Another week...

...another holiday! Tomorrow marks the beginning of Chinese National Week (国庆节, Guóqìngjié) and once again I find myself turned loose in Chongqing with new friends, plenty of cash, and no obligations. Not only that – my birthday is this weekend! Plans are materializing and the week looks promising. One of the best things about my situation here is that even when I’m out socializing, shopping, or just vegging out in front of the TV, I’m still learning Chinese. I’ve found a way to turn partying into studying. Actually, the other foreign students here all tell me you do about 80% of your learning outside of the classroom. Pretty smart, huh?

I’ve discovered that, aside from actually going out and conversing in Chinese, watching kids’ shows and soap operas on TV is one of the best ways to improve your listening comprehension. That’s the beauty of foreign-language TV and movies – even the trashiest talk show can be educational. My roommate follows several of the corny Asian soaps (known here as “dramas”), but I’m really into the kids’ shows. The Chinese kids’ shows are delightfully strange – I watched one last night that appeared to be a traditional folk story acted out by creepy stop-animated puppets – but I also get a huge kick out of watching the Chinese-dubbed versions of Spiderman and Digimon. Nearly all the TV shows also have Chinese subtitles, too, so I can practice my reading at the same time. I still haven’t gone to check it out, but there’s a theatre (电影院, diànying yuàn) on campus where you can watch Chinese and Chinese-dubbed Western movies for just three or four yuan, or about 50 to 70 cents. Sounds like a good way to pass the rainy winter evenings. My snazzy new cellphone also has FM radio, so I listen to Chinese talk radio while I do my homework (作业, zuòyè) and it gets easier and easier to follow along.

For a different challenge, I like reading kids’ books. Well, more like translating, because I never seem to know enough of the content to just sit down and read them. I always have to look up words in a dictionary, untangle a few grammar structures, and make some notes. Occasionally you can find a book written in both Pinyin (the Romanized phonetic transcription of Chinese) and characters (汉字, Hànzì), but the ones without Pinyin are much harder because if you run into a new character you have to look it up twice – once to find out what the pronunciation is and then to find the meaning. I also often run into words I know used in a combination or grammatical context I’m not familiar with, so even if a passage looks simple at first glance I’ll probably still have to struggle to understand it. It’s like decoding a secret message. Chinese is easier to learn than people think it is, but it’s still damn difficult sometimes.

Socializing in Chinese is by far the best way to practice. All the Chinese students here speak some English, which makes it really easy to lapse into English every time I run into a word or concept I can’t express in Chinese, but I’m doing it less and less. One thing I’m thrilled about is that I’m starting to get to that point where, to at least some extent, I’m thinking in Chinese. People here will often address me in English, but more and more I find myself automatically responding in Chinese and completely bypassing English. Lots of the Chinese people I talk to want to practice their English, too, so I’ve gotten into the habit of doing a language exchange; I speak Chinese to them while they speak to me in English. My limited vocabulary (词汇, cíhuì) can be extremely frustrating, and when I first got here I despaired at the amount of Chinese I didn’t know, but in the deluge of new words I hear every day I manage to retain a few. I was told by one of my Chinese friends last night that my Chinese has improved, so if I can make a noticeable improvement in three weeks I must be doing something right.

Chinese lesson of the day:
我学习汉语
Wǒ xuéxí Hànyǔ
I study Chinese