Zhao Yun Ren had an amazing year for dialects. He was a polyglot and he could do both the North and the South sounds. So he went to New York City with uh, you know, some records in hand. In the same recording studio that Al Jolson was singing jazz songs, he recorded these uh records of uh the Putinhua sounds. So he successfully completed these records that were to be the reference materials for the teachers to teach. When he got back to Beijing, the language officials kind of scratched their heads and they sort of realized, well, wait a minute, it took this linguistic genius to be able to pronounce all these sounds. How in the world are we going to find teachers who are going to teach this to kids? And Zhao Yan Ren, you know, jokingly said, for many years, I was the sole speaker of this special language that was supposed to be the language of 600, 700, 800 million people.
SPEAKER_07Thank you so much, David, for joining us again for another language version of the Geopaths Podcast.
SPEAKER_04My pleasure. There is always something else.
SPEAKER_07Sort of like language learning, right? There's always more to learn. There's always more to talk about.
SPEAKER_04And then when you start forgetting the things you learned, you gotta go back and have new, refresher podcasts. So you you you've got this podcast at the end of time, I think.
SPEAKER_07I've got sure that that's a good thing or a bad thing. I don't know.
SPEAKER_04I don't know.
SPEAKER_07Well, today we're going to exclusively talk about a billion voices, your book. So let's dive in. I love process questions. So we're gonna do a little bit of the who, what, where, why kind of thingies and how, probably. When I do book ones where the author's not there, I usually just read the back cover, but now I can cheat and ask you what what is this book about?
SPEAKER_04Okay, as the title suggests, it is a very compact and truncated, you know, for for reasons, the story of how China went kicking and screaming into the 20th century and 21st century, revising and collating its languages to create a unified speech that everyone in China could speak. And this included not only the spoken language but the written language, which is notoriously complex and hard to you know deal with. And uh all of these, all of these forms, the the forms of writing, the very script itself, the uh the languages that were involved, and the dialects, because there were both languages and dialects, all had to be considered, all had to be understood, and all had to be uh put into into a form that they could become pedagogically available to China. And that turned out to be a very messy, long-term, very frustrating, very often contentious endeavor, and it's one that they aren't really finished with yet. There are still open questions and policies that haven't been quite decided yet. And so that's why I kind of structured the book in terms of battles and skirmishes and wars, because it was written about an era that was very war-torn. You're talking about the fall of the Qing dynasty, the 20th century, uh, when the Republican government was trying to create a viable government, but at the same time fighting the Japanese, containing the warlords that were trying to take over China, and all at the same time trying to figure out how to unify this mass of different cultures and dialects that was China. So I thought that I found this very interesting. And I Penguin had given me the assignment of writing a book on a scholarly topic of some kind, but but making it short, readable, and not for those who were scholars in the field. And that was a quite a challenge, just deciding what to talk about was a challenge, but then also just explaining it all in very easy terms so that everyone could understand it. It was a fun challenge for me because I always find that I actually understand things better when I put them in easy terms for myself. And then you can always make it harder once you get it, but you know, I had to like get down and get back to the basics. And it was great fun. And I think the book kind of is a is a nice brief overview of all that chaos and struggle and linguistic confusion, which results in where we are today.
SPEAKER_07Now you mentioned there are still open questions. Well, what are they?
SPEAKER_04Well, for example, I'll start on one that's very relevant today, which is the status of the mini dialects. When they proposed this idea of coming up with a lingua franca, a poutonwa, a standard speech, a common speech, they had to make many compromises and consider many possibilities about what this speech would be and whether it would be drawn from various dialects, an amalgam of sorts, or whether you would just pick one dialect which would be the prestige standard and force all other dialects, all other regions to speak that standard. But this was primarily for the Han dialects, which are the offshoots of what usually from uh partly Mandarin, but also partly the Han dialects that aren't Mandarin. But there were lots of other languages spoken in China too, such as Tibetan, such as the Uyghur language, such as Mongolian. And the one of the questions was for all of these dialects, does the standard Putinhua standard that everyone will have to speak in media and taught in the schools, does that imply that all these other dialogue dialects and spoken forms will gradually disappear and will no longer be spoken at some point in the future? Is that the goal? Or is the goal to merely provide a standard speech that people can use when these different groups, speech groups, want to communicate each other with each other in a common language? If it's the latter, are is the continued existence and use of these languages and dialects in daily life assured by the Constitution? Or is it just something that we kind of hope will happen and we'll wait and see if they actually kind of die out naturally? So they're not really clear about this policy, and especially with uh with the Uyghur language, which is a controversial issue at this point, right? Do they teach it in the school? Do we continue to teach it? Do we want it to die out? How much culture do we want uh there to be preserved? And a big part of how much culture you you want to promote or or preserve has a lot to do with your attitude towards the language, because the the culture is embedded so much in the language that once you can't teach the language in the school, the culture dies out quite a bit with it. So these are the some of the open questions that not open questions I had, but questions that the government policy still has not decided. They're still a little confused about it.
SPEAKER_07As someone who's about to leave a place I've been in for three years, I'm really starting to see China from a different perspective as I'm starting to get one foot out the door. And I'm very curious as you're describing all of the politics within the language. I know you've been in China a long time, but people probably still refer to you as you know, foreigner and what have you. How far into the politics of language do you get? Do you feel you are rooting for one language versus another? And by language I also mean culture and people or how much do you wrap the language politics around you, or how much do you just put it over there and study it and not get involved in it?
SPEAKER_04Well, since since I don't actually go out in the field and and do you know hands-on work teaching the common language or doing surveys right now, I think there's just some obvious feelings that that linguists, scholars, and then people who are just interested in culture have, which is that we don't like to see the the death of languages and cultures. That's one of the sad things about modernization. Right now, China has a lot of languages and dialects, and of course, they're trying to promote the the common one, the Putinhua, that everyone is required to speak. So that's good. That's that's the aspect that everyone can get behind because everyone needs to be able to speak a common language. It's a handy thing for a large country. The question is, what is the fate of these other dialects? If those dialects, because of the vast use of the common language, start to die out, then that's a little bit sad because that means that it that not only these sounds and these linguistic aspects are dying out, but what with them dies out part of the culture, because so much of the culture is embedded in the language. So the question is how much do we try to maintain those languages while at the same time getting the people able to speak the common language? That's the challenge. And sometimes, in the interest of everyone be speaking the same language, the government will go way overboard and try to actually squelch the other languages, restrict their usage, and force everyone to speak this the common language, which after a generation or two results in the death of the language and part of the culture. And that's a sad thing. So I think that's the in terms of politics, this is the struggle we have. We need to try to give the minority languages the rights that they're given in the Chinese constitution, which is the right to continue and promulgate their own language, their own and their own culture and their own religion. And that would be a good thing to preserve that at the same time as creating linguistic unity, which they want to do.
SPEAKER_07Wow. It is this this could probably be its own episode, if not series, right? I mean, that's very very sticky. But let's let's go back to the origins of the book. Why did you write it? Was it because Penguin, like you said, reached out to you, or had you been thinking of something like this for a while?
SPEAKER_04I had been re researching this topic for a long time just for fun and had written some brief articles touching on those these issues. But Penguin approached me and said, you know, what would you want to write about? And I thought this was a great story that had not been told really in simple form in one book. And I thought it was a challenge and it would be fun, and so and so I did it. And in the process of doing it, I actually uncovered a lot more uninteresting facts, mostly about the interesting people that are involved in these language wars, who were very, very uh interesting and sometimes very cantankerous and uh and uh you know irritating scholars who had had strong opinions about things. So there were some battles that took place.
SPEAKER_07Were there any people that you weren't aware of that you found out in researching and writing this?
SPEAKER_04I wasn't too much aware of some of the May 4th people that I just heard their names, but uh one of the people who was in charge of the language conference that they held in 1913 to unify this the the uh pronunciation, one of the heads of that conference was a guy named Wu Jir Huei, who is a fascinating person that I didn't realize he was such a curmudgeon, such a firebrand with such strong opinions and such a foul mouth. I mean, if he didn't like something, he would curse them out in language that would make Louis C.K. blush. So that was fun actually to find that these were not just abstract academic issues. These people really cared about them.
SPEAKER_07Well, okay, wait, wait, wait, let's backtrack. How did you find out that he had that kind of foul mouth? Like what kind of documentation or things did you find that showed that?
SPEAKER_04There would be some mention or brief quotes or something here and there, but there but there's all sorts of letters and stuff that are not translated that scholars will translate. So I found a few quotes in some of the books on Hu Tonghua that I was reading. But a friend of mine, Chris Ray, had was writing his book about humor and uh satire and comedy during the Republican era, during the 20s and 30s. And Wu Jur Huey was a writer and um also a sort of a polemicist uh that was that had to do with publications, and and he did some study and and was able to reproduce and translate some of his most outrageous quotes. And I went, oh, these fit right into this portrait I'm trying to paint of him, and so I just borrowed those and put them in my book. We're all looking at the same things. I think the the interest of this for historians is that you had all of these wars going on and skirmishes about power, about uh governance, who was going to be the next leader of China, who was going to defeat the Japanese, what to do about the warlords. And at the same time, there were all these language battles going on but between the same people. But language was one of the issues that they had to to wage war about. It's so what I had fun doing was overlaying the these language wars over the pathway or the trajectory of the actual physical battles that were being waged.
SPEAKER_07It's quite interesting. And you did make it very accessible for folks. I mean, I must say, the the f I've touched a few different things throughout the the three years of trying to learn Mandarin and a lot of the history stuff just kind of I I tune out pretty quickly, but the way that you blended the the people really, really stuck out the people and their emotions attached to the language and the politics and the country and just all of that together. And there are funny bits. I mean, I have a permanent tweet on my social media planner for that. I think you saw it the first time I tweeted it. For example, on page 47 of the book, we say that Chinese is phonetic in the way that sex is a road. Technically true, but in practice, not the most salient thing about it. And that it's not something that I expected to read in a book about the the struggles with the Chinese language. So there's moments like that that are really, really, really nice to read. When you started to write when you pitched it to Penguin and they or they contacted you, you came up with the specific idea. Who did you envision reading this?
SPEAKER_04I I really did try to make it accessible. I tried to make uh uh explain even the the complications of how characters do express sounds and these things, which is really hard to explain. But I envisioned someone who had maybe tried to learn Chinese or did know some Chinese or had struggled and failed and gave up Chinese, or who just had a friend or a son or a father or a sister that was learning Chinese and kind of knew about it and just wanted to know what all the fuss was about. Why was it so hard? Why was it so tricky to explain all these issues? And I thought Penguin took this as a challenge that we should pre-produce these books that actually would express and communicate these important ideas in a in a simple way that in a in a size that you could read on a plane trip. So it was a big challenge because I had to throw away a lot of stuff. Yeah, I I envisioned the people that you know wanted to know more about this. But what I found out when people started reading it and commenting on it was actually even people who are experts in Chinese or people who have taught Chinese or people who are Chinese and have been speaking it their whole lives, in fact didn't know much of this material. I think the most surprise I got from was native Chinese speakers who said, I had no idea that Putonghua was a kind of a manufactured mashup of different different dials. I said, No idea. And uh especially the parts in the book where Chairman Mao and Lu Xun and other people advocated actually eradicating Chinese characters altogether, something that's not in their textbooks. And I had Chinese people say, Where did you get that? I don't believe that. No, Mao Mao Zong would not say he was going to abolish characters. That's come on, you foreigners come up with the most nonsense. Fake news. I said, nope, nope, nope, look it up. So that's why I was very careful to quote all of those directly rather than just allude to them, because they said it. And I think that's that's interesting that that people go back and like rethink the whole um aspect of the language and they see it in a different light.
SPEAKER_07Who do you think ended up reading the book more from the contact that you've had with readers? People who grew up with the language or people who learned it or were curious about it later on?
SPEAKER_04I think a lot of people read it uh who are just who are linguistically inclined and somewhat interested in China politically or linguistically, and found it easy to understand some issues that they would not normally have been able to delve into because they would have had to read big, thick books on the subject. It was actually reviewed in The Economist and a very good review, too. And the obviously the root reviewer was not in a trained linguist, but but but he or she, because we don't know who wrote it, was just taken by the idea of this large country that had this language problem and saw parallels between other languages, other countries like India and even Europe in some cases, and this struggle to patch together a common language from all the other dialects. I think probably the some of the people who appreciated the most were not necessarily language learners, but people who are really interested in the dynamics, the political implications of language learning. It was also reviewed in the China Daily, and I know a lot of Chinese people have read it and even have written blogs about it, sometimes criticizing it. So yeah, I think it's a mixed bag, but the the main thing, my students, for example, people learning Chinese, find it a little bit like my article about why Chinese is so damn hard, that it sort of vindicates some of their long-standing doubts about this you know, this agenda of learning Chinese. They tell me things like, I never really understood why it is that these that the characters are so hard for me to remember and learn, and why they had to be written this way, and why they didn't just adopt, you know, a system of an alphabetic system. And now I I sort of get how hard it was to do that and why they compromise and why they did this. So I think for a lot of people it just made them feel I mean, it's a way of of kind of understanding why we have to go through all this complexity. And you find out they didn't have much other choice. There was just constrained by the history, the the inertia of the language, and other things. And so Chinese is what it is, but it is for a reason, and now people kind of know about that.
SPEAKER_07I we've talked about it before. Actually, it comes up in almost every episode on the language show, is the difference between the spoken language and the written language.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_07It really, really feels like two different languages when you're learning it.
SPEAKER_04To me, I think of the book also as the overall story of how China struggled mightily at the end of the Qing dynasty in the 20th century to pull its language from the written page to a living spoken language. Because so much of the written language was not meant to be, what was not conducive, it was not spoken, it was not colloquial, it was not meant to be. It was uh the the the spoken language was not merely a record of the written language, and the written, I mean the written language was not merely a record of the spoken language, like it is with most other languages. And the written language was by and large incomprehensible to most speakers of the ordinary language. Their task, and the May Fourth movement did this, was to pull all of that, those linguistic tendencies and and structures into something that could that would serve the ordinary people as a living language and not an elite sort of tool that only scholarly bookworms could use. That was a tough thing to do because there was a lot of animosity toward that. People thought that this literary language should go on forever because it was so beautiful and it was it was so complex. But the the May 4th movements and the people who were advocating language reform were saying, you know, Wen Yan is all well and good, and all these beautiful calligraphy characters are all well and good, but we need to get the average people into a stage of literacy so that they can actually function as civilized human beings in a kind in a culture. And to do that, we've got to radically change it so that language is a tool for communication and not a museum piece, which is which which it had been. And that was a huge struggle, and that's what I think comes across in the book.
SPEAKER_02At every step of the way they had to make lots and lots of effort to change people's minds.com, we believe if you can play cards, you can learn foreign languages. We offer a variety of games for all ages and skill levels that will be perfect for your next study session, game night, or language club. We even offer free shipping to any location worldwide. What's more, you can get a special introductory price on your first game. Just enter the coupon code Geopats Podcast when you check out at languagecardgames.com. Since 2016, we've been producing addicting card games that function kind of like a Trojan horse for language learning. If you or someone you know likes to play card games, likes to learn languages, or both, this would be the greatest thing for them. If you've ever thought that learning languages is a struggle, or if you've just been looking for something to enrich your daily practice, rest assured we've got something for you. We've incorporated a grand mixture of easy and advanced language and linguistics concepts into our games so that as you play, you learn and grow. What could be better than that? Thanks for listening, and now let's get back to this week's episode.
SPEAKER_07In a lot of language learning resources for beginning Mandarin Chinese language understanding, people keep saying, oh, you know, Putong Hua is based on the Beijing dialect, blah blah blah blah blah blah. Isn't that really true?
SPEAKER_04Uh yeah, well, it is true. No, it's true. The what we call putung hwa is sometimes lazily just lumped in with Mandarin or with uh Guoyu or these sorts of things. The reason that we have this problem is that when the these language committees met for the first time, they wanted to come up with a common language, and rather than just choose a dialect that already existed, they decided that they should pick and choose some of what they thought were the best sort of elevated, the more sophisticated uh forms, speech forms and beautiful sounds that were parts of several different languages from the north and south. So they came up with a sort of a Frankenstein language that included some of the northern dialect and some of the sounds from the southern dialect, the Ruchung. So they created this language that no one ever spoke, and they said this is going to be our common language. It's a compromise between the north and the south, and now it's gonna be our natural language, and we have to now we have to teach it. So they got someone to make phonograph records so they would have the phonetics on record so the teachers could listen to that and teach it to the students. And it proved to be so difficult that the first guy they had to do it couldn't do it because he couldn't do the southern sounds very well. So they finally got a linguistic genius, Zhao Yan Ren, who had an amazing year for dialects. It was a polyglot, and he could do both the north and the south sounds. So he went to New York City with uh you know some records in hand, and and in the same recording studio that Al Jolson was singing jazz songs, he recorded these uh records of uh the Putonghua sounds, the 6,500 syllables of the of the language, and he could do it. He was a a polymath and a translator. He's the one who translated Alice in Wonderland into Chinese and through the looking glass, and and he was uh translator for Bertrand Russell and John Dewey and so forth. So he was a genius. So he successfully completed these records that were to be the reference materials for the teachers to teach the sounds of the language. When he got back to Beijing and had these records, the language officials kind of scratched their heads and they sort of realized, well, wait a minute, it took this linguistic genius to be able to pronounce all these sounds, but how in the world are we going to find teachers who are going to teach this to kids? And what to say that they can even learn it, because this is not an existing language, and they're going to have to learn, they're going to have to have special teachers who can who can speak this language, and we would need hundreds, tens of millions of them, perhaps. And here is here we only have one. So how could they teach all of China with one speaker? And Zhao Yan Ren, you know, jokingly said for many years I was the sole speaker of this special language that was supposed to be the language of 600, 700, 800 million people, and he was the only one who could speak it. What a taste. And of course, this goes to show that that people were kind of kind of stabbing in the dark. They had no idea what they were doing. They had no really good solid knowledge of linguistics and how to go about doing this thing. It seemed reasonable at the time, but so in the end, what they did was they gave that up sensibly. They said, I guess we better do the obvious thing, which to just choose a language and a and a dialect that already exists, and just teach them that, because that way you have lots of native speakers. So they said, All right, we'll we'll choose the the phonetics of Beijing dialect, but we tamper with it a little bit and we leave out some of the sort of Beijingisms of the very idiomatic uh sorts of uh idioms and things, clean it up a bit, incorporate the more sophisticated and broad vocabulary of the northern of the northern dialects, the Mandarin dialects in general, and the and these sort of qualities of vernacular literature, which are supposed to be the epitome of of this Mandarin speech. We plunk all those together into a another Frankensteinian thing, and then that will be Puton Hua. So it's it's still a kind of a hodgepodge of compromises of this and that, but at least the phonetics are basically based on on Beijing Hua, so there we don't have to worry about that anymore. So, yes, people would people will say, isn't Putong Hua just Beijing Hua? Well, yes and no, it is. Beijingers can understand somebody who's saying speaking putonhua, but it's not exactly the same language. There are words and phrases that are not in Putonghua that Beijingers say all the time.
SPEAKER_07Is there a lot of stuff written on Zhao Yang Ren? Because he sounds like a really fascinating character.
SPEAKER_04He is. He is a fascinating character. There aren't that many books about him. He his own books are still uh delightful to read because they're linguistics textbooks, but they're written in a very accessible style. There are articles about him, he has autobiographical uh writings, but no, he deserves. In fact, you've given me a good idea for a book. Hurry. I think I should write John Edman's biography. That would that would be very fun to be.
SPEAKER_07F-U-C-C-I-O is how to write my last name in case you put it in the dedicate the book to you.
SPEAKER_04You didn't be my first reader, but no, I I think that would be I think that would that would be a very, very good book, and I I'm the one to write it. I should do that.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, I think you should. That would be amazing. I remember reading that part of the book, and it really just so many of the characters that you brought, not characters, see, that's the thing. So many of the people that you brought out in talking about the struggles with the language really, really, really were like people in the room with me while I was reading it. And that's not easy to do when you talk about politics and language. It's easy to get caught up in the visualness of the language.
SPEAKER_04That's one thing. I wanted to introduce the joys of the book was to introduce these people because they were well, they were right. Uh, like uh Joe Yo Guang, who's the father of opinion, you know. He was a banker. I mean, he was a capitalist. Yeah, he was a banker, he wore rich clothes, he was taking uh ocean trips, uh, you know, with the Queen of England and Paris. And because he had studied economics, the the party wanted him to come back and and sort of be on the team as an economics advisor. And uh he wasn't even a communist party member, but they really brought him back. So now he was back in Beijing. And then they he because he was sort of an amateur linguist, they wanted him to do this pinion, devise the pinion method. And I love the quote from him. He said, uh, he he wasn't a professor of linguistics or anything. He said, but I can do that, but I'm an amateur. And Joe and I told him, said, Ah, we're all amateurs, none of us know what we're doing.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, I have tagged on page 75 where I believe it was him who said, We spent three years developing pinion. People made fun of us, joking that it had taken us so long to deal with just 26 letters. I love that. I was like, Yeah, wow. It's just amazing. It's like we learn this stuff, you know, and then you go, you don't necessarily, as you're kind of, you know, experiencing the language itself and trying to grapple with the different aspects of it, you don't necessarily think of the history of it. So I think this is like a beautiful companion that should be like a prerequisite for starting to learn Chinese.
SPEAKER_04Well, for those struggling with the language that have noticed that these so-called Biaoin sections of the characters, you know, there's one that's supposed to give a radical, a semantic meaning, and there's another that usually will give the sound, but it's never reliable. It gives you kind of close to the sound, the tone's not right, and usually the phonemes are not quite correct. I, for one, was very frustrated when I first started learning things. What are these sound components are so unreliable and sometimes even misleading? Why is that? It just was so maddening that they that we didn't have a real reliable way of guessing what the sounds of the characters were. And this book, for those who are worried about that or wondering about that, this book explains why that's the case. Why you have so many things that are the actual phonetic component, but they don't really function that way. Right. Because they don't the sounds aren't close enough to be reliable as a hint. And that's one of the frustrating unscientific aspects of Chinese script that makes you want to tear your hair out, your hair out, your hair out, your hair out. Explains that, you know, don't tear your hair out. Your hair is valuable. This was for a reason. And once you know, you can use you can use what you can use and throw away what doesn't work.
SPEAKER_07I imagine people ask you questions about the book, and we've already been over part of that. But what do you wish people would ask you that they never do?
SPEAKER_04I'm sort of interested in the future of these dialects, and I at the end of the book, I'm I speculate about it. And I think I have some pretty good ideas about what these dialects are going to look like in the next hundred years, maybe. Some of them are going to die out. I think some of them will will continue to exist. And I think there that some of them will link together to co create kind of new dialects. I didn't get into it too too much in the book, but it's it's pretty clear that a dialect like Cantonese is not going to go away anytime soon. Whereas a dialect like some forms of Hebei dialects are already dying out because kids watch TV and they just quit speaking it. But I think that that people don't sort of realize that this is an ongoing problem. Some talk dialects are gonna die out, just like maybe the Brooklyn accent's gonna die out and all sorts of things. Blasphemy. Yes, that's I sort of wish more people would do would actually study that or take my book as a jumping off point and try to think a little bit about which dialects are are surviving and which ones are likely to survive and what it would mean if they were to die out. Of course, sometimes it's just uh an accent that's dying out, and but in other cases, like Cantonese, it's another language that dies out. If Texas people quit talking like this and one day and they watch loud TV and stuff, and then they start typing like an NPR announcer, that'd be sad, but but it wouldn't be a loss of a language, it'd be the loss of a kind of a you know a sort of interesting accent that that was a had cultural aspects. But I mean, if you lose the difference between, you know, Spanish and French, that's a whole culture that's gone. And Cantonese has a whole rich culture associated with it. And when the language's gone, the opera's gone, the the books are gone, the stories and and uh whatever, legends even and stuff that are associated with the language are lost.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_04I have a regret about the book, which is that some people said, I don't like the way this book kind of sides with Chairman Mao and some of the other people who were wanting to eradicate the characters. The author seems to wish the characters had gone away, and he reveals that he actually always hated them and is sad that that the characters weren't abolished when then when Mao had the chance to do it, and this kind of thing. I think that's my fault because I I sort of I sort of put myself into the historical context a little bit too much. But I wish I had added something in there that said my my feeling about the characters now is that in fact they don't need to be eradicated because we have these new technological devices. People don't need to learn to write them, every single one, like they used to. The characters are really quite beautiful and rich and semantically and semiotically interesting. It would be cool if they can stay around. They're easier to read than they are to write. Some studies even say that Chinese readers can read them quicker than readers of alphabetic systems. So I'm not against the Chinese characters. I don't want to eradicate them, but I do say that we should be very careful how we teach them, because if you don't teach it in the right way, it can be very slow and can keep students from getting a mastery of the spoken language. If I made that all clear, it would be a whole nother chapter of the book. But I just want to make people clear that my comments about the Chinese language was that at the time when they were advocating elimination of the caregivers, that was a very reasonable path to take because we did not yet have computers, we did not yet have digital tools, and it was a real threat to literacy. And they were very concerned in a patriotic way of making China a stronger country, and that meant a literate pop populace. And then that context, in the May May 4th context and in the Chairman Mao context, it was not only a good idea, it was probably something that was inevitable if they wanted to create a literate society at that time. But times have changed, and now we really don't need to consider such a drastic move.
SPEAKER_07I'm sure you've heard these purists that say, Well, if you can't write the characters, you don't know it.
SPEAKER_06Right.
SPEAKER_07So I mean, I agree with you, it's a lot easier for me to type I do the pinion input when I type in the language and then I pick the character. But a lot of people, you know, fall on the side of, well, if but if you can't write it with no help at all, then you really don't know it, and then it's not real, like you don't you aren't actually fluent in the language.
SPEAKER_04That way of thinking gives everybody an inferiority complex. Right. And it makes me it makes me and everybody want to give up because oh my god, if I have to really remember how to write all these characters, then I'll never really learn learn them, you know, quote unquote learn them. But the point is when you see so many Chinese people who also can't write them.
SPEAKER_07Struggle, yeah.
SPEAKER_04And yet they can read them and still use them in everyday life, you think maybe this is a special case where this is a language where you really don't need to learn to read, write, and speak equally. It may be that speaking is the main thing, reading is the way that you re get the the sounds and the structures of speech. Writing by hand is a s is no longer a necessary or essential skill. It just isn't. It's just like doing logarithms. You don't have to learn to use a slide rule now. You just have a calculator that will do the logarithms. So now you don't really need to get a pen and pencil and write the thing down. You just need to get it off the page and read it.
SPEAKER_07How do you write in Chinese? What input do you use on your phone?
SPEAKER_04Because I'm a weird guy who wants to maintain my ability to write, I usually try, I put it on the pad uh writer mode, and I try to write by hand. And then, of course, every time I do that, I say, Oh darn, what is a character? So I have to go back to pinion and entered in pinion and then suddenly I remember it right. I'm someone who tries to make my daily text messaging reinforce my writing. And in the course of it, I realize I'm forgetting some really, really common characters that I knew solidly 10 years ago.
SPEAKER_07I do that input on Pleco just for fun to try to guess the stroke order, but I don't do it when I'm texting someone because I just need to get meaning across and I'm very, very slow. Does uh stroke order count when you're doing that kind of input?
SPEAKER_04The way the uh input works now, the way the the technology is, you don't have to do the right stroke order. Sometimes if you do it completely wrong, it it'll misinterpret the what the character and come up with garbage.
SPEAKER_06Sure.
SPEAKER_04But but you but there is a there is a correct stroke order. Even the Chinese don't always get it right because there are these idiosyncratic ways they were right. But as long as the basic form is correct on the screen, the computer can recognize that and it will pop up the right one. But if you're writing it by it with a writing brush in a calligraphy class, there is a right and a wrong stroke order. And if you don't do the right stroke order, it won't look right. And your teacher will slap you on the wrist uh with a rip with a bamboo rod.
SPEAKER_07This sounds like a personal story. Has this happened to you? I have dreams of of eventually getting to a calligraphy class. It's going to happen, even if it's in a different country. I'm going to end up in a class with a giant brush and somebody slapping my wrist. Because I I think I think the script is beautiful. It's frustrating, but I think it's absolutely beautiful. And I like there's sort of a meditativeness to the to the flow of it, whereas I think the Latin letters are pretty darn dull. Let's just say.
SPEAKER_04I agree. That's why I got into Chinese, and I think a lot of people borners did too. They just the characters are so fascinating. You you want to learn more about them, and then you of course that it's a you learn as much as you can, and you you find that, gee, I could do my whole life doing this, and so you end up doing that.
SPEAKER_07Right. I yeah, I spent a good few months just playing with the radicals and the meaning and those those dang historical books that take the different radicals and go into their meanings and and how the character changed over time. Man, that is a rabbit hole to prevent you from learning the language like no other. I was like, wait, I still don't know how to say eat or drink. Wait, this is a flaw. This is a flaw. I have to stop.
SPEAKER_06Right, right, right.
SPEAKER_00Are you learning Chinese but finding it hard to understand what everyday people are talking about? I've been there.
SPEAKER_01Hi, I'm Josh Lugden Davis, host of the Mandarin Sling Guide Podcast. When I started teaching myself Chinese ten years ago, I was frustrated by how all of the best and most interesting Chinese words were not in my textbook. That's why I made a Mandarin Sling Guide. Each week I host different Chinese guests from different walks of life to talk not only about the sling they use in their lives and work, but also about their personal stories. I've talked with a business leader, a famous podcaster, and a queer filmmaker and activist among others. I've learned so much from doing the show, and I hope that you can come and learn with me. Just search Mandarin's Slunning Guide wherever podcasts are found. Mandarin's Slunning Guide, MSG, the Chinese learning podcast that tastes great and probably isn't all that bad for you. See you there.
SPEAKER_04Start to give you the feeling that that you you have to keep struggling all day with the written language and go through a period before you can begin to address the spoken language. Or if you feel like the ratio seems to be like 70% writing characters and reading characters and only 10% speaking, there's something wrong with your language class because it should be the other way around. You should be speaking from the beginning, you should be speaking as much as possible, you should be learning in tones, structures, idioms alongside the writing, but it should not be driven by the writing, which I have to say, in most classes, the way they teach Chinese in China, and the kind of classes my daughter went through, really much more than 50, 60, 70% of the emphasis of the whole class is on reading and writing those characters. Right. The ten shies and everything like that takes up most of their time. And they'll take up 80% of a class period writing and like reading them off the page, and then maybe just just reading by rote some of the some of the sentences and never uh having dialogues, using sentences, using words in different uh semantic contexts. None of that. But they say, well, once you learn all these characters and learn enough of them, then you'll be able to speak and write. Nope. You'll just know those characters and how to write them. You still won't be able to speak and write. Yeah. Because you you won't know the language. The language is the spoken language. So that's my advice to people. Don't let them fool you that China is mostly a writing system, it's a spoken language.
SPEAKER_07It is both. But most people who are learning it as teenagers and adults are going to mostly be using it to speak. So yes, on that in that regard, absolutely. But honestly, it drove me crazy because I I tried to find classes and tutors and things, and I just kept hitting wall after wall. And I was like, never mind, I'll go to stuff online at home. Because as an ex-language teacher, it was very easy to understand what they were doing. They were taking how they taught children who can't even hold a pencil yet. So of course you're going to go slower and teach them the characters and kind of acculturate them in that way. So they teach adults like they teach children, but we don't have that kind of time. We don't have four or five years of input before we sit in front of them. Like, you know what I mean? It just they just copied and pasted what they did with children with adults, and they're still doing that in language classes now. And it just doesn't work. It just doesn't work for most people. Now, some people just trudge through because they're like, Well, I don't know how else to do it, and they and they trudge through, but a lot of people drop out because it's just so dull. Our brains don't go that slow. It's adults. We need we need it to make sense, we need it to be functional, we need it to, you know, be more real than just doing that character a hundred times.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, you're exactly right. That's the problem.
SPEAKER_07It's changing how that's taught. I mean, education, you know this. I don't have to tell you this, but for the listeners, education changes slower than almost anything else. So yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Even in the private language schools, yeah.
SPEAKER_04I think with Chinese, some of the smarter students that I know, they they soon realize what you were just describing, and and they get out of it and they start doing it on their own. Yeah. Because now they have digital tools and their their videos online and things that they say, I just I'm so impatient with this, I'm gonna learn it on my own. Yeah. And it's not the stage where actually you can do that. Before I don't think it was even possible. But now if you're a smart learner and you're you're dedicated, you can you can learn on your own.
SPEAKER_07You can, you can.
SPEAKER_04You need other people and friends to you know to help you, but you don't need a standard classroom situation.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, and to use the language once you get to the point where you can produce stuff, you definitely do need other people. But there's a lot of content out there. And ironically, I think HSK prep materials are actually some of the better ones, which is just so frustrating. Test materials should not be the best language learning materials. They are. It just doesn't make sense. But yeah, that's a whole other tangent. Do you have a favorite part of the book?
SPEAKER_04The the part that I that I really enjoy and I wish I could write more about is uh Chinese language on the internet, because there's a lot of interesting stuff about that. But this was not a book about the internet, so I had to sort of play that down and just give hints of what it was like. But yeah, that the internet, I could write a different book on just Chinese Chinese languages.
SPEAKER_07Okay, are you I'm sure you are, but have you seen the book uh Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch? No, it's with English, not with Chinese, but she does uh it's all about internet English and how it's changed and very non-judgy, just observational stuff and with tons of really fun examples. I love looking at how the internet changes languages. And so if you did the Chinese equivalent to that, that would be amazing.
SPEAKER_06That's very interesting.
SPEAKER_07Because internet and she's very active on social media and her and she co-hosts a podcast called Lingualism, where they dig into different aspects of the language. But the podcast is not specifically the internet, but because internet the book is. So yeah, very, very cool.
SPEAKER_04That sounds right, I'll check it out.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then write the Chinese version of it so the rest of us can read it in English. So you have a lot of writing to do after this now. You're just gonna have to join all your devices.
SPEAKER_04Thanks a lot, Stephen.
SPEAKER_07Writing. Yeah, yeah, there you go.
SPEAKER_04I have five more. Okay.
SPEAKER_07This is what I do. I don't actually do anything, I just talk other people into doing the things I would like to be to do. Yeah, this is my goal in life.
SPEAKER_05What a dream, can't you see? What a lazy life you leave. When you sleep all day long, when you know you're doing wrong. What success, ain't gas, always happy, do you do less, and excuse every day. Now you're gonna go ahead. And you can tell us what you learn, kill a home, you figure it out For you I'm not getting served I'm really hoping What your problem won't you only get what you deserve Come on now Does the world ever change? Does it ever really grow? Or does it just turn around and remain? Always in the state squaw Black and white, so uptight, always looking for a fight. Seeing red, lose your head like a stick of dynamite. Cus your gauge, set on rage, demonstrate your mental age. Just don't do some drool like a bully out of school. Oh yeah, well I hope you figure it out. Then for you wind up getting burned. And I hope you figure it out. And you can tell us what you learn. Yeah, well I hope you figure it out. For you wind up getting yourself. I really hope you figure out. But your problem won't. You'll only get what you deserve.
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