write a fine piece on why language learning is so very, very special and wonderful when you travel. The judges were mostly big name print travel writers, with one exception- the Fluent in 3 Months dude.  I’m loathe to even link to him here because he makes me feel like crap. He’s built an empire on the idea that if you just go out and, like, chat with the locals, you will be fluent in 3 months. And if not, you’re a lazy, imperialist asshole. Or something like that. I didn’t enter because I knew I’d end up writing something like this and he’d probably light my entry on fire.

It’s not that I haven’t tried to learn.

 

Oh, Burmese, your spirals are so pleasingly complicated!

 

I’ve spent my entire life living in someone else’s language. Hell, I did my whole K-12 in French (which, thankfully, I can still speak fairly fluently even after 20 years of ignoring it). My early 20s were spent grappling with being submerged in Afrikaans. I can still recite dirty poetry and curse people out, though I doubt I’d be able to hold a conversation anymore. In my late 20s and into my 30s, it was mostly Turkish but with forays into Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese. More recently, I’ve memorized the pleasantries needed for basic functions in Thailand, Indonesia, Burma, Sri Lanka. This past summer, I babbled away happily in French and pidgin Arabic in Morocco for a solid month. I don’t expect others to speak to me in English, though I appreciate it when they can (and when I can’t do it in their language, like in Burma).

If you want someone who can explain how to identify Persian, Arabic or French loan words in Turkish, I’m your gal. If you want someone to do a comparative analysis of pan Turkic root words, yippee, that’s me. I parse Uyghur for fun. I deconstruct ten syllable Turkish word-sentences like a Sunday puzzle. Last night, I worked my way through this convoluted baby: Çalıştırılmaktaydılar (er, those who were being made to work?).

At any given moment, in my head I’m constructing sentences in one of several languages, just because I wonder what I’d do if in that situation in, say, Xinjiang or Bishkek or Cairo. Could I get my lunch? Could I ask where the loo is? Could I tell that creepy guy to fuck off?

I love language. I love talking about language.  I’m a total language nerd.

I just don’t love talking.

Mostly, I don’t love the endless talking at that infantile, chit-chat level required to learn a language fluently. That level of language is what I deal with for a living. Chatting with locals at beginner levels is something I’ve been paid to do for over a decade. I do it all day at work and then frequently again at weekends, when I do 15 minutes interviews with 30 or so more over the course of 2 days. My brain has been trained to analyse and critique that level of language. I’m a harsh judge. I get paid well to be so. I judge myself even more fiercely, because I know I should be better. I know I could try so much harder.

In my down time, all I want is silence. All I want, if not silence, is a low key, intelligent, adult level conversation about something meaningful. I want to have all the vocabulary needed on the tip of my tongue. I want to use ALL the tenses available to me. I want to be linguistically acrobatic. I want to be an intelligent, eloquent adult.

 

I swear, my brain must be the size of a walnut…

 

Most of my adult life has been spent sounding like a small, awkward, not-very-bright child. Most of my adult life has been spent with my ears straining to catch what was said, scrambling to assemble a coherent response in a timely fashion. Most of my adult life has been spent like a student in a Charlie Brown classroom, with the teacher bleating incomprehensible syllables at me. Waaah-waaah-waaah.

Back in Turkey, maybe a decade ago, someone told me about their friend who had moved to Greece because, well, he loved everything Greek. He revelled in it. He stayed and enthusiastically learned the language until he could understand what everyone was saying, without any effort. It was then that he had to leave, because the din of comprehensible daily conversation (so banal! so judgmental!) drove him nuts. He had liked Greece when it was, effectively, quiet. He had liked it better when he was in the Charlie Brown classroom of Greece, observing, slightly detached.

I get it. I do.

I like being in countries where I don’t speak the language. I like being on the outside, looking in. I like having an excuse not to have to make chit chat. I’m cool with being able to tune in when curious enough to listen but not fluent enough to catch everything, unfiltered. I like not having to hear women on the metro talking about how old and fat I look (standard comments overheard in both China and Turkey). I like not hearing every cranky comment my students make when they’d rather not be in class. I liked not understanding every anatomically specific suggestion or request made by guys in Egypt, Turkey, Morocco.

I feel horribly, horribly ashamed of myself for feeling this way.

 

I’m still functionally illiterate at 38.

 

As a well traveled person, I should be throwing myself into every situation possible to meet the locals! immerse myself in the culture! stop being a linguistic imperialist monoglot!

It’s kind of like the slight feeling of shame when you’re in, say, rural Myanmar and oh, god, all you want is pizza and not more freaking noodles or rice again.

Sometimes, after most of my adult life being spent in other people’s cultures, other people’s languages, I just need time in a room of my own. Metaphorically speaking.

Am I awful?

Also, how do you say decongestant in Mandarin?

ETA: My lovely assistants at work ran out and bought me these before class today (and obsessively kept my coffee mug full of piping hot water, left I become chilled and die during the lesson). Bless.

 

Comments

15 responses to “Dear Language, I Guess I’m Just Not That Into You: Notes on Being the Worst Student Ever”

  1. debbie ann Avatar

    I think maybe being sick you are being harsher on yourself! You are great just the way you are – sometimes you just need to be in your comfort zone. Sometimes that is pizza or language or whatever. You are still out there trying, you know so much more from your travels and from trying the language. be kind to yourself, the way you would be with a friend.

    and I love that video in the middle. that is so great. your posts are a good reality check for me.

    1. MaryAnne Avatar
      MaryAnne

      Aw, thanks for the reassuring words. Maybe I am being hard on myself- it comes in waves… Maybe I’ll feel better when I’m physically in better shape. For now I’ll amuse myself with that video and use up the world’s forests with my tissue consumption…

  2. Charles Haynes Avatar
    Charles Haynes

    I assume you’ve already tried Google, but just in case you haven’t it thinks “减充血剂” (jiăn chōngxuè jì) is decongestant. Searching for it finds lots of chinese pages talking about decongestants… Nasal decongestant seems to be “鼻用减充血剂”

    Hope you feel better soon.
    — Charles (debbie’s partner)

    1. MaryAnne Avatar
      MaryAnne

      Hey, thanks! I hadn’t done google, because I’d had some awkwardly wrong translations with it before and tend now to use my Pleco and DianHua apps when out and about. You’re right though- there is a plethora of vocabulary out there. I may have to try it out tomorrow, if this cold doesn’t go away… I have to teach 10 year olds tonight with my head still stuffed full of hot cotton and my nose going crazy!

  3. Martin Avatar

    Ohhh. I know exactly what you mean… The struggles in catching conversations, and all the kids talk you’re urged to participate in to learn the language, which rather get you to listen than to talk… Sounds quite common to me, in so many ways… 🙂

    Anyway, my try / findings:

    bí yòng jiǎn chōng xiě jì
    鼻用减充血剂
    nasal decongestants

    Bí yòng pēn wù jì wèi xiāo zhǒng (le)
    鼻用喷雾剂为消肿(了)

    pēn wù jì (wèi) xīrù
    喷雾剂(为) 吸入
    Spray for inhalation/to inhale

    xiāozhǒng
    消肿
    swell AND/OR deswell (not sure 🙂

    xīrù
    吸入
    inhale, inhalation

    pēnwù / pēnwùjì
    喷雾 / 喷雾剂
    spray / spray means, aerosol

    bí yòng
    鼻用
    nasal (in terms of ‘in the nose’,
    not to mistake with bí yīn / 鼻音 = nasal tone)

    Hope you’ll feel better soon. 🙂

    1. MaryAnne Avatar
      MaryAnne

      I must copy down your very very useful glossary above. Thank you!

  4. Katja Avatar

    The fluent in 3 months dude makes me wary. Admittedly, I have a problem with talking about fluency (quite literally, sometimes): I prefer to talk about competence. It may be splitting hairs, but given that I’ve met two people in recent months who are trilingual and who still don’t consider themselves fluent, I think there’s a lot to be said for talking about competence, rather than fluency.

    Personally, I’m fluent in certain situations and not in others. And I know I’ve just used the ‘f’ word to describe myself, but this is exactly what I mean: there are times when I can chat away happily and bat conversation back and forth, and then there are others when I can barely get one word out. In my books, that means I’m not fluent overall. I am, however, competent. (Most of the time. Language-wise. Ahem.)

    I totally understand where you’re coming from as regards people’s attitudes. Yes, I’ve been here for three years and yes, I probably would have progressed faster in the language had I been braver about speaking. However, often the very same people that dismiss me as a lazy idiot are the ones who refuse to speak Italian to me because it’s easier for them to speak English than to have to concentrate on my imperfect Italian. So tell me: who’s the lazy one in that situation?

    1. MaryAnne Avatar
      MaryAnne

      I have issues with the fluency thing too. I think I know who he is, on a meta scale: in my first year in Turkey, I worked with a total extravert… He befriended everyone and parroted whatever they taught him with no thought to language function or grammar. Like, they’d teach him ‘gitmek’ (to go) and he’d say, ‘hey, gitmek now!’ while I silently wept inside and say to myself, dude, it’s ‘hadi gidelim artik’ and everyone would be applauding him for his freaking fantastic Turkish and scowling at me for my stupid, linguistic imperialist ways. I just happened to be the metaphorical baby who didn’t speak until she was nearly 4 but who started speaking in complete, complex sentences. It took me, literally, 4 years out of my 6 in Turkey to stop being called a moron.

      And yeah, competency. I was super fluent in some areas, a right chatty-Cathy, but couldn’t even understand a simple question in others. I think it’s because I was self taught and lacked a solid foundation. Somethings I knew shocked people because they were apparently pretty advanced, but then they’d find out that I didn’t know how to say how old I was…

    2. MaryAnne Avatar
      MaryAnne

      Also, yeah to the people speaking English because it’s easier for them… most of the people who criticized me for my crappy Turkish were the ones who told me it’d be too hard and boring to speak at my level anyway so English was the default.

  5. Liv Avatar

    I think you’re being a bit hard on yourself. Don’t forget that when you’re relatively new to a place (ie – with little ability in the local language) everything seems more exotic and interesting and you don’t understand that the local women are saying you look fat (charming Turkish honesty, isn’t it?!)

  6. Kirstin Avatar

    Bishkek shout-out! 😀 If you happen to find yourself there (in the next year or so) then you wouldn’t have to worry about knowing how to get lunch, ask where the loo is or tell someone to fuck off, because luckily my crappy Russian skills have those three things covered. I told myself when I first moved to Bishkek that I’d be fluent in Russian in a year and I could work on Kyrgyz after that, but now I’ve hit that dangerous level where I can get by with keywords and miming, like you said, and I’m just unmotivated (and too busy) to start up with lessons again and really try to improve. That said, maybe it’s a cop-out answer, but while learning languages is great for traveling, to show respect for people you interact with and to make small interactions easier, I don’t think total fluency is necessary to get by as an expat. In other words, don’t be so hard on yourself! Invite a family member or friend who knows absolutely no Mandarin to come visit you to make you feel better about your language skills.

  7. Selly Avatar

    You are way too hard on yourself, nevertheless whatever it is that occupies your mind and later ends up on this blog always makes for a good, interesting and thoughtful blog post. It gets me thinking.

    I’ve recently started escaping from German, English and Mandarin by focusing on Cantonese, a language where I struggle even with the most basic phrases. That doesn’t stop me from pretending that I know what is going on and that I understood everything perfectly.

    Strangely enough it’s a welcome break, up until I’m asked in Cantonese whether I understand and am forced to admit that I didn’t even understand the question.

    German makes me think too much, especially in combination with English. I think and think about how I can possibly perfect something I want to say or write to the degree that I my head start to hurt. All those synonyms…sometimes it’s just too hard to say what I want to say. I’ve the same problem in Mandarin, I want to be really good at it and end up totally frustrated and ready to throw my phone at all wall when my other half states that he has no idea what I mean or worse asks for the correct English word so that he can translate it into Mandarin himself.

    I love languages but just like you, sometimes I just prefer silence where I don’t have to try and work things out. I’m glad I chose not to learn Spanish, French or Italian. I hear those languages all day in work and on the street and it’s bliss not to know what’s going on.

  8. Dyanne@TravelnLass Avatar

    THANK YOU. For making me feel less of an idiot here in Vietnam. I’ve been here more than a year now and regularly beat myself up for speaking but the barest, most neanderthal basic few words.

    I am determined to halfway reach competency (never fluency – in my dreams) in a few years (and plan to get a tutor and get serious), but…

    I must admit, I rather favor your notion of:

    “…I like being in countries where I don’t speak the language. I like being on the outside, looking in. I like having an excuse not to have to make chit chat. I’m cool with being able to tune in when curious enough to listen but not fluent enough to catch everything, unfiltered.”

    Indeed. After the past year of living amid a blur of blissful gibberish here in Vietnam, I recently spent a few weeks in Australia, and… I must say, I wasn’t all that keen on understanding every utterance around me, and feeling obligated to make chit chat just because I happen to be fluent in my native English.

  9. […] go to a new restaurant and order what you usually ask for. Suddenly no one understands you anymore. Vinegar is an example. Trial and error. Adjusting. Correcting. That’s the key. And, if not in China to […]

  10. […] go to a new restaurant and order what you usually ask for. Suddenly no one understands you anymore. Vinegar is an […]

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