Thoth Learns How to Read and (Sort Of) Write Chinese (中國)

Some of you in Taiwan might still know what I'm up to. I have a lot of posts here which are almost essay-like, with references, links, opinions, commentary, but not much personal reflection on my own personal experience.

I have renewed my offical attempts to learn Chinese. Not that I haven't been practising the past couple of months, but I haven't really practised speaking. I have been practising writing, since one's progress (or at least mine) takes less time in this area. I have always felt frustrated though when confronting the written/read Chinese language as far back as when I lived in Taiwan. I could never read the simplest signs. Like most foreigners. But I am not most foreigners, because I am more intelligent than most people. I am not a genius, but there are many people in Taiwan, who were there for shorter periods of time than I was, and these people learned more about writing and reading Chinese than I did.

I always needed that key. Which is how to comprehend the characters or words.

For me, the biggest, major thing, is independence of effort.

I always wanted to able to look up a word in the dictionary and see what it meant in English.

I am vegetarian, so you can imagine how difficult it was, even if someone handed me a piece of paper saying as restaurant should have such and such a sign. How do I look up a Chinese word in the Chinese/English dictionary (and for the record, I did not have such a dictionary for about a year, although I did have small dictionaries in the back of phrasebooks, but I could never understand how people could figure out what the heck these words meant and how people could remember these obscure characters.

I find it so easy now. Just because a very kind friend of mine here in Montréal, Yunjun taught me about the language. What Yunjun taught me this past Sunday afternoon, was how you can find these characters in the dictionary, without looking at every character and every page in the dictionary. What the heck does a radical mean?

A radical is part of the word/character. It is like "a" is part of apple, or for that matter, "ap" is part of apple.

Here is an example. I was looking at the cover of a magazine (Taiwan Panorama) and I wondered what this character meant: 父母. It means parents. But how do I find it in the dictionary? 父 is actually a radical itself, so that makes things a lot easier. And that radical is the 94th radical. How do I make it easy to find this radical in the radical index? Well, this radical has four storks. The short one on the left that goes up diagonally, followed by the one that curls down slightly in a perpendicular direction to the right. Then the other side that mirrors it follows in the same way (with two strokes, of course - one short one going up and one longer one curling down-left). The second character 母 was a bit more difficult to find, but because I have to dictionaries now, I found by cross referencing it. The problem, sometimes, too, is that if your dictionary uses simplified Chinese (the Mandarin that Chinese use) as opposed to one that uses traditional Chinese (used by Taiwanese), then it will be difficult to find, if your text is written in traditional Chinese. Still, if you have two dictionaries, it can be easy to find your character.

Most Taiwanese I have met will not be able to tell you how to use a dictionary. This is unfortunate. Maybe the situation is different in Taipei, but I think the education system in public education system in Taiwan has been extremely lax, and this laxness is inexcusable. After all, my friend Yunjun learned this stuff (using a dictionary by looking up radicals). She is from Shanghai. She thinks that maybe it has to do with my having been in small cities. Somehow, though, with Taiwan's dense population, its virtually being one-island/one city, you would think that the knowledge and skills that people have in one place would quickly transfer to other places. One thing I find absurd about Taiwan attitudes (and this is nearly universal there, by the way), is the very shock people display at the idea of travelling more than fifteen minutes from their home, except for rare, giant, family occasions. Whereas in Canada and the United States, people think nothing of commuting for two hours each way - in their cars, to
boot - to get to work, or to do whatever. Now, I am not suggesting it is a good thing to have to commute for four hours a day, but what is it to travel on public transportation (something city people do, I am sure, in Taipei, quite often, because of Taipei's size, crazy traffic, and sheer stretch) for two hours from one's home, or from work on very frequent occasions? This is good for education. Do it for individual freedom, for educational habituation, and simple fun! Get to know people in the mountains, those of you who live in the cities! Get to know people in Chiayi, thouse of you who live in Houlong, Miaoli (苗栗) County. See, I am even typing in Chinese, but I had to look up the li part in Wikipedia. And I got one radical wrong in the Miao part. I don't know what meaning it would have been had it been 喵栗, but this latter one is not correct.

Anyway, I hope to be able to teach Chinese, one day. I don't want it to be the only thing I do, but imagine teaching foreigners in Taiwan Chinese, and teaching Taiwanese about film philosophy, film theory, film history, and film aesthetics. Once I found out how to use the Chinese dictionary, I have been able to recognize characters a lot easier. This is the way I learned most English words as a kid. I read children's books (like Grimm's fairy tales) and looked up words I didn't know. Often, I would look up words, and they would still be mysterious, even after looking up a word, and looking up, once again, that words equivalent, because my English wasn't sophisticated enough.

Learning the meaning of words comes from the relationality among them in one's personal practice, and on an intimate level.

So, what have I been doing? Practicing Chinese, French, and reading philosophy (like Zizek, film theory, and watching films on my computer's DVD player).

Perhaps my experiences, and the way I described the secrets of using the dictionary will help some of you poor lost foreigner souls living over there in Taiwan. It will certainly be tons easier when, and if, God willing, I get back there. Gosh, for all the two years I spent there, even though I was there less than four months ago, it has really quickly begun to feel like a distant dream or memory. Not Sharon, but Taiwan. Taiwan feels real to me, but still, D I S T A N T.