The Chinese Language (and Food, of course)

My afternoon class was bumped today, so I decided after my morning class to walk home and see what I could find.  It's a fairly log walk (about an hour and a half) but I didn't have anything else to do.  I happened to come across this food court:

I decided to test out my Chinese on a small noodle shop.  I told the lady I couldn't read the menu and could she recommend something for me, but then she just pointed up at her menu and said something really quickly.  I tried to decode as much as I could and ended up ordering "三和一面" (something like "3 in 1 noodles" I guess). There were a bunch of noodle dishes on the menu and this was the most expensive (8 RMB vs 7 RMB) so I figured it would be some kind of combo dish.

Here is the lady at work, check out all the delicious ingredients:

And here is the finished product.  Pretty much as expected, it came in a slightly larger bowl than the other dishes:

For an afternoon snack (after I got home and had a nap ... I must be on holiday or something) I decided to finally try Chinese wine.  I went to one of the patios on Bar Street and ordered a glass of Great Wall Red with a small plate of dried plums (i.e. raisins):

The wine was served chilled and it wasn't too bad!   It's not going to take the world market by storm, but I think it would go pretty well with the spicy beef I had at this same restaurant awhile back.  I think I'll return later and give the combo a try.

For dinner I decided to be *really* adventurous and try the chicken burger at my hostel, with a margarita.  How Chinese can you get??

Not a bad life, eh?  Learn some Chinese, nap, eat and drink.

(For comparison - breakfast 25 RMB; lunch noodles with a bottle of water 10 RMB; wine with raisins 65 RMB; chicken burger with margarita 68 RMB.  Guess which meal was purchased outside the "tourist zone"?  Also guess which had the most flavour?)

Speaking of learning Chinese, as you know (and would expect) despite all my lessons and hard work I'm having  lot of trouble with the Chinese Language.  I can barely pick out the odd word when someone is talking to me, and often I have a hard time communicating simple words.  (I don't expect it will ever improve.  I was talking to one of the other students this morning, who has been studying on and off for 4 years. I asked him if he's gotten to the point yet that he can actually communicate with people and he said no, he's still just trying to pick out the odd word for context.)

Of course every Chinese person I've talked to can't understand the difficulty.  "What's the problem?  The grammar is so easy!"  And it is, to a point.  You don't conjugate verbs, and there are relatively few grammar constructs (compared to English for example), but on the other hand the grammar rules that they *do* have are much more rigid.  If you get the word order wrong your sentence quickly becomes nonsensical, unlike in English where you can still get the gist.

(When I was hanging out with my Chinese friends at the Shaolin Temple, I mentioned  I bought some commemorative stamps, and one of the girls asked "How much did you buy for?"  (Or something like that.)  I said a hundred kuai, and then the young guy Brian got all incensed.  "How did you understand that???  She said it completely wrong," and etc.  But in English you can understand people when they say things completely wrong.  Not so Chinese.)

And there are many many many things in Chinese that are much much much more difficult, so thank heavens for un-conjugated verbs!

To start with, in English you have to earn 26 letters, and then some combinations that make different sounds (sh, th, tion, etc).  There are lots of exceptions, but once you've learned the rules you can sight read, and take a pretty good guess at how things might be spelled.

Not so Chinese!  There are 10's of thousands of characters.  The general feeling is you need to know at least 3000 to be considered "literate", along with the various word combinations that these 3000 make up.  And there are no rules, simple or otherwise, to help you guess at the sound of a character you don't know, or the characters representing a new word.  They have to be learned 1 by 1 and memorized.  (There are some conventions, like the radical might give you a clue to the meaning, and another part of the character might give you a hint to the sound, but these are just aids that can help in memorization, not rules you can use to help sightread a piece of unfamiliar text.)

The pronunciation is another whole other matter.  In addition to Mandarin's 4 "tones" (at least there are only 4; Cantonese has 9 tones) the pronunciation itself is very different from English.  There are 2 "sh" sounds (in pinyin "sh" and "x"), 2 "ch" sounds (pinyin "ch" and "q") and so forth.  For the different sounds you hold your tongue, lips etc in different positions, and some sounds are "aspirated" and some not. Not only does this make the language difficult for the English speaker to pronounce, it makes it MUCH more difficult to comprehend.

(One of my teachers is focusing on my pronunciation, so I'm hoping I will soon be able to differentiate "sh" from "sh", and "ch" from "ch".  Right now our conversation is going something like this:

"Che"
"No, che"
"Che"
"No"
"Che"
"Right!"
"Ok, Che"
"No, wrong"
Etc.

Wish me luck!  My tongue is exhausted!)