Language, wine, and the Sichuan accent

Our Chinese friends here tend to have really strange schedules – classes in the mornings, afternoons and evenings – and often a really odd mix of required courses and electives. Physical education is mandatory for university students in China, as is Marxist theory, no matter what your major is. The electives available are pretty interesting, though, and yesterday I had the opportunity to sit in on one of Benson’s classes all about the art, science, and culture of wine (葡萄酒, pú tao jiǔ).

The lecture room was only about a quarter full, and we managed to sneak in and fold ourselves into one of the rows of tiny seats near the back without getting too many stares. The teacher was chattering animatedly into a headset about the various features and technicalities of wine corks, his voice piped out of the speakers installed around the room. I noticed right away that he had a bit of the local accent, which means, among other things, he pronounced a standard Mandarin “sh” sound as an “s,” a “zh” sound as “dz,” the “r” kind of sounded like a “z,” and his tones were a bit different.

For the first few minutes of class I was pretty lost and could only pick out the odd word or phrase, but I just sat back and relaxed into it and found that the less I strained myself to grasp every word, the more I understood. It’s a bit of a “forest for the trees” phenomenon. The teacher elaborated on barrels, bottles, grape varieties, stemware, and, for reasons not fully apparent, Marilyn Monroe, and by the end of the two-hour lecture I was able to make sense of most of what he said, even when it included some unfamiliar words. I was even able to decipher the meaning of some of those familiar words from the context alone, without even checking a dictionary, and that’s harder than it sounds. Listening comprehension has been one of my biggest obstacles here; while my spoken Chinese is good enough that I generally have no trouble communicating, I often don’t understand what I hear, particularly when it’s addressed directly to me. I tend to get flustered and distracted and won’t understand even familiar words and phrases. It certainly doesn’t help that people often sound like they’re yelling when they talk to you here – I always think they’re angry at me and start listening for a totally different set of words.

Anyway, the class was educational on two levels and I’m stoked to keep going. Now I'm scanning around for more classes to infiltrate. Benson's also learning French (taught by the same Chinese guy who taught the wine class), and I bet that would be a pretty interesting class to check out. Although I studied French from elementary school through high school, it's all completely atrophied from underuse now. Relearning my second language via my third language would allow me to set up a whole new two-way mnemonics system for both languages and would be one hell of an intense brain workout. I've also been invited by one of the teachers here to sit in on her Russian class, which would be entirely in Russian as she speaks no Chinese and only basic English. Not particularly helpful to my Chinese studies, but I've always loved the sound of Russian, so why not?

Chinese word of the day:
语言
yǔ yán
Language