So language is the center of everything I do. I I for various reasons I'm now using Chinese to teach the foreign students and using English to teach the Chinese students.
SPEAKER_10All right. Welcome to the Geopaths Podcast where we scratch your cultural curiosity it with many different themed shows. I'm delighted to have a changing script show today, and we have David Mosier for uh talking about learning and using, more so using in this part, Mandarin Chinese. Thank you so much for joining us today, David.
SPEAKER_11Thank you. It's a great pleasure.
SPEAKER_10Um you are working at a university. Are you teaching language or are you what what are you teaching exactly?
SPEAKER_11Right now, you mean?
SPEAKER_10Yes.
SPEAKER_11Oh. Well, for the last uh since 1994 or so when I came, I've been teaching at various universities, including the first one was the Foreign Studies University, and I was teaching translation, teaching translation theory, uh comparative grammar, and uh some kind sometimes uh some English composition courses or something. And then for about uh five uh five years I worked for CCTV, as they called it back then, China Central Television, uh, for the education channel. And I was doing translating and also doing hosting, doing children's English programming. A whole lot of kids, or not kids, adults, come up to me these days and remember me from that show. Oh usually, usually a beautiful woman who goes, Oh, are you David Moser? Wow, you said and she says something like my mother really loves you. Uh or uh, you know, I I remember when I was literally watched you when I was five years old. So anyway, and then I worked for uh a an overseas study abroad company called CET, and we taught and we trained generation after generation of young Americans or people from studying in the US uh in Chinese language, culture, politics. A really great and important job.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_11I I was I I liked it and thought it was really important. And then the last couple years I've been at Peking University as the associate dean of a high-level um graduate program called the Yanjing Academy. And now I'm back again to universities teaching uh translation and cross-cultural analysis to both foreigners and Chinese, and it's a great delight to mix those two together. I love being a bridge and a bridge both ways is great. So that's what I'm doing now. So language is the center of everything I do.
SPEAKER_03Sure.
SPEAKER_11And uh I I for various reasons I'm now using Chinese to teach the foreign students and using English to teach the Chinese students.
SPEAKER_10Wait, really?
SPEAKER_11Uh wacky. Yes. Yes, because the foreign students are are none of them are are native speakers of English, and most of them have been immersed in Chinese uh courses since they got there. In fact, they take all their courses in Chinese. Okay. So their English is not has not improved, but their Chinese has. And so when I speak to them in Chinese, they say, No, your Chinese is too complicated, it's too fast. We don't understand what you're saying. Please speak in Chinese. And my Chinese is much less complicated, and they can understand that. And the Chinese students say, We want to practice our English listening. You know, don't speak to us in Chinese. So it's it's swiped, it's switched. I speak Chinese to the foreigners and English to the Chinese.
SPEAKER_10That's really fascinating. Oh my goodness. Wow. Wow, wow, wow, wow. Well, for your students, for your students, your translation students who are still learning certain nuances of the language or certain phrases or what have you, do you ever compare notes on tools? Because you had mentioned that how you learn Chinese and how it's learned now is really different. Do you compare notes on that?
SPEAKER_11Right. Uh tools, I used to be very evangelical about it because a lot of people didn't understand the the advantages of these digital tools. Nowadays, I think most people, unless they've been living on Mars, that they know that there's Pleco and they know there are these great tools. Usually it's just how to use the tools. Most people have downloaded Pleco but don't use its full functions, right? Uh the I think the main thing that that teachers, I think students are pretty much uh up to date with the possibilities and how to use it. What I find is that that the teachers, the Chinese teachers who teach Chinese, are sometimes woefully far behind. They're still stuck in this old paper and pencil day, um, and they're still teaching students that way, and uh not really taking advantage of the tools. For me, the one of the most revolutionary aspects of the new tool thing, the Pleco and all the other digital tools, is that there is there is no longer such a thing as what we had to do in the old days. There's no longer such a thing as looking up a word in a dictionary. That concept has gone away.
SPEAKER_10Yeah.
SPEAKER_11What you do is you touch a screen and a thing pops up and you get the the meaning and the opinion and everything, and then you go, then you go on. So this thing we I described, this painful lookup process, is is gone. And my students no longer even have to know or care what a radical is. What's the radical of this character? What's a radical and why should I care about it? So so the entire way of looking for them, I mean, someone who's serious will know what a radical isn't because if they're serious about the language and they want to know more. But for the average learner, if they want to just jump in, they don't really need to know about you know where these parts come from and what the radicals are.
SPEAKER_10Do you think there's anything missing in their ability to use the language, not knowing that?
SPEAKER_11Well, there is in some sense that uh, you know, obviously there's semantic information, there's there's a lot of clues you can glean about the how to write the character by the radical. But it's a trade-off, Stephanie. I mean, you can't have everything. Uh what? Really? You thought you could, huh?
SPEAKER_10Oh, I have to go. I have to go cry now.
SPEAKER_11Well, but uh to make you feel better, you can't have everything, but you can have more than you thought you might be able to have. Oh, yeah, that's fine. So anyway, uh yes, uh uh the ease and speed of the lookup means that if if you at the first stages you don't care that much about the technical aspects and you don't want to go on to become a professor of Chinese at Harvard, you can jump really fast into the language and do things with it without worrying about the the the the etymological aspects and the character aspects and the and the the the the complicated versus the simplified characters. You know, you can just toss all that away and just just jump into learning. Of course, if you're like me and you're more nerdy and like you, obviously you want to get serious about it, you need to know more in order to really deeply understand the language. Right. But but that's the great thing. The tools now allow you to make inroads into Chinese without being a full-fledged Zionologist, and I think that's a good thing. The other thing is there's uh there's a real danger with the Chinese language, especially with again with teachers, of giving the idea that what the language is all about, or the main thing about Chinese is the characters. And you've got to really understand them and be able to write them all and before you can speak. And that's just wrong. It loses track of the a very basic linguistic uh uh tenet, which is the core of language, the the the core language skill is speaking and listening. That's the core thing. It's writing is a is an adjunct to to speaking and listening. It is an oral medium. Many people speak wonderful Chinese and cannot write at all. Right. And and if you can learn to speak and be in the language and understand it and speak it, the writing, much much of the writing task becomes automatic because you already know the words, you already know the sounds, and the the the writing just comes with it.
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SPEAKER_04Hi there, I'm Brendan Davis coming to you from Beijing, and I'm the co-host with Ying Ying Li of the podcast How China Works. Since you like Steph's show, we thought you might like our show too, so I want to tell you about it really fast. Our first season was designed as a crash course in China for foreigners and to help a young Chinese audience who's going global. Those shows are heavily researched to give insights into the most critical situations you'll need to understand, regardless of whether you're coming or going from China. This year we switched gears to an interview format. We talked to leading China players from around the world, people who are actively engaged in shaping, changing, or navigating this fast-changing dynamic. We've had some truly amazing guests join us, so we would be honored if you would join us to check us out online or at one of our live events we're doing around Beijing now. You can find How China Works in All Podcatchers or visit us online at how ChinaWorkspodcast.com to learn more. Thanks a lot. Now back to the show.
SPEAKER_10Can you give our listeners a little bit of a snapshot of your very long and intricate relationship with the Mandarin Chinese language?
SPEAKER_11Oh, well, yes, I uh was someone who came to Chinese through a back door, you might say. I didn't really plan to ever do this for my living, or and much less stay in China forever, it seems like. Um I just got interested kind of for intellectual reasons. I I was always interested in languages, and when I bumped into Chinese, I said, this one looks a lot more interesting than some of the European languages I was dabbling with. And uh after a year or two of that, I got an amazing uh uh sort of serendipical, serendip serendipitous, I guess you should say, um, opportunity to actually come to China and take part in the translation of a book. A friend of mine named Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote a book called Gürtel Escherbach that won a Pulitzer Prize, found out his book was being translated at Peking University. And he said, she said, You've been studying Chinese on your own for a year or two, you know, why don't you go there and take part and make sure they're not you know butchering this translation, right? So he sent me free of charge here, and that's where my Chinese began, really from just learning it by by myself, um, and then then uh coming to Peking University and and struggling mightily to understand the translation. And from then on, it was so exhilarating, I just couldn't stop. And I I'm I still consider myself a high-level learner, dedicated learner of Chinese.
SPEAKER_10Language learning seems never to stop.
SPEAKER_11It's yeah, it's never it's not it's not really like uh you know learning computer programming or something, although computer programmers would probably gripe at that. So what do you mean? We we learn all of it. There's new stuff all the time. But yeah.
SPEAKER_10Wow, okay. I'm I'm stuck on that. You said after a year or two of self-study, did you say?
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_10Can we unpack what that was? What we're gonna do to learn that in a year or two you could participate in a translation already. That's impressive.
SPEAKER_11Ah uh well it's less impressive when you know how actually bad I was at the in the participation. Um I I uh I got back then. This is we're talking about 1986. Were you even born in? I don't know. Yeah, yeah. You seem young enough to 71. Okay, but you were a a little girl. Okay. Well, so I um there weren't there weren't very many Chinese learning methods back then. I mean, this was a dark era there was and there wasn't an internet really. Um so I was using these old uh John de Francis books. They they were a very great series. Some people, some crotchety old Sinologists might know what I'm talking about. That they were um they were very systematic and it was all on print. There was no such thing as CD-ROM and stuff. And I was just very, what you might say, very practical. Even from the start, I I realized um that if I were going to really learn to speak it, I needed to just learn to say what applied to my life and my daily life and what I wanted to say. So rather than go through a systematic textbook and you know learn all the patterns and stuff. Mostly I just learned some of the basics, I learned how to write the because he has a good book on that. And I mostly started to make Chinese friends, and I would just talk with them and I say, How do I say this? And what if I went to express this? What would I say? And they just told me, here's how you would say it. And I made my own little uh phrase books and worked on those. And so after a year and a half, I was not in any sense fluent in Chinese. Um I I did go to Taiwan for for a month or two to try to study Mandarin there, and but really got nowhere because it was uh the environment, there was a lot of Taiwanese in the environment rather than Mandarin, which didn't help me much. And they were using the fenty, so the the pr the traditional complicated characters, and I was distracted by other things. So but by the time I finished a little bit of that immersion for a couple months and learning, I could have basic conversations. The main thing is I kind of knew I knew what Chinese was about, I knew what I understood the structure, I knew how to go figure out how to understand a Chinese sentence, and I could say some basic things. So and since I was only be uh basically reading the translation, reading the proof proofs and trying to get the meaning out of it and then seeing if there was any wrong interpretations, I was okay for the job because I could sit in my lonely room and pour through dictionaries by the hour. And and uh and after a while, um by a while, I mean two, three or four years of this, I finally got pretty good at it, but it but it was a real tough slog, it really was. And I have to tell you, uh back then there were no word processors, so I was actually looking at manuscripts written, handwritten in Chinese. Oh and that was a terrifying experience because in the very beginning I could hardly even read the printed characters, much less. Uh but the saving grace was I had the original text. So I would look at that it said, uh, you know, computer processing is such and such and such. And so I knew somewhere in these chicken scratches there had to be the word computer in Chinese. And I would look and look and say, Oh, this looks like it. Yeah, chi sun ji, yeah. And then then I began to say, Oh, that's how you write it. And so it within the four years, I not only uh got better at reading and writing, but I also got much better at reading the you know, almost illegible Chinese handwriting, which was a big boon for later on. So that's how I started.
SPEAKER_10There's so much to unpack with that. We could spend a whole half hour just on that. And um, but because that was pre-pleco, and so you were using a paper dictionary and looking it up by stroke.
SPEAKER_11Oh my god, yes, pre-pleco. If I could oh if if I could have miraculously had Pleco back then, you know, I hate to say this, but I probably would have, you know, killed my own mother to have that tool. It was such an incredible thing back then. Back no, back then we had to do it the hard way, hard the hard way, which was uh big thick dictionaries of many kinds, and you had to learn how to look a word up in a dictionary, which meant you needed to learn what the radicals were, you needed to be able to count the strokes.
SPEAKER_03Right, right.
SPEAKER_11And um, it was a learning experience. It was like a whole course in itself just to learn how to look up words.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_11And I could I could struggle for literally one, three, four, six, eight minutes just trying to find the word in the Chinese dictionary.
SPEAKER_10That sounds fast.
unknownIt does.
SPEAKER_11It is one of the most painful things you can imagine. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_10I actually wanted um somewhere between HSK2 and HSK3, uh, I wanted a paper dictionary and I wanted someone to teach me. And my friend and I sat down in a coffee shop and he sat, he he taught me, but I honestly I because of the time it takes and because Pleco is so amazing, I barely used it after that. But it was it was interesting to see the process.
SPEAKER_11Exactly.
SPEAKER_10Uh but wow, and gave me a master.
SPEAKER_11So this is my copy of uh a famous book called Wei Cheng by by Chen Jong Shu. And I wanted to read this book, but it was just so impossible I had to look up words every so I wanted to read this book, but looking up a word was so painful I didn't want to keep looking up words over and over again. Right. So I read this whole book. I don't know if you can see, but every every single page I wrote down in pencil the annotated version. Like every word I had to look up, I would have to write it down. Every single page has me my handwritten notes on these characters that I had to look up. So I I read the entire book writing these notations because I didn't want to keep I didn't want to keep looking up the words each time. Right. So then then I would go through it and read it a little bit of time, and the words I didn't know were already there on the page. Right. So I basically I basically invented Pleco. This is pleco, this is non-computer pleco, right? Exactly. It gives you the net definition. So I I don't know if um um Michael Love has his his patent on Pleco, but I think uh the idea really belongs to me. I should be suing him.
SPEAKER_10Oh, sure. Well, like all great ideas, it probably came from what people were doing already, just in a small, compact mobile form, right?
SPEAKER_11Yeah, right, right. And yeah, great ideas, great ideas come from desperation, and that's that's what this was.
SPEAKER_10A few quick notes the Geopets Podcast newsletter comes out every Tuesday. Go to Stephfuccio.com to get that, and also get on the mailing list to get it every week in your email inbox. If listening to podcasts makes you think about making your own, I can help you. You can get a free month of Podbean hosting service by using this promo code podbean.com forward slash virtual expats. Don't forget the S. If you're an expat, I'm also doing some beginning expat podcasting workshops online. Go to stepfuccio.com for more information. If you don't want to record your voice but need a voice, you can buy mine. I'm doing some voiceover work at voices.com forward slash actors forward slash steppuccio. What I'm not charging for are the promo spots in these episodes. These are offered to content creators and people who have announcements about information, content, and whatnot that is related to what we're talking about in these episodes. I actually want to bring in your book, A Billion Voices, because I just consumed the sucker in two days and I just I was circling so much stuff I barely can see the writing or the I was just and I'm so glad that you you I can't find it right now, but you did quantify the phonetic component within characters.
SPEAKER_11Ah, yes, yes, yes, right, right.
SPEAKER_10Yeah, and how many there are.
SPEAKER_11And how unreliable they are.
SPEAKER_10Oh no, I don't like that part. Are they really unreliable?
SPEAKER_11They were reliable when they first devised them. But as we as m centuries go by, language changes. And I gave the example of Shakespeare, the Shakespeare rhyme, you know, that that love and prove don't rhyme now, but they did in his time. Well, the same thing goes for these Chinese characters. The sounds they chose were rhymes then, but now they're so far away, it almost doesn't help much at all. Sometimes sometimes it's a totally different sound.
SPEAKER_10I had kind of picked up on that organically with the HSK stuff, but I didn't quite know how to search for things that sounded similar enough. But I found that it kind of helped me. It kind of helped me. It should sound kind of like this, but it's not exactly that what I think it is. Can we go back to when you initially started to learn the language? What was your super efficient get pretty darn good in a year or two method? What were you how were you doing it?
SPEAKER_11I think it was because we didn't have I didn't have those tools. Uh you you just had to be uh, you know, a lot depended on just sheer memory. And luckily my memory was better then than it is now. I think if I had to tackle it now, there's no way I could remember all the characters. But I also had the advantage that I was already in kind of in Sinology and I'd read a lot of books on on exactly these problems. So I was already very sort of hip to the pro whole problem of phonetics and sounds in Chinese. So um, you know, I was learning as I went. I I think uh sadly to say, and I I think I said this in one of my writings that, you know, if you've been studying a while and your attitude is I just have to keep going because I I've spent so much time I can't stop now.
SPEAKER_10That doesn't sound engaging. What I know you said that it seemed like a more interesting language than the other ones you were learning, but what was there anything in particular that inspired you to get started or that kept you going in the first uh big jump?
SPEAKER_11Yeah, for me the inspiration was not just wanting to to use Chinese, although that is a wonderful thing. I was interested in the the sort of psychological cognitive aspect of it. The question of whether the the kind of language you speak, your your mother tongue, uh, would influence in some way your your thought your thought processes like your logical reasoning or maybe the way you conceptualize things or gender or any of these sorts of things. And the the more I studied French, which is the only other language I really got into, the more I felt like this is just English. You know, I said it's it's like uh recognizing that uh uh Superman is really Clark Kent without uh without his glasses, you know, it's like that about that but with Chinese there were some deep, deep structural differences, and there was differences in the way they handed abstract nouns and the differences in the ways that they handed sing handled singular and plural and time, everything was very different. Um, and so I thought so I so I I started like uh devising experiments. I did my PhD on psycholinguistics, trying to understand these issues. So I was what I wanted to find a language that was different enough from my language that I could actually get a sense of what it would be like to live in that world, in that psycholinguistic world. And so now that I speak it much better, I'm getting more and more uh data, I guess, on that. And I have some opinions on that, but that's still that was the the question I was focused on. And so for me it was so important to get to get to the point where I could really understand what Chinese people were saying and why they would say these things. And I just found it endlessly fascinating. So it wasn't just a a desire to do to do business or to to do to be able to start a company or do a business meeting or something. It was I was trying to understand what would it be like to think in Chinese.
SPEAKER_10And even if that meant I there's so much I I we could do like five episodes just on different parts of what you just said. But the thing that threw Well, I'm into it. Welcome to the monthly gas, David Mowser. Yes, yes, yes. But the thing that drew me in this time post-learning to code Python is the look of the characters. Instead of intimidating me, they finally started to call to me. And I started to feel like their complexity was helping me learn language more than I had any other language that looked similar that had the Latin script. Now, to now, to be fair, total disclaimer, everybody that that's watched the YouTube channel or has listened to the podcast knows I've fallen off of studying for months now. And I'll probably get back on, but I've I did not get to a high level. I don't know how what my relationship with Mandarin is at this point, but that shift and that brain burn that came from studying the characters versus studying a language, studying and using a language that was so similar to English was very different. And that's kind of the name of the what the podcast was for a long time was changing scripts because I felt like there was a cognitive difference in switching scripts of a language, not just switching the sounds of the language. So it's interesting that you had that experience with the sounds, not just the characters and the look of it, the writing of it.
SPEAKER_11Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah. Although I'm like you, I was really hooked on the script as well. I just I still am. I just think it's the most fascinating.
SPEAKER_10It's so beautiful. Yeah. It's yeah, it definitely is. Like I've been looking for a calligraphy class for as long as I can remember. And occasionally I'll run across one. Uh and I'm sure they exist in in Chinese. I just can't read enough to to quickly grasp things within time. But within the English posting world uh of events that are happening, I'll like get onto one and they'll just have one like year.
SPEAKER_09And I'll be like, hi. Can I have more than that, please? Can we do a weekly or monthly one? Right, right. The process of reading them.
SPEAKER_11Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_09Anyway.
SPEAKER_11Can you need to get a you need to get a private tutor? Because that's that's the only that's the only way you'll really learn it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_10I know, I know. And and financially I'm I'm working up to that. But it's a challenge. It's a challenge. Can you, because we talk about time in English versus Mandarin Chinese so much on this podcast, and I'm really excited to hear you dig into how differently that is. If if you were to explain that to someone who's just entering uh the Mandarin Chinese language, is there a way that you could describe the how different it is?
SPEAKER_11Uh well, time I guess could mean a couple different things. One one is uh how they talk about time, you know, whether because uh other languages uh sort of image time differently than English. Some that you have usually we talk about past, present, and future, and we make an analogy to space, not time. So we say, you know, uh we're we're in we have Christmas is ahead of us, uh, you know, I put all that behind me now as I look forward into the future. And so everything has spatially spatial metaphors, is how we talk about time. Um that's that's a metaphoric issue. That's kind of like how we envision it in the mind. Of course, one of the differences that Chinese has an up-down component, which we don't really use in English, right? So we talk about Xia Gashin Chi and Shang Shin Qi, you know, the up upward last up week and down week and and so forth. Um so there's that aspect which is very interesting. And there's a there's a woman named uh Lara Boroditsky um who uh specializes in uh these sort of uh studies of uh the psycholinguistics of Chinese and and time, and and she has some very fascinating experiments about it and shows that native speakers do in fact sort of envision time in a different way. There's also uh the fact that both languages uh you can either envision time as uh sort of moving forward to a distant point, or you can imagine time as moving toward you, the speaker, and you're stationary, and the time is what moves, right? So uh so you can say uh Christmas is almost here, or uh, you know, the end of the semester is coming up toward us soon, or something like that, right? And you're envisioning yourself as stationary and the time point is moving inexorably toward you, right? But then you can also say as we move boldly into the 21st century, you know, or or as we uh you know forge our futures or something like that. Now now we think of ourselves as moving ourselves forward towards that future point in time. And Chinese can talk about both of those things, as both of those ways of talking about time. But the other time aspect that to me is a maybe perhaps a little more interesting is um the just the tense aspect, the the fact that our traditional Europe, European, eurocentric, Indo-European notion of past, present, future, and everything has to be marked uh that way. Chinese doesn't mark that. It marks it in a different way. And uh the the linguistic uh answer is China does Chinese doesn't actually have tense in the way we think of it, it has what we call aspect. So it's more concerned whether an action has occurred already or is in the process of occurring or will occur or something like that, rather than the simple notion of past, present, and future. And that is really fascinating. And what it means that there's you're handling information in a different way, and very often some of the information we think is crucial is just not there in Chinese. You have to glean it from the context.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_11And I think that that is so much fun and so interesting. And so and and something that foreigners have a hard time grasping, and we tend to put too much information into the sentence when actually you you don't really know. I mean, what you you just have to it that's contextually determined. You don't have to put it in there, you just Chinese are used to leaving it open, right?
SPEAKER_09Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_11So uh so we say, you know, uh if you you know uh uh yin, yi Chuma. That just sounds to us like are you going, do you go? Uh why don't you there's no where's the future there? Will you go, would you go, do you want to go? You just say my chew. And to that that seems so bare bones to us. Like, well, how do I know if it's uh you know a would, will, shall, or what? But that's just the way Chinese works. You you just let context determine it. There's a whole lot of fascinating stuff like that. By the way, I also just mentioned this is not with time, but one of the things that first blew me away was that the third person, ta, can mean he or she or it. And it never really occurred to me that this really made much difference because there's a written form that's different, right? Right until I began to until I began to take part in situations where we would be talking about someone who would be coming in in two weeks. Right. And we would use ta will be here, when will who will meet Ta at the airport? Will Ta need any extra, you know, facilities here or whatever. And then at some point after these two weeks, someone might might say, Hey, Tasha Nanunuda. You know, is this Ta we've been talking about a male or female? It struck me at the time, like this is incredible. How do these people go for weeks with an image of a mental model of somebody who's a professor in their head, and they never really settled down whether this person was a male or female? Because in English, you from the first sentence you would know. Right. You would never forget. And I thought, this is amazing. This is fantastic.
SPEAKER_10Have you asked any native speaker that of like how what they envision when they hear talk but they don't know?
SPEAKER_11Well, there's usually there's very often there's very often clues that they can assume, you know, but but but they can make sexist assumptions. If it's uh if it's uh we're we're inviting uh you know our computer programmers coming over today, probably most people assume it's a male unless you tell them suddenly it's a female. So they usually have they have their stereotypes and their defaults.
SPEAKER_03Right, right, right.
SPEAKER_11But on the other hand, if there if there really is a neutral thing, uh there's really no reason that they should that they should know, and it it really actually doesn't matter.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_11Um uh the the analogy they would give me is well, uh in Chinese it's very clear when we say go ga and d dee that one is my older brother and one is my younger brother. Right. So when you when you people speak English, doesn't it bother you that you don't know when you say my brother and I don't know whether it's your older brother or your younger brother? Like, doesn't that seem weird that you don't have that information? I say, yeah, that's true. It doesn't seem weird at all. I mean, at some point someone say might say, Is he your is he your older brother or your younger brother? Because up to that point, who who cares w which it which it is? The same is true with gender. We can we we don't I don't need to know who's gonna come and fix my toilet, whether it's a man or woman, really, you know, until they actually come to the door and then oh it's a man, it's a woman, right? So so we don't really need to know in most cases whether it's male or female.
SPEAKER_10That's very true, that's very true. When I was teaching in Japan, my Japanese students were floored that we didn't have terms for like older classmates, like upperclassmen versus I guess we do upperclassmen, lower classes, but we wouldn't use them as we don't use it. And they when they're talking about someone, they do use them every single time, not just the first time you talk about someone kind of thing.
SPEAKER_11They were just like it's missing because well, the reason for that is in Japanese, you have yeah, you know, right? The honorifics, the the way you you would talk, you would address the older one differently than the younger one. Right. And you would address the outsider versus differently from an insider. Right. So they have to care about those distinctions a lot more than we do. It doesn't matter for us.
SPEAKER_10So it's like it's uh like Mandarin Chinese is simplified, whereas they don't they don't inflect their verbs, but then it's more complicated because there's these other things that we don't think of.
SPEAKER_03Oh yeah, right, right.
SPEAKER_10So yeah, yeah, yeah. I could go on forever, but I promised you half an hour and we've gone well over. And you've already agreed to come back. So there's no need. So I think we can probably wrap this this episode up.
SPEAKER_11Okay. Next time, next time you could talk about my book, that'll be great.
SPEAKER_10Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, what what do you want the listeners to go consume of yours right now? Like what thing do you want to tell them about? Or yeah, let's start with that one.
SPEAKER_11Well, certainly my book is there. Um, I guess for Chinese learners, if they haven't read uh Why Chinese is so damn hard, they can go read that. Yes, that's a good start. Yeah, that's a good start. Yeah. Although that's outmoded, but it's that's uh sort of what's the word? Uh it needs to be updated. It's it's outdated, but it's still useful to for some people.
SPEAKER_09What's outdated about it?
SPEAKER_11Well, it doesn't talk about that. Was before there were the Pleco issues the technological tools, the digital tools. So so it was all about struggles of looking up words and dictionaries and stuff.
SPEAKER_10Oh, gotcha.
SPEAKER_11But yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_10Okay, great. And if they wanted to reach out to you on social media or what have you, where should they?
SPEAKER_11Uh I I tweet. I'm a I'm a twit. So I uh I tweet, I'm just David double under there's two underscores. So it's David underscore underscore Moser on Twitter. You can find me.
SPEAKER_10And I'll put that in the show notes for you all, but just just in case you don't want to, just in case you're in movement and you don't want to look at the website right now.
SPEAKER_11Or or or you can just uh drop a you can just drop a tweet to Stephanie and say, how do I get in touch with David Moser?
SPEAKER_10Oh, I see now.
SPEAKER_11Yeah, I'm gonna fill your fill your mailbox with people wanting to find me.
SPEAKER_10Hey, that wouldn't be a bad thing at all. Podcasting is a pretty silent medium, no matter how many days you get. So I I welcome it. Steph Fuccio at gmail.com in case you're all and if you spell Fuccio right without me spelling it, you get extra points.
SPEAKER_02Good, good.
SPEAKER_10Anyway, well, thank you so much for this today. I know we've heard a little bit. Thank you very much. And uh yeah, we'll be hearing from you again soon.
SPEAKER_11Okay. Thank you, Stephanie.
SPEAKER_10Thank you so much to our guest, David Moser. I put all of the information for David down in the show notes, and I will be tweeting and Instagramming about him as much as I can over the next few days so that y'all know that this uh this information is there, and just in case you don't show note it, you'll have the information in social media form so you can consume the other things that he's put out about the language. Even if you're not studying Mandarin Chinese, I think the cognitive things that David talks about are really interesting, and he writes about them in a way that's incredibly approachable, even to non-language geeks. But if you're listening to this, you probably are a language geek, so you're fine. Anyway, thank you again to Damon Castillo for the background music. Uh, this is Sometime Guy, and is off the mess of me album. Damoncastillo.com is his website, and you're going to hear the full song in with lyrics in three, two, one.
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