Finding the Words...

"The limits of my language are the limits of my world.❞
‒Ludwig Wittgenstein

This morning I find myself working happily in the small bar at the rear of the Tara Guesthouse. It is slightly more expensive than the cafe on the main road, but is has a much quieter ambiance, more conducive to activities such as this. There is a small pool, barely wide enough to execute a single stroke, but quite pleasant on a hot day. Today though, it is overcast and remarkably cool for Thailand, the mercury barely managing to reach 28 celsius. Such days though are to be appreciated here in normally sunny Siam, much like Goldilocks’ ideal: not too hot, not too cold.
I have spent most of the morning since a juggling session at 6.30 a.m. struggling to improve my nascient Mandarin. I have made efforts, infrequent and intermittent it’s true, but efforts, to acquire this most challenging of languages for about four years now. Some urgency has been added to the task as it now seems likely that I will be back in the Centre Land (Zhong guo, so called apparently because the Chinese perceived their country as being the centre of the World) by the end of November.
Why is it that language acquisition is so difficult beyond one’s teenage years? I am not the brightest in the World, but I am not the thickest either (though, at times, I have my doubts...), but acquiring another language at this stage of life does seem to be an immensely difficult undertaking.
I have posed this question to several of my fellow travellers whilst here in Kanchanaburi, but without receiving a satisfactory response up to now. Some of them speak a second language, several are even polyglots, but none seem to have acquired much fluency in another language later in life. I did meet an American in One More Bar who seemed to speak adequate Thai after living in the country for seven years. His understanding though was limited to the spoken word, as became obvious when he tried to translate the writing on a cigarette packet. Even with the obvious context, a gory picture of impending damage if one should actually enjoy the product therein, he still found it difficult. I was impressed both by his obvious intelligence and his willingness to risk embarassment whilst seeking to improve his skills, but a little discouraged by his inability to understand the fairly simple text.
I recently spent some time in France (see blog) and was pleasantly surprised with just how much French I knew. I had told my travelling companion before we left that essentially I had no French, but when faced with the reality of seeking out some pain killers in a pharmacy it became clear that I knew far more unconsciously than I had given myself credit for. Thus emboldened (this happened on the first day of the trip) I had a lot of fun inflicting my enthusiast, if somewhat dubious, language skills on the local population. Apart from the odd ‘zut alors’, they seemed mostly encouraging!
The thing is though, somewhat depressingly, my French comes from my long lost childhood, from a time when language learning actually seemed to somehow stick. The famous psychologist and all round renaissance man, Noam Chomsky, once opined that all children are born with a Langauge Acquisition Device (LAD) embedded into their neurology. I have personally witnessed many examples when children of mixed nationalities or those who find themselves growing up in a different country to their parents homeland quickly and easily pick up the local language. Unfortunately, Chomsky also was of the opinion that this device atrophies somewhere in the latter teen years, thus making it progressively more difficult to learn another tongue as we get older.

Noam Chomsky

On the positive side, there has been a veritable explosion on the internet in recent years, particularly perhaps on Youtube, of people advocating ‘hacking’ a language. They use techniques such as focussing their attention on frequency tables (lists of the most commonly used words), flashcards, basic grammar hacks that quickly reveal how each language’s grammatical assumptions work and several other such ‘quick fix’ ideas. Sometimes though, I wonder if it is not the simple willingness to make mistakes, the sheer thick-skinnedness, of these individuals that allows them to make progress. Indeed, perhaps this is what we lose as we get older and mature from teens into young adults. As children, we are often unafraid of making a mistake, occasionally even making a fool of ourselves, but the older we get the more we tend to dread such embarassing situations. As our personalities ossify with the passing years perhaps it is that very process that makes further learning more and more difficult?
These language ‘hackers’, from Benny Lewis (the Irish Polyglot) to Tim Ferriss, tend to have one thing in common; a willingness to take a risk and to be unafraid of making mistakes, even advocating such situations as a way of learning. They are a brave and somewhat extrovert bunch, but perhaps their methods are not applicable to everyone.

After starting this week’s blog I found myself in a situation when I was forced to employ German with some fellow travellers who share the same verandah in the Smiley Frog. Again, much to my surprise, the German I had learnt as a 30 year old in pursuit of a certain young lady in the fair city of Stuttgart came readily to mind. It was by no means fluent, but I found I could understand 95% of the conversation and could contribute myself to the extent where I was readily understood. Interestingly, to learn the language I had used a very esoteric method known, at least at that time, as accelerated learning. Large parts of the sessions consisted in lying back, eyes closed, listening to baroque music from the 18th century and gradually, very gradually being fed German whislt you were in this relaxed state. Amazingly, despite the rather disconcerting conscious feeling that you were not learning at all, the stuff seemed to stick.

Perhaps this is the answer to my own conundrum. It is clear that many of our most fluid and fluent skills are completely unconscious. Indeed, when the conscious mind tries to interfere with them it is often to the detriment of performance. If you try to consciously think, for example, of how you actually perform the act of walking and then try to control it with that part of the mind, you will invariably find that it becomes much, much more difficult. The skillful execution of a golf swing, the playing of an instrument, the construction of a long and complex sentence in conversation, all these are generally done completely unconsciously and very much best left so.
With these heady thoughts in mind, I think it is time to finish imbibing this beer and consign this week’s effort to the World Wide Web. The venue has moved on to the Triple B Bar on the main drag, musicians crank out “I still haven’t find what I am looking for” which, in the circumstances, maybe quite appropriate. But maybe, just maybe, I have my first clue!

Not so easy peasy...

          This week's 'Letter from China' comes from the simple but comfortable confines of Pappa Gourmet, a tiny café cum tea bar in one of the slightly more salubrious side streets of Chang An. The place is only about ten feet wide but nearly makes up for it by having a mezzanine floor. I use the word 'nearly' advisedly, as those of us of slightly more generous height are challenged to do anything other than stoop on the upper floor. Still, it is comfortable, at least once one has levered one's long-legged frame into position.

          Many of the cafés and shops in this area follow the modern trend of naming their shops using the alphabet commonly employed in English. Most times, the premises bear two names, the Chinese and the English, but many dispense with the Chinese altogether and just focus on the more fashionable Anglo-Saxon. This trend has been noticed by the powers that be (and they are considerable powers...) in China and reacted to. Much like the French and their infamous 'Academie  Francaise', there is a feeling that the traditional culture, and the language in particular, is under threat from the modern preponderance of English in the world's of commerce and entertainment.

          For my part, the adoption of more and more English cannot come too soon. For the second time, before the start of this latest venture to South China, I dedicated myself, quite earnestly and with a fair degree of determination, to the study of Mandarin, both spoken and written. It seems though, that for the second time this most complex of linguistic systems has defeated me utterly. After some eight weeks of dedicated practice, averaging about an hour and a half a day, and six weeks of actual exposure to China and the spoken language, I feel I have barely scratched the surface of a scratch on the surface of the language.

          I can manage, at a push, the very basics such as politeness (to a point), asking for items in shops and enquiring after the price but beyond such bargain basement Chinese, I am stumped. Even such simplicities as asking directions, something that would come in handy in these bustling and constantly confusing metropolises, are quite beyond me. I may be able to ask the question but am utterly unable to comprehend the stream of apparently disconnected syllables that is returned to me. My only recourse in such circumstances is to follow the directions of the respondent's hands and nod, murmuring the odd 'hao' (good) and 'haode' (fine) and trying not to look too challenged.

          This is, of course, hugely frustrating. The frustration was so great in fact that I began to doubt my own ability to learn and assimilate. I am no polyglot but can get by in German and have a little French. In the past though, when I have spent some time in a new country, I usually find that I can pick up the basics of what is needed to get by, at least to some extent, within a relatively short time, even if this entails learning a new alphabet as was the case in Thailand and Russia.

          To test my own apparently dwindling abilities I decided to look into another language to see if it would prove as difficult. I chose Spanish as it is likely to come in handy for future flaneurial visits to Spain and South America. I listened to some recordings from the redoubtable Michel Thomas (a fascinating character whose biography is well worth looking up in its own right – he packed an awful lot of living into his 91 years) and found that far from being unresponsive that I was actually picking up the language like a talented teenager. In three days I seem to have learnt the equivalent of two months of Chinese, perhaps more.

          So what is it that is so very difficult about Chinese that it intimidates even the most accomplished of polyglots? I say this having just read about the famous Italian cardinal, Joseph Mezzofanti, who was reported to be able to speak sixty languages fluently. Despite his previous acumen, it was rumoured that he had a nervous breakdown when faced with Mandarin. This event not only thwarted further progress in Chinese but led to him temporarily forgetting many of his other languages.

          The first problem with Mandarin is that it is a tonal language. This implies that the meaning of words is changed by the tone attached to them. As an example we can use the seemingly simple two-letter syllable 'ma'. This can mean a piece of hemp, a horse, to scold someone, a mother or can be used at the end of a sentence to indicate a question is being asked, depending on the tone it is uttered in. This multiplicity of meaning applies to every syllable that Chinese uses. Often, to the European ear, simply picking up the fact that the tone has changed in the first place is something of an achievement – to then add meaning to that is bordering on a minor miracle.

          The actual number of sounds employed by Mandarin is relatively few but this only adds to the confusion. The same syllable can be used multiple times even with the same tone and yet mean something completely different. The syllable 'shi' for example has a grand total of some 32 meanings, depending on tone and context. That is roughly 31 too many for this nomadic flaneur...

          I could say a lot more in regards to the challenges of the spoken language but, unbelievably, that is the easy part. When it comes to the written, Mandarin is saddled with a writing system that is both ancient and unbelievably cumbersome. The learner of English has to accumulate 26 letters which, for the most part, equate fairly consistently with sound. In Russian the task that faces the would be learner is 33 letters and for the Greek a mere 24. To learn even the most basic Chinese reading skills one would have to accumulate at least 2,000 symbols. Even then, it is thought that it would still not be enough to read even basic newspaper articles and nowhere near enough for any kind of literature. There are sinologists who have studied the language for ten years and still cannot read even a simple novel in Mandarin.

          The classic comeback to this observation is that the symbols are made up of only about 200 radicals (or basic building blocks). Again, this is only partly true. There are many words that have no radicals whatsoever. Those that do have them are combined in many strange ways and, just to make matters worse, the radicals often also change form when used in combination - squished, squashed, bent or just completely different!

          Combinations of radicals can be added to the left or the right, above or below, inside or outside the main symbol with no guiding principles whatsoever to predict their behaviour. Some add a degree of phonetic clue but most don't. Some add a degree of semantic (meaning) significance but again, most don't. The whole system, to put it mildly, is a complete mess. So much so that to use the word 'system' seems unjustified in the case of Mandarin.

          Finally, if one has stayed the course and actually manages to recognise the symbols, just to make things interesting they are spaced evenly with no indication if the word involved is made up by one, two or even three of these collections of symbols. In English, we simply use a space to indicate the end of one word and the start of another. In Chinese, one has to work out which of the possible combinations is intended as the spacing itself gives no clue. Oh, nearly forgot, just to add insult to injury, Chinese is sometimes written left to right and sometimes top to bottom...

          Back in the cosy confines of Papa Gourmet, I stare uncomprehendingly at the menu which, after several weeks of trying, is just as opaque to me as on the first day. One could, with sufficient dedication, application and time master this language to the extent that one could 'get by'  (about 25 years should do it) but... is it worth that much effort for such meagre returns? Unless there is a pressing necessity to do so for business or personal reasons, I would suggest that one's time might be more gainfully employed doing... almost anything other than learning Mandarin!

          Apparently, the Chinese Premier Xi Jingping himself believes that rather than the Chinese learning English, the rest of the World should now be learning Chinese. In response to this notion, I think I should utilise a commonly used phrase from Spanglish...

           No Way, José!

Just to show that sometimes the confusion goes both ways....