Archives for February 2009
The Five Things I Don’t Like Hearing
When I posted the article Mr. Negative, I should have clarified that it didn’t mark the end of my complaining. Come on, guys, isn’t it as therapeutic for you as it is for me to make a public list of the obnoxious things I have to hear on a regular basis? Maybe we can learn a little something along the way. It’ll be fun! Starting with my favorite:
1. Hello
Of course this one’s going to top of the list. What foreigner doesn’t grow to hate the hello? While there’s nothing wrong with a warm greeting between two passersby, many people have gotten into the habit of heckling foreigners with this one and not letting up until they get some kind of reaction. I’m not talking about a wave or a smile or a return hello, either. That usually doesn’t satiate them, which means I’m still not sure what it is they hope to accomplish.
2. Laowai / Waiguoren
I’ve addressed the issue of being called Laowai instead of Mr. Nielsen enough, but there’s more to the picture than that. I feel like all of China has signed up for a game of I Spy, and when anyone sees a foreigner, they must drop everything they’re doing and blurt out, “Waiguoren!” Seriously, people will stop mid-sentence to make this observation. It’s not so much addressing you, either, as it is just letting those around them know that a foreigner is in the area.
3. May I come in?
You might question why something so polite would be on this list, but it seems that, no matter how many times I ask my students to drop this one, they just won’t let it go. I’m guessing “May I come in?” is a formality their previous EFL teachers introduced, and it drives me crazy. Any student coming into class late stops at the door and bellows, “May I come in?!” even if I’m in the middle of explaining something important. It’s a constant reminder I’m not getting through to these kids as quickly as I had hoped.
4. When will you get married?
I thought I had dodged this question once I left Utah, where your business is everybody’s business, but apparently it’s okay to pressure acquaintances you don’t know very well into marriage here, too. What gets to me, though, is that the people who ask if/when I will marry the girlfriend I’ve only been dating for four months have been dating their significant others for two or three years! Why don’t you get married, huh? Why don’t you get married!
5. Your nose is big.
Nobody is more aware of my big nose than I am, and nobody likes being reminded of it as much as I do. Or, uh… don’t? Since pointing out the obvious seems to be such a celebrated pastime, everyone can join in on the fun of bringing attention to the parts of our bodies we’re most self-conscious about! Fortunately, the only thing they’ve got on me is a big nose. Other people, both foreign and Chinese, aren’t so lucky.
Whac-A-Mouse with Mario and Friends
Back in October, I posted a picture of a mascot whose body looked eerily similar to Super Mario. Well, other Chinese stores are apparently having fun with Nintendo property, too. Just take a look at this Whac-A machine sporting pictures of Mario characters Hammer Brother and Lakitu (and their heads are fully intact this time).
Okay, so it’s not as amusing as the other Mario rip-off, except that the things you are whacking are Minnie Mouses. I guess if you’re in the right mood, it would be fun to pretend like you’re a Nintendo employee stomping out the cutesy competition. And what better place to start than a Wal-Mart in China?
British English is Taking Over China
Strawberry. If I follow that with the word “pancakes,” my mouth starts watering, but I don’t want to talk about strawberry pancakes today. Just strawberries. You see, Grade 3 has had the hardest time remembering this word, and yet it’s an important one to know should they ever want to venture away from the chocolate-flavored ice cream at McDonald’s.
For the first few weeks back from my winter holiday, I’ve been reviewing with the kids everything we learned last semester. I’m glad to report that most of them have finally gotten the strawberry. However, this review has brought up a new problem: French fries. We’ve drilled “fries” as long as we’ve drilled “strawberry.” Now that I’m back, I’ve found everyone is calling them “chips.” You turn your back for one second (or one month), and British English comes charging in!
Most of the English books I see are based on British English, which means my friends have been taught to use words like “mum” and “trousers” and spell color with a U. I don’t have a problem with this so much as I find it interesting how everyone’s fascination with English stems from doing business with the US, yet all of their materials are prepping them for a trip to England. Then these schools keep hiring American teachers, and we have to explain to our students over and over that, no, we are not from England, no, we don’t eat biscuits every day, and, uh… what the hell is a lorry?
All right, get ready for another “when I was…” moment. Ready? When I was a teacher in Wuwei, my students kept bringing up cultural information about America that was just… wrong. In fact, the things they were saying were more about England than the US. After I finally pointed out they had the two countries mixed up, they seemed really disappointed and lost all interest in talking about American culture. Maybe I should just agree with my students that I’m an Englishman so we can all live in a happy fairytale!
Flashcards, Green Cards, and Red Cards
When you come to China to teach, it’s not necessary to pack a lot of teaching supplies, because, even though it may not always feel like it, this is still a modern country. Most of what you need in the classroom is available at the supermarket. Except 3×5 cards. I’ve yet to find anything in the store like a good, old-fashioned 3×5. I knew this would be a problem, so I had enough sense to bring several hundred with me. 3×5 cards are a teacher’s best friend, aside from a beating stick.
This week, I put together an activity where each student got a flashcard with a picture of a vocabulary word on it and took turns asking, “Who has…. this?” and replying, “I has…. this.” It turned into one of those things that would have made for a great lesson in any other environment, but in a classroom of 50 Chinese kids, it was about as bearable as the “who’s on first” skit. Yeah. That’s right. Who’s not a fan.
I don’t regret trying to do this lesson, though, because it ended up being a good way to show them just how poor their behavior is. I decided to create a “good/bad bag” based on a discipline idea I got from my mother who used a similar approach to keep my Sunday school classmates in line (because Sunday school students have no incentive to be good). When the class is well-behaved, a green card goes in the bag. When they’re bad, a red card goes in. At the end of class, a card is drawn. If it’s green, something good happens. If it’s red, something bad (or nothing) happens. Simple, right?
My first attempt at this was just to warm the students up to the card system. There were no rewards involved. And I knew they wouldn’t do very well, anyway. One class ended up with only one green card and ten red cards. As we were counting the red cards together, the kids grew more and more excited and shouted hurray on reaching ten. Okay… obviously it’s going to take a couple tries for this to sink in.
One Year Older, Two Years Wiser
Today, I am 25. Well, actually, I turned 25 yesterday, but today, I’m now 25 according to Western time zones. In Chinese culture, though, I’m 26, and, apparently, I’ve been 26 for a while. I’m often told that people here are already considered one year old when they are born, which is fine. Being in the womb is hard work! That still doesn’t account for the additional year that keeps getting tacked onto people’s age, though. What gives?
A lot of this confusion comes from the Chinese New Year. Once the Year of the Ox rolled in, people started telling me I was 26 even though my birthday wasn’t for another month. Because of this, I’m never sure if someone is telling me their real age or their Chinese age, and I’m never sure which one to give out. It seems that whenever I say my real age, and people later find out the year I was born, they think I was purposefully lying to them. As if I really have something to hide by pretending to be two years younger!
There are a lot of things about China I let slide, because I understand I’m an outsider who will never fully “get” a lof of what goes on here, but the age discrepancy is one of those things I just can’t bring myself to accept. So while my friends will tell me they are 23 years old, I have to remind them, “But you’ve only been alive for 21 years.” Got you there.
Mr. Negative
My mother has brought it to my attention that my blog isn’t very clear whether or not I like my stay in China. That sentence has too many my’s in it. Yes, I can see this being a problem. The negativity, not the my’s. But isn’t it more fun to write about all the bad things instead of all the good things? When I was still cranking out game reviews on a weekly basis, I had a much easier time ragging on a bad game than praising a good one. And I still complained about the good games an awful lot. I think my writing is naturally negative, and I have to work hard to make it sound more uplifting. Ha, ha, hee, hee, ho, ho!
I think this is a great opportunity, then, to karate chop a couple of puppies into a vat of acid. No. No. Not that. I mean it’s a great opportunity to mention the things I do like about China. Obviously, there’s a lot that gets on my nerves, but there’s also a lot that drew me here in the first place and a lot that keeps me from hightailing it back to the US. And it’s not just a girl, either! I like traveling. I like seeing new places and experiencing new things. I like meeting up with other people who have a similar penchant for adventure and who were crazy enough to act on it.
There are things specific to China that I love, like the food, the landscapes, the festivals, the randomness, and being able to see traces of ancient history before it gets eaten up by the Western movement. Plus, Chinese kids are the cutest kids in the world. Honestly, though, I think I could have fallen head over heels for any foreign country, simply because I like the change. It’s good for me. China just happens to be the place that started it all.
My mother also requested that I post a picture of myself, since the last picture was from Harbin, and I was so bundled up, you couldn’t see anything. So here’s me on Tianzhu Mountain:
Stop kissing the monitor.
My Chinese Coach DS Review
I took a year of Chinese in college and have been meeting with a Chinese tutor at least once a week, not to mention I have every opportunity to practice and learn Chinese in real world (and real frustrating) situations every day, but progress is slow. The truth is, I lack the confidence to talk with native speakers and lack the discipline to study seriously. If you hide language-learning inside a video game, though, it’s just enough to dupe me into doing something with Chinese, and that’s where My Chinese Coach comes in handy.
Unfortunately, the game is designed for people who have little or no prior knowledge in the language. So those who already have “Ni hao” and “Xie xie” under their belts will find it tedious trudging through all the beginner lessons before getting into stuff that’s actually useful. It would be nice if you could just skip lessons, but then if you didn’t have to work towards opening lessons in sequential order, you’d probably lose the desire to stick with it.
The lessons are nice and short, anyway, and are based on themes like going to the hospital or ordering food. A couple of nonsense topics are thrown in, but most lessons are things you would want to know eventually. There’s a lot of great information in here, and it isn’t limited to just Chinese; you also get a dose of China and Chinese culture in general. If you know you’re not going to be able to sleep on that 13-hour flight to Shanghai, this would certainly help you get up to speed. But I don’t think it’s safe to take everything the game says to heart, as My Chinese Coach is ridden with spelling errors and incorrect tone markings. If they can’t get those right, who knows what else they got wrong. Maybe Beijing isn’t the capital after all!
Zipping through the lessons won’t give you the best education, either. To really make the most of this software, you need to use the built-in writing and voice recording tools. The latter is a neat addition, because you can record your voice and compare it with the Chinese coach’s pronunciation of each vocabulary word. This is a great way to ensure you’re getting the tones right (as opposed to risking it and sounding like a total goof).
Hey, wait a minute! This is starting to sound like actual work and studying! That’s why My Chinese Coach has enough sense to include 12 mini-games. But here’s the problem: most of the games suck. There is a multiple choice quiz and a flashcard drill that end up being very helpful, plus a game about tones for those who still struggle recognizing the differences. The rest, however, serve no purpose other than to boost the number of unlockables. I just don’t see Whac-a-Mole as a tried and tested way to learn anything outside of rodent disinfestation.
Another problem with the mini-games (and My Chinese Coach overall) are their emphasis on learning characters. Very few are strictly about pinyin. I understand characters are important, but speaking Chinese is easier and more important for you to pick up than reading Chinese, and reading Chinese is easier and more important for you to pick up than writing Chinese. Yet My Chinese Coach dedicates three mini-games to writing characters, and all of them end up feeling overbearing to anyone but the most fervent Chinese students.
If you’re taking Chinese that seriously, then you need to upgrade to something better. My Chinese Coach teaches characters way too fast, and the DS’s touch screen isn’t sufficient for practicing to write. The handwriting recognition is shoddy; I could pass off a character as a bunch of scribbles, and the game was none the wiser. It also favors simplified characters over traditional, which I have absolutely no qualms with, but I know some people fall to pieces at the idea of having to learn one over the other.
Ultimately, I appreciate the effort made by My Chinese Coach. Even though its mini-games aren’t that fun, playing them is much more engaging than trying to learn on your own by reviewing a bunch of dialogue printed off the computer. For those who can’t sign up for a regular Chinese class and can’t seem to concentrate on anything not tied to Nintendo, this isn’t a bad choice. I was able to get several new words and phrases out of the game, which has got to be worth something, but I still have a long ways to go. And so will you.
Hometown Hefei
I’ve always considered Hefei my hometown in China. It’s where I lived four years ago when I taught at the Guanghua School for ILP and has been the foundation of a lot of life-changing self-discoveries, crazy memories, and good friends. I had even pushed to teach in Hefei this year but ended up in Changzhou because of some difficulties finding a primary school. But after visiting the city again for the first time in almost three years, I kind of feel like I dodged a bullet.
Changzhou ended up being famous for combs and a couple of odd snack foods, so I asked a friend what Hefei was famous for, and he said, “Uh….” And that’s Hefei. Despite being a city of over 4.5 million, not a lot seems to happen there. Its biggest tourist attraction is the burial grounds and temple of Lord Bao Zheng. Of course, I only went to Hefei to visit my friends, and it was fun to walk through some of these old places I haven’t seen for years.
I don’t think there’s much of an expat community in Hefei, either, besides the semesterly ILP groups, which means foreigners are even more of a spectacle than they are in Changzhou. And you know how much I love people staring and pointing at me! In fact, I went to Qianshan for a day (a nearby, rural area where foreigners are pretty much non-existent) and found the locals’ fascination with me to be somewhat rude. During a huge Chinese New Year parade, strangers kept pulling me aside and interrupting my conversation with my friends so they could practice their rehearsed English, “Hello nice to meet you my name is Jonas why you come to China.”
At one point, the parade stopped, and one of the guys carrying a dragon asked me to pose in front of it. I’ve never seen so many cameras come out of so many pockets so fast! But the reason I went to Qianshan wasn’t to have my ego stroked. I wanted to check out Tianzhu Mountain, another one of these so-called AAAA tourist attractions. While it’s lesser known than other mountains, I thought it was a pretty cool place. Tianzhu Mountain looks like it seceded from Huangshan (the Yellow Mountains), since the two share very similar landscapes, though Huangshan is definitely the bigger and better of the two.
I returned to the Qianshan bus station at 3:30 and bought a ticket back to Hefei. The ticket said my bus was supposed to leave at 3:00, though it was still waiting outside. But even after I boarded, we had to wait another hour to leave. And yet this is common. The way these buses work is that they’ll just sit there until every seat is full. It makes me wonder if there’s a chance you could never leave at all. Stuck in Qianshan? Is there a worse fate?
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