28
Sep 2004
Telling Anecdotes
One
Overheard in the office:
> Girl A: 索性的索是…？
> Girl B: 索尼的索。
> Girl A: 哦，知道了。
> Girl A: Which 索 character is the 索 in 索性? [索性 is a not uncommon Chinese adverb meaning “simply.”]
> Girl B: The same 索 as in “Sony”.
[索尼 is the Chinese transliteration for “Sony.” Its characters are meaningless, chosen for phonetic value only.]
> Girl A: Oh, got it!
Two
I recently had the 抽油烟机 in my apartment fixed. I’m not sure what it is in English. Literally translated, it would be “oil smoke sucking machine.” It’s more than just a hood and exhaust fan for the cooking range. Because Chinese cooking uses so much oil and the oil goes into the air during the cooking process, this appliance helps suck in that oil and collect it. As I have discovered, if you don’t have a “oil smoke sucking machine” or it doesn’t work properly, the area around the cooking range gets covered with a thin layer of sticky oil residue every time you cook. Nasty.
So yesterday my landlord showed up to collect the rent, and he brought a repairman with him. Some valve in the exhaust duct had gotten stuck shut. Easily remedied.
What amused me was the way the repairman checked to see if the exhaust fan was drawing in the air. In the past I had used a piece of tissue. He just lit up right in my kitchen and used the cigarette smoke to test it. Of course, after testing the fan he also finished the cigarette.
Three
A Chinese friend of mine made this comparison recently:
America’s September 11th is like China’s 1989 incident. When the anniversary rolls around, security gets tightened big time.
I know it’s an innocent (and true) comment about security, but I felt emotional spasms of revulsion inside when I heard a comparison being made between the two incidents. I don’t think I have to go into why.
(Linguistically, there’s another similarity. As with several holidays and other historical anniversaries in China, the 1989 tragedy is referred to in Chinese by the numbers corresponding to its date. It’s called 6-4 — for June 4th — in Chinese. In the same way, the American tragedy is referred to as 9-1-1 in Chinese.)
P.S. Happy Moon Festival!
26
Sep 2004Pinyin Tooltips
A while ago Matt from Metanoiac asked me how I do my pinyin tooltips. I was too busy at the time to reply, but since maybe other people are interested in how I do it, I’ll give a public explanation here. (Warning: for those of you with no Chinese-related weblog, this is going to be a very long, boring post.)
“Tooltips” are the little text boxes that pop up when you hover your mouse on certain elements. The picture at left is an example. Internet Explorer (IE) users may be used to using the alt attribute to add tooltips to photos, but this is actually a web design no-no. Non-IE browsers do not display alt attributes as tooltips (this is not the intended purpose of alt), and anyway, alt attributes don’t work for non-photo elements like text. The correct attribute to use is the title attribute.
So you need to use the title attribute to get the tooltip, but what tag does it go inside, and how do you get the dotted underline and the question mark cursor? You need to use CSS for that.
The tag you’ll use is span. All you have to do is define a span class in your CSS. I call mine “info” because it doesn’t have to be used only for pinyin tooltips.
span.info {
border-bottom:1px dotted #00AAFF;
cursor: help;
}
This means the underline (which is actually defined as a border) is 1 pixel thick. “#00AAFF” is its color. The onmouseover cursor value is defined as “help“, which results in the question mark effect.
Then you can use it in your HTML like this:
<span class="info">text</span>
Result:
text
This will give the underline and cursor effect, but not the tooltip. You still need to add in the title attribute:
<span class="info" title="pinyin">text</span>
Result:
text
I’m guessing you want the pinyin tone marks too, though. For that, you’ll need to make sure that your page is encoded in Unicode (most people use UTF-8)*.
For the actual pinyin, I use the Pinyin to Unicode converter at The Fool’s Workshop. It’s very easy to use. Type in “zhong1wen2” and click Convert. You get “zhōngwén” back. Then you just copy and paste. Simple.
Here’s what that HTML would look like after you copy and paste:
<span class="info" title="zhōngwén">中文</span>
Result:
中文
This does mean, however, that you’ll have to convert the pinyin for each word you want to provide pinyin for, which is a bit of a pain. But the result is nice.
Also, it’s worth noting that the tooltip is not going to look good on some old computers or computers using weird fonts for their browsers. It’s a helpful effect for a lot of people, but you probably don’t want to make it central to your design.
* By this I mean that in your webpage’s html the <head> section should include the following metatag:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
If your webpage is encoded in Unicode and you’re using Movable Type like me, it will make your life easier if the default encoding of your edit screen is also Unicode. To do that, just edit the mt.cfg file. You need to find “PublishCharset“. For me it was on line 313 (of 457 total lines). Yours should be similar. Uncomment that line (delete the ‘#’) and change it to:
PublishCharset UTF-8
Thanks goes to John B, who originally showed me how to do this.
25
Sep 2004My Ayi
A while back I told you about my ayi (阿姨). Now I’m going to tell you some more.
My ayi comes from Hubei province. She has a son there attending Wuhan University. I don’t know more about her particular family circumstances than this, but knowing just this much it sounds like a difficult situation.
My ayi is probably in her early 40’s.
My ayi always calls me xiansheng (先生), something like “sir.” I’ve asked her many times to just call me by my Chinese name, but she forgets five minutes later, once again calling me xiansheng.
My ayi never joins me for dinner. In the beginning I would try hard to get her to enjoy with me the meal she prepared, but she steadfastly refused every time. Chinese people typically eat dinner between 5 and 6pm. I imagine she’s eating at close to 8pm on a daily basis.
My ayi comes 6 days a week. At about 5:30pm she goes to the market to buy fresh ingredients. She then bikes to my apartment, arriving at 6pm. Dinner is ready around 6:30. She leaves around 7pm. She used to stay longer, but she still seems to be getting the job done. I don’t begrudge her a little haste.
My ayi acts as housekeeper/cook for a number of households. She has worked for foreigners before, so she has a bit of knowledge about “what foreigners like” (or don’t like). You might argue that it’s impossible to make such generalities, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that most of us foreigners don’t like chicken feet and things like that. Her experience rings pretty true for me, anyway.
My ayi knows which foods and ingredients I don’t like, and she’s never once slipped up and made something I don’t like after I had already told her.
My ayi always carries a notebook in which she makes careful note of all her employers’ expenses. She periodically gives me these figures so that I know exactly how much I’m spending on the actual food. It comes out to about 100 rmb (US$12.50) per month.
My ayi carries her cell phone around and usually gets at least one call while she’s here. Her cell phone is nicer than mine.
My ayi understood fine when I requested that she not use the kitchen dish towel to clean dirty things. I explained that the dish towel is for wiping water off clean things, and I didn’t want it to get dirty. (When she first came, I lost one dish towel that way.) I guess she decided she didn’t have enough rags to clean with, though, because one day I found that she had ripped my dish towel in half, leaving only one half hanging clean and faithful at its post while the other half was dispatched to explore less pristine regions.
My ayi hates wasting food. I feel the same way, so it’s no problem. Still, every now and then she suspects that I don’t like something, or a dish has been reheated several times, and is afraid I’ll throw it out. She’s not too timid to ask me not to waste it, or to scold me mildly if she catches me throwing something out (which is rare). One time she made something that I didn’t like. She could tell, and rather than let me waste it, she took it home for herself to eat. I didn’t mind at all. She never made that dish again.
24
Sep 20042 weeks
What have I been doing for the past 2 weeks (besides trying to get my site back online)? It seems like a lot of nothing, but the list goes something like this:
- Plowing through my Chinese intro to linguistics text. (Surprisingly, I’m learning a lot of really useful non-linguistics-specific vocabulary.)
- Reading short stories by H. P. Lovecraft. (And, frequently being disappointed by the endings.)
- Killing time going through the archives of Nuklear Power. (OK, I know it’s lame; I can’t explain it! But FF1 was my favorite game of all time, so that must be part of it.)
- Expanding my music collection. (Huddle Formation by The Go! Team is awesome happy music.)
- Visiting the hospital again. (More on that adventure later.)
- Deciding not to go to India for my October vacation because the plane tickets are just not cheap. (Still not sure what I’ll do.)
- Thinking.
Yes, I’ve dicovered that when my internet usage goes down I end up reading more and getting more sleep. Good thing I solved my hosting problem. No telling what I might be capable of if I were well-rested, well-read, and well-thought out all the time!
24
Sep 2004Finally back up
Sinosplice is finally on its new server. I never intended to take such a long break from blogging, but I needed outside help to do the transfer, and that involved quite a delay. In the meantime I didn’t want to blog because anything I wrote about my blog would just be more whining. I’ll spare you those “fascinating details.” Suffice it to say that there were way more obstacles than I anticipated, and I actually switched to two different hosts in the past two weeks. But all that’s behind me now. (How’s the speed where you are?)
I no longer have cause to whine, and I have a lot to write about. Expect frequent updates in the days to come.
For now let me just give a big thank you to Wilson, without whom I wouldn’t have been able to make the hosting switch.
09
Sep 2004Internet Experiment
I’ve been whining quite a bit lately. First it was about not being able to find someone to work with me at my company. Then it was about the Great Firewall of China picking on me.
I’ve now found Micah to fill the laowai void at my company, but my internet access remains in a deplorable state. Thus the whining continues.
I was recently researching the problem, and I read what Wang Jianshuo had to say about it. (His site is a great reference for all matters Shanghai.) He’s been having problems too, and he also uses ADSL. A Chinese friend in the IT business informed me that her friends have been having similar issues lately (especially with Google), but that those using cable broadband service (有线通) weren’t having the same issues.
Since the internet access problem is mostly specific to Shanghai, I theorized that China is trying out its newest internet filtering technology in Shanghai, with ADSL service in particular as the guinea pig. My troubles are a side effect of what Wang Jianshuo calls “bugs in the great firewall,” which exist because of the newness of the technology. Surely any filters applied to ADSL will also be applied to cable broadband, but maybe only after this initial “tweaking phase” is completed. And who knows when that will be.
So I took a gamble. I signed up for cable service, paying 340 rmb (over $40 US) for installation, the cable modem, and a month of service. The service itself is slightly cheaper (120 rmb per month instead of China Telecom ADSL’s 140 rmb per month), and the speed is about the same. But my website might be once again freely accessible. If not, I wasted 220 rmb for pretty much the same service I was getting.
The installation was finished this afternoon. Once connected, I tried to access my site via FTP. No go. I went to my blog page. My site loaded slowly, pretty much the same as before. Experiment over.
One difference, though, is that Metafilter seems to load better than before. That’s a plus. Also, sites seem to be timing out less often, and just loading slowly instead.
Anyway, I’m through with this crap. I’m changing hosts again. If my site is down for a little while, or the comments don’t work or something like that, you know why. Hopefully soon I’ll be back online proper, blogging about things less boring and negative.
09
Sep 2004No Longer Alone…
The search for another kindergarten teacher trainer to work alongside me is finally over. Funny how these blog connections work, but the one who ended up taking the job is Micah Sittig, a long-time China blogger who has recently returned to China. Anyway, I’m looking forward to working with Micah and molding him in my badass teacher training likeness in the weeks to come. (I’m also looking forward to having someone to share my workload with. This past month has been kind of rough.)
07
Sep 2004Anti-Washington
The city of Qingdao is clearly making a strong statement against one of America’s most beloved forefathers, George Washington. Curious as to what could fuel such anti-Washington sentiment, I did a bit of research. Here is what I found:
- The Anti-Washington Monument is the exact same shape as America’s Washington Monument.
- The patented shape of the original Washington Monument was named an “obelisk” by American designer Joe Obeliskovich in 1884.
- The Anti-Washington Monument is a hateful greenish black color. The original Washington Monument is a beautiful white color, symbolizing purity, freedom, and unchecked corporate interests.
- The Chinese call the Anti-Washington Monument by an entirely different name which I didn’t bother to write down. (We know the truth.)
Related: Evil PSB Headquarters
Personal Update: I’m now back in Shanghai. I’d like to post some accounts of my recent trips, but I’d like to upload pictures, and unfortunately my current hosting situation prevents me from using FTP. I think another host switch may be in my near future. In the meantime, I was able to upload this one photo.
31
Aug 2004Micah and Food
I’m now home briefly before heading off to Yinchuan (Òø´¨). Somehow I doubt Yinchuan will have very good internet access. I’ll be gone for about 5 days.
In the meantime I’ll share a really cool blog. Micah is a China blogger who’s been around pretty much as long as any China blogger I know of, and I keep finding more and more stuff of his online. Micah is currently in China, and prolific as ever. Recently I was impressed by his food blog, which is focused on Chinese food. I find it really hard to take pictures of food that make the food look good; he did a good job. Great blog design too. Enjoy.
I should also mention that one of my favorite blogs, Zero Dispance, is no more. The author has begun the next chapter in Changchun (³¤´º), however, and it has a new name: words are pretty.
30
Aug 2004More Internet Irregularity
I’m still in Qingdao, getting in one last internet session before returning to my crippled Shanghai connection. I’m on an ADSL connection, and I haven’t accessed my webmail and website at this speed in quite a while.
The other night I went online via a friend’s laptop. He had a mobile phone card. The connection was slow, but it was completely wireless and independent of wi-fi “hot spots” (which is good, because there wouldn’t have been any where we were, in a place outside Qingdao called ƽ¶È). He said the service cost him 2000 rmb (about $250 US) per year. Hmmm…
One thing that I find very strange, though, is that my CSS layout is broken when I view it here. The right column acts as if it were not inside its controlling div, but nothing in the layout has changed. I’m using IE 5 here. Explanation?
Qingdao is an awesome city. I’ll have more to say about it in the near future (along with a few pictures).
26
Aug 2004Off Again… (and ROACHES!)
Friday morning I’ll be on a plane to Qingdao (青岛). I’ll have just missed the beer festival, but that doesn’t matter. I’m sure Qingdao is not out of beer, and the city’s still there to be seen. I’ll take Monday to do just that.
Tuesday I’ll fly out to Yinchuan (银川), capital of Ningxia (宁夏) Province. I’m told the agent is going to take us sightseeing there. Yinchuan is next to the Gobi Desert and mountains, and there’s supposed to be cool stuff to see which I might know more about if I were a good Lonely Planet-reading tourist (but I’m not). It’s not like I have lots of time or freedom this time anyway, so I’ll just see where they take me.
In unrelated news, my apartment has recently come under assault by massive cockroaches. Three sightings in the past three days. The first two were terminated by good old fashion smashing the hell out of them. The third one escaped. The third one was the most disturbing because I spotted it taking a stroll across the curtain rod over my window in my bedroom while I was on the phone. I got off the phone for a sec to try to destroy it, but it escaped into the folds of a nearby blanket! How nasty is that?! I had to finish the phone call, and when I got off it was long gone.
I went right to the supermarket to get roach spray and hotels, but they didn’t have any roach hotels. The majority of the insecticide they had was for mosquitoes. And almost all of it was Raid brand. Raid seems to have the Chinese insecticide market cornered.
So then I did the intelligent thing and went home and sprayed the hell out of my entire bedroom. (It doesn’t say anything on the bottle about the fumes being poisonous…) Maybe I’m being squeamish, but the roach was big, and I gotta sleep in that room.
I don’t know what’s going on, because I’m very good about keeping food in the kitchen, and my ayi keeps my place pretty clean. I never spotted a single roach before these.
I’m going to bed soon. I’m trying to make myself believe that the roach either escaped my room through some unknown portal or that it was hiding under the couch when I let a fumigation storm loose under there, and it has long since twitched its loathsome little legs for the last time.
24
Aug 2004A Victim Again
I could swear this website is being dogged by a curse. I change hosts, but it finds me again. This is the third time.
Some time during the week I was in Hubei it began. At the time I thought it was just a Hubei thing, but I was wrong. Within China, it is now very dificult to access Sinosplice. The blog will usually load, but very slowly and sometimes incompletely. Getting into my webmail is difficult. If I can get in at all, I can expect to wait 1-2 minutes for an e-mail to open. Fortunately, POP access still works, although it’s way slower and much less reliable than it used to be. Movable Type is also being very difficult. I’m hoping to get this post online in this precious moment of connectivity. What’s most maddening, probably, is that MT Blacklist won’t work anymore. When I click on “DeSpam” the browser starts loading and never finishes. My comments are getting clogged with spam, and I’m powerless to stop it.
I’m not sure what to do. Changing hosts again isn’t really an option this time; there’s now no refund for unused service. Should I pay for a good proxy? I hate to have to do that, and I really want my site accessible in China.
Man, this is driving me crazy. I hate being a censorship casualty. Again. And again.
I’d appreciate any suggestions regarding hosting, MT, MT Blacklist, or reliable proxies. You should probably e-mail me. I’ll probably get it.
Also, I’d appreciate it if people in China could tell me if they’ve been having trouble accessing my site (along with their location).
I’m hanging in here.
20
Aug 2004Chinese Green Cards?
I’m still in Hubei on business. I’ve been here for almost a week. Despite all the warnings I got that Hubei (and especially Wuhan, which I haven’t been to yet) is like an oven, it’s been refreshingly cool the whole time I’ve been here. It’s because of the rain (typhoon?), I guess. It’s been a great break from Shanghai’s muggy heat.
I am still looking for a teacher trainer, but I’m having a lot of trouble accessing my e-mail from Hubei, so it’ll be a few more days before I can reply to e-mails about that.
Although I’m pretty much aloof regarding world events right now, I do know that the USA has finally caught up to China in number of Olympic gold medals. The Chinese are watching very closely.
Today some teachers here in Hubei pointed out to me an interesting CCTV headline:
This is definitely an interesting development for some of us here in China. I’ll have to read up on this more when I get back to Shanghai.
14
Aug 2004A Few Photos
The day I took the photos for my Solar Visor entry I also took some other pictures. I’ll share a few of them here.
Siesta
It’s a popular custom in China for people to take a nap after lunch. I really don’t understand how the laborers can sleep in such searing heat, but they do it all the time. (Although not always so cuddly-like.)
You know that dinner you had last night…?
What, did you think everything was prepared in a nice big clean kitchen somewhere?
Bus Advertising
Some ads are definitely less annoying than others.
I’m leaving on another business trip today. This time it’s Hubei province, to the cities of Shiyan (Ê®Ñß) and Xiangfan (Ïå·®). I’ll be gone for about a week. (And I’m still looking for someone to do my awesome job with me!)
In the meantime, if you’re looking for more China photos, I recommend you check out Patrick’s blog. (Scroll down and keep scrolling; there are some great pictures in there.) Wayne in Taiwan is getting all fancy-pantsy with his new camera too.
13
Aug 2004Superstition?
Yesterday I went to a kindergarten to teach a few classes with a co-worker. The kindergarten is inside a walled community. Not the kind of rich walled community you may be thinking of, but rather a big collection of fairly run-down Chinese apartment buildings which happen to be surrounded by a wall.
On the way out, we passed two men burning stuff near the garbage. My first thought was, “Just great. As if the pollution wasn’t bad enough, people also burn garbage for no apparent reason when they could just throw it away.”
Then I noticed a middle-aged woman and a rather old woman, who appeared to be just passersby, arguing with the men. It was all in Shanghainese, and I couldn’t understand it at all. Especially the old lady looked pretty upset about the exchange. I saw that what the men were burning was several large sheets of folded yellow paper. I also saw a bundle of white cloth which appeared to be next.
I asked my co-worker what they were saying.
> Me: What were they saying?
> Her: I think maybe someone died, so they’re burning things. The old lady told them they shouldn’t be doing it because it’s just superstition. The men told her it had nothing to do with her and she should mind her own damn business.
> Me: Why do you think someone died?
> Her: Well, in China, after someone dies we often draw a circle on the ground and place some of their clothes and other belongings in the circle and then burn them so that the person has these things in the afterlife.
> Me: So is that superstition too, or tradition?
> Her: Tradition, I guess.
> Me: Where do you draw the circle? Just on the street?
> Her: Yeah.
> Me: And what do you use to draw it?
> Her: Chalk.
> Me: Just regular white chalk?
> Her: Yeah.
This is the kind of thing you see less often in Shanghai, but you still see it if you go to the right parts of the city.
10
Aug 2004Getting in Deeper
Recently I had a chance to tour three of Shanghai’s main universities as part of a last-ditch effort to find someone for my company ASAP. The idea was to visit schools with Chinese study programs, find the foreigners, and possibly recruit a qualified one. I chose a really hot day to do it. In one day I covered Shanghai Jiao Tong University (上海交通大学), then East China Normal University (华东师范大学), and finally Shanghai International Studies University (上海外国语大学). (Notably absent from this list is Fudan University (复旦大学), but I’ve heard really bad things aboput their Chinese studies program, and it’s not in a convenient location, so I skipped it.)
Handing out my fliers to strangers was kind of a weird feeling. I felt like some suspicious salesman trying to perpetrate a scam, or like one of the Chinese promoters on the street attempting to persuade foreigners to come to her restaurant or bar. The difference, of course, was that I was just trying to find one good person for an actually decent job. But it still felt sketchy.
All of the campuses were nicer than I expected. Quite green, with lots of space. Like most Chinese college campuses, the teaching buildings were a mixture of old structures falling into disrepair and newer, more architecturally “inspired” creations with such modern wonders as elevators.
East China Normal University struck me as the most picturesque, with its emerald green streams cutting through campus and shady tree-lined streets. However, East China Normal University also flung its foreign students into an inconvenient corner of campus, a place which aesthetics seemed to overlook.
Shanghai International Studies University seemed very modern. It was also quite small, and I didn’t find any foreign students. (I think they are actually on a different campus than the one that I went to by the Hongkou Soccer Stadium.)
East China Normal University happens to be the school at which I’m considering doing a master’s in applied linguistics. During my lunch break I had time to inquire about the possibility. It turns out there are actually two applied linguistics programs; one is under the Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language Department (对外汉语系), the other is under the Chinese Department (中文系). They recommended I look into the Chinese Department program. Even though the program in the Chinese Department will be more difficult, it has a better reputation in China. I went along with that. I was sent to talk to the Dean of the Chinese Department.
That’s when things started getting scary. The Dean talked to me about the requirements for me to enter the program. I need an HSK score of 6. I have a 7. No problem. Since I’m a foreign student, the foreign language requirement is waived. Great. There are also four entrance examinations prospective grad students need to take. (gulp!) I would only need to take two. Excellent. One was Foundations of Chinese (汉语基础). I was confused for a second. Didn’t they trust my HSK score? No, that’s different. The HSK verifies that I know Chinese. The Foundations of Chinese test verifies that I know about Chinese. Structure and features of modern Chinese grammar, Chinese phonology, special features of Chinese characters, rhetoric, etc. Oh great. I haven’t really studied that. The other test is a Writing Composition test. Uh-oh.
Naturally, these tests made me a bit apprehensive about the whole deal. I talked to the dean about it, and it seems they’re willing to cut me a little slack, but I’m still going to have to bust my ass. They want me in the program, but I’m going to have to really work. Since I don’t want to start until Fall 2005, I have time to study the necessary material on my own. These are the books I was told to pick up: Modern Chinese (现代汉语), Problems in Chinese Grammar Analysis (汉语语法分析问题), Selected Readings from the West on Linguistics (西方语言学名著选读), and Essentials of Linguistics (语言学纲要). I don’t expect much trouble from the latter two other than just absorbing the Chinese for all the linguistic jargon I mostly already know. But the first might two may pose some diffilculty for me to tackle on my own. I think it’s time to start hunting for a tutor again.
Wow, this is looking like quite a challenge. But it’s a challenge I want. So, I guess it’s time to hit those books….
08
Aug 2004Lays Potato Chip Renaissance
Without a doubt, food is one of the major perks of living in China. Not only do we get the most authentic Chinese flavors here, but we frequently get them cheap. In addition, a Westerner living in China will inevitably be exposed to all kinds of new and exotic foodstuffs completely unavailable back home. What the Westerner doesn’t expect is to discover those exotic foods produced by familiar American multinational corporations and displayed in Chinese convenience stores.
One such example is mint Sprite. Yes, it tastes like mint, and it’s a drink. The Chinese seem to like it, and I read that it’s available in Canada and the UK as well. I bought it once. I finished the bottle, but that was plenty for me.
What interests me more is the current Lays Potato Chip Renaissance that we in China live in the midst of. Lays (乐事 — “Happy Things” in Chinese) has come out with some really unusual flavors, and some of them are quite good.
Click each thumbnail below for a bigger image.
The three flavors in the groups on the left are Cool Cucumber (清怡黄瓜味), Crisp Hokkaido Seaweed (北海道鲜脆海苔), and Fresh Lemon (沁凉柠檬味). I like all those flavors, but the cucumber flavor is especially weird and tasty. The Chinese really know how to appreciate cucumber.
The three flavors on the right all belong to the “Chinese Favorites” (中华美食 — actually more along the lines of “Chinese Gourmet”) collection and include Spicy Crab (香辣蟹味), Peking Duck (北京烤鸭味), and Five Spice Fish* (五味鱼香味). I haven’t tried these yet (I am not a total potato chip freak), but I will soon. I find it interesting that only the Peking Duck flavor from the “Chinese Favorites” collection has any English on it. Is this Lays’ prediction of which flavor foreigners will actually be willing to try? (Hmmm, maybe someone should send Richard a bag.)
Collecting and trying all these strange new potato chips almost makes me think I need to do another Junk Food Review….
* OK, I know my translations of the flavor names are not the greatest, but I also know from experience that translation of Chinese food names is not easy, and in this case particularly not worth the effort.
06
Aug 2004Accent
In order to become really fluent in a foreign language, it’s more than just a matter of learning vocabulary and grammar and stringing them together flawlessly. Some of the hardest aspects to master in order to sound truly native-like are intonation and accent. Usually there comes a point when, either through lack of effort or through linguistic inability, non-native speakers stop improving (look at Arnold Schwarzenegger). Linguists call this phenomenon fossilization. (The term fossilization is usually applied to grammar, but I think it can be used for the fine points of pronunciation as well.) It’s understandable that learners would eventually halt their progress in this area; there comes a point when the benefits of added native-like fluency just aren’t worth the effort the would require.
I think these questions of accent and intonation enter the mind of any person bent on mastery of a language. Exactly how good do I need to sound? Do I care if I’m always easily identifiable as an American (or just a foreigner) to native speakers? Does my accent affect listeners’ comprehension? Does my accent in their language sound bad to them, or is it charming? If I can reduce my accent with coaching, should I? How much money is that worth to me? And if I did go through coaching, how would I know when to be satisfied?
Although all these questions have occurred to me, I haven’t really answered them all. I work full-time now, and since I use Chinese on the job I’m kind of depending on that improving my fluency, including accent and intonation. I’ll admit I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I’d like to reduce my accent in Chinese as much as possible, but I’m also kind of lazy, and I’m not yet ready to address the question of how much it’s all worth to me.
Students of Chinese have one big advantage when it comes to accent. Because Chinese speakers’ Mandarin is affected by an underlying extremely diverse linguistic hodgepodge of languages and dialects, the accents of the Chinese themselves vary widely. This works to a foreigner’s advantage because if he can get down the tones and the sounds of Mandarin, his accent can sometimes be mistaken for one of the native Chinese groups’ accents. For a student of Mandarin in Mainland China, the accent progression from jabbering fool to fluent goes something like this:
- Foreigner accent (not good)
- Xinjiang accent (better than the “foreigner accent” only because it’s “Chinese”)
- Hong Kong accent (getting better)
- Taiwanese accent (good Chinese, but funny)
- Southern China accent (fluent and authentic, but not ideal)
- Beijing accent (the Chinese standard)
I’ve had occasion to consider these matters of accent and intonation because it’s been a key issue recently at work as we continue to record the voices for the cartoon series we’re producing. The voice as Asta the pig has been praised by test audiences, cementing my role.
I know that foreigners who have worked for my company in the past have not been allowed to do the cartoon character voices because their Chinese wasn’t good enough; they sounded “like a foreigner.” I’m not vain enough to think that my recordings are indistinguishable from native speakers’, but I really wonder how much slack they’re cutting me. During recordings I have been getting some accent coaching; if my reading sounds strange to them I have to redo it as many times as is necessary to satisfy them. That may sound really aggravating (and it can be), but at the same time, this is free accent coaching I’m getting on the job! So I can’t complain.
There’s definitely a pattern. Whenever lines become very long and grammatically complicated, or involve a phrase or grammatical structure I’m not familiar with, I almost always need several takes. Short lines with easy content I can just breeze through, sometimes getting laughs from my audience with my impassioned pig voice.
Damn, my job is pretty cool. (Doesn’t anybody out there want it too??)
04
Aug 2004Looking to Guoqing Vacation
The first week of October is a national holiday in China. It’s the “National Founding Day” national holiday, or 国庆节 in Chinese. In order to celebrate the founding of the PRC, everyone in mainland China gets a week of vacation. Ironically, that “everyone” doesn’t include the true proletariat. Workers and service industry people in cities, rather than getting a break, have to work all the harder as the white collar Chinese pour in for their vacations. Oh, and then there’s also the matter of the “week” of vacation not really being a week for most companies.
But back to the point. It’s kind of hard to decide where to travel for this holiday, because most of China’s tourist destinations are just overflowing with Chinese tourists. Add to that the fact that my job takes me to a lot of tourist destinations for free and during non-peak season, and I start to look outside of China for a vacation destination.
I’ve pretty much decided on India. It’s nearby, it’s cheap, and I even know someone there. I know I can’t see much of India in only a week, but to be honest I’m not sure I’d want a real long stay either. But it’s certainly a country I’d like to see a bit of. I’d appreciate any recommendations anyone might have; I’m still in the planning stages and I’m not going to buy the stupid Lonely Planet.
Note: The guy I had lined up to do my job along with me fell through. I’m still looking, and it’s urgent! See the original entry as well as the Sinosplice Jobs description.