SPEAKER_02

Welcome to the Changing Scripts Podcast, where we describe our personal language learning stories with a focus right now on Mandarin Chinese. My name is Stephanie, and I was a language instructor for about 15 years, mostly in Asia. I have been learning Mandarin Chinese for about a year now. This podcast is part of the Changing Scripts Pod Tube experience. The podcast part is where I chat with other language learners and native speakers of Mandarin Chinese about their language learning experience. And the YouTube channel is where I share my own personal successes, failures, and questions while I slowly but steadily learn to read Mandarin Chinese. In this episode, we chat with Tanya Crossman, author of Misunderstood, a book about how overseas life impacts young people. Tanya has a very intimate connection with Mandarin Chinese language. She started learning it in her teens, and because of her use of the language, both in and outside of China, has really developed a deep relationship, not just with China-Chinese culture, but with the Mandarin Chinese language as well. Tanya also brings to the table, I believe she said, 12 different languages that she can compare Mandarin Chinese to. This was a really interesting conversation to have and a really intimate emotional viewpoint of a language and its usage. Let's hear what she had to say. Alright, thank you so much, Tanya, for joining us on the Changing Scripts podcast.

SPEAKER_01

Hi, thanks for having me. I'm from Australia originally. I first started studying Mandarin Chinese 25 years ago. I've done it at two high schools in Australia with a tutor in the US at University in Australia and at University in China, but my last formal Chinese language was 14, 15 years ago. But I've been living in China. This is my second time around, but all up about 11 years.

SPEAKER_02

Boomerang.

SPEAKER_01

When was your first time? I first visited 99. I first moved to China February of 2004, was here for 10 and a half years, left for three and a half, and I moved back at Christmas, so not quite a year ago.

SPEAKER_02

We're going to do your chronology of first and second language and whatever languages come after that.

SPEAKER_01

But I wonder I think I'm at about 12 now. Oh my god, are you serious? Yeah, but Mandarin's the only one I speak. The rest I've never done more than like a year or so of. Oh, oh, like that makes it less impressive.

SPEAKER_02

With your geographical background, we might want to do an extra layer of kind of chronology of place. So can we can we do uh where you've lived first?

SPEAKER_01

Okay. So I lived in Australia until I was 13 in Sydney and Canberra. Then I moved to the US and I lived in Connecticut for two years, moved back to Australia to finish high school, do university, moved to China to do a year of study, which turned into living here for 10 years. I was in Cambodia for six months and then back to Australia to study for three years, and then I moved back here, here being Beijing. But mainly I spent most of my childhood in Australia and most of my adulthood in China. That's the short version. So let's do the language version now.

SPEAKER_02

So what was your first language? I know some of these might seem like obvious questions, but you never know when something will come out. Um so English is my first language. Okay. Let's dig into that a little bit. Do you remember anything about learning your first language either before you went to school or after you were at school?

SPEAKER_01

I know I could already read when I got to school. I've always been language written, spoken, whatever has always been something I've been interested in, even as a small child. Always loved reading, always wanted to write, wanted to write music, wanted to write books. I don't really remember learning it because it was just something that came quite naturally and quite young.

SPEAKER_02

Right. Now, music and books, there's an interesting comparison. Are you more of an auditory person or a visual person?

SPEAKER_01

Visual. Absolutely visual. I find it very difficult to learn by listening. Me too. At the start of every semester in my last degree, I would go to my lecturers, especially anyone I hadn't had before, and say, for your information, I will be sitting in the back of a classroom looking at my phone almost the whole time in my lectures, playing a little number game. I'm doing that to help me concentrate because I don't learn well by listening, and I've found that if I'm doing just something that's numerical, not alphabet-based, that just absorbs the distracted part of my brain. It makes it much easier for me to focus. I'm telling you that so you don't think I'm this is actually my way of focusing on what you're saying. Because it can look quite rude to them otherwise.

SPEAKER_02

But that's one of the ways that helps me deal with the auditory stuff. Are you talking about something like Sudoku or something else? I found the best one was 2048.

SPEAKER_01

I mean, Sudoku, there's at least a little bit of thinking and strategy in well, 2048 is you're just flipping around in a circle. You know what I mean? It's very perfunctory. The idea is not something that takes any kind of thought. Oh just enough to take the distracted part of my brain and shove it off to the side. Yep. And my classmates found it hilarious. Now, when did you find out that that worked for you? How old were you then? I found it out not so much from lectures, but from other parts of life. Um, so particularly, this is gonna sound weird, from church, from listening to sermons at church. Like I just couldn't concentrate. And I found by accident one time that when I was in Cambodia, I was helping out at a small church there, and I would go to both of their services because I would help with music because they didn't have any musicians. So I'd hear the same message twice sometimes. And so the second time I'd just sit there playing with my phone, and I realized that I was actually absorbing more when I was playing on my phone. So I started doing it deliberately, and it made a huge difference actually. I absorbed way more content when I was playing a game on my phone.

SPEAKER_02

That's interesting. I wonder if doing that just kind of like relaxes you so you can pick up on things more.

SPEAKER_01

I think it's when I'm not doing that, basically my brain is running on 10 tracks at once all the time. If I occupy some of those tracks with something perfunctory like that, then they aren't gonna get distracted and drag the rest of me with them. If I'm not doing something to distract myself, I'll end up like something someone says will spark a different thought in me, and I'll go off on this other tangent and I'll be have gone off for five or ten minutes and missed something and then have to and then I refocus.

SPEAKER_02

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_01

So it's kind of like controlled distraction, basically.

SPEAKER_02

Sure, sure, sure. No, it's clever to know these things because we all work a little bit differently, and I think that's one of the things I'm really learning after years of teaching language to try to actually push past the beginning stage of learning one and get to one. I want one second language, not twelve, although that was lovely. But I'm like, you know, it I can't use what other people use because it's not working, it's never worked, so I have to kind of piece together what I'm doing. Yeah, exactly. And it's it's just finding that, not finding the way, finding oh way that works right now.

SPEAKER_01

As a kid, it came out as doodling on the page as I went every semester at my undergrad. I would say, I'm gonna take good notes this semester, and the first one lectures would have really good, consistent notes. Yeah, and the longer the semester went on, it basically devolved to just straight up doodling by the end. Um, because it's part of how I like I need to do something.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, using slightly kinetic, something non-verbal. Right. Was your doodling actual pictures or shapes, or what were they? It was shapes and patterns, but often I'd be turning those shapes and patterns into some kind of picture. Um I'd often find there was certain, they would always be the same kind of thing. I'd repeat over and over again. I'd switch through certain different patterns I'd make the pattern rather than I wasn't drawing a picture.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, mine were circles. I would just kind of go around and around and around in a circle and not make anything of it. It was just a but a series of circles. I find myself I still do it now. I did a lot of dot patterns. So doing small dots. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And I've had to draw them as little circles, depending on what kind of pen I had, and and building a pattern out of those. I did a lot more triangle patterns than circle patterns.

SPEAKER_02

Interesting, interesting.

SPEAKER_01

So even if I was drawing those little dots, I was turning or diamonds or something like that.

SPEAKER_02

Here's going tangential. Oh, what was that? Dead Dead Again? This old, old movie with Emma Thompson. Did you ever see that movie? I don't think so. It's not ringing a bell. Oh my gosh. Okay, so I don't remember the full story. I just remember it was one of those things where she was reincarnated, and her old one of her old selves was the murderer of one of her current lovers, and it all came out throughout the series, throughout the course of the movie. Anyway, there's something that she kept drawing. She was a painter, I think. And it it gave a hint as to that she was that person in that previous lifetime and that he was that like it was all clues to this big giant puzzle, but she never knew her whole life why she was drawing this thing. Do you have memories of your first library experience?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, no, we went to the library all the time, like from before I can remember. We were always going and getting books, like you know, you every week you had to go and get a new set. Whenever we go on car trips, Mum would be going and and borrowing stories on tape to put in the car. So that was always a big part of everywhere, every time we moved, you'd find the nearest library very quickly.

SPEAKER_02

When you were a kid growing up, either at home, in school, in your commute local community, what kind of languages were around you?

SPEAKER_01

English was definitely the predominant language, but I mean Australia is a large immigrant country. Actually, the area that I lived as a small child is now a very Chinese area. It wasn't so much then. I mean, maybe a quarter of my classmates would have been Asian, um, but that was a mixture of first, second generation from different places. I had friends like in my class from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Italy, in Canberra, it was a lot more European immigration, but I wasn't hearing those languages very much. I mean, occasionally if I'm visiting a friend at their house, I might hear their parents talking them in a language, but yeah, I I didn't hear much other than English as a small child.

SPEAKER_02

I see. Well, when did the idea of learning different languages first hit you and first like maybe interest you?

SPEAKER_01

Well, the first time I learned a second language was third grade. There was an after school elective. So for like six months or a year, I did Japanese once a week after school. Mum didn't even ask me, she just signed me up for it. I think I don't know if she just knew that I would enjoy it, or I mean she had enjoyed studying language when she was younger, or just like, oh, it's a good opportunity. But I loved it. I was fascinated. First experience I took. What did you like about Japanese? I don't know that it was about Japanese specifically, but just about learning another language. It was like a code, you know, you're unlocking a code, the idea that it's a different way to say things. I've always had a very strong understanding is something that really motivates me, wanting to understand people, understand things, and language is the way to do that. Yeah, I mean, I don't remember very much of the Japanese I learned. I can, you know, count and it's a maybe remember a couple of nouns and a couple of polite phrases. But to be fair, most Australians probably know like basic Japanese numbers and greetings anyway. So I'm not sure that that's just from that class.

SPEAKER_03

Sure.

SPEAKER_01

But and I mean it was another four years, I think, before I got another chance to learn a language, but it stuck pretty early that that was interesting, that language was interesting.

SPEAKER_02

And did you just do it that that one year in third grade?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I mean, I think it was only I don't remember if it stopped being offered or if it was just because we moved, because we moved shortly after I started fourth grade. But yeah, for whatever reason, it wasn't very long.

SPEAKER_02

And in fourth grade you moved to the US?

SPEAKER_01

To a different city in Australia. So I moved from Sydney to Canberra.

SPEAKER_02

You moved to the US when you were 13. Yeah. Let's play with this for a second. When you moved to the US when you were 13, um, then you had to encounter American English.

SPEAKER_03

This is true.

SPEAKER_02

At that age, how aware were you of the differences between Australian English and American English?

SPEAKER_01

I mean, a little bit, because outside the US, most English-speaking countries have access to a lot of American media. Because most countries, it's cheaper for them to import media from the US, who's a huge producer, than to produce their own. Growing up, I was hearing TV in Australian, British, and American accents and vocab. So I was exposed to all of those, just as pretty much everyone in the English-speaking world other than Americans are. Yeah, there was a lot that I was already exposed to. I knew certain words were different. I knew that Americans said sweater instead of jumper, elevator instead of lift, different things like that. But yeah, I mean, obviously there was way more than I was aware of. But the concept, I mean, I knew that it was going to be different. What surprised me more was how my American friends didn't get the differences in language and culture. Thought my accent was cute, but kind of expected me to culturally be on the same page, constantly getting in trouble making these cultural missteps and having no idea what I'd done wrong. What part of the US were you in? Uh Greenwich, Connecticut, um, just outside New York City. Oh dear.

SPEAKER_02

Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

There's it's a very different world.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I well I exactly. I say oh dear because the East Coast has some very old families that have traditions. Strong.

SPEAKER_01

And Greenwich is a very old money kind of area too.

SPEAKER_02

Wow, wow, wow. So they expected you to adjust. And what was your response to that at 13? Were you like, all right, I'll just be a flexible human being, or did you kick back? I refuse to use American spelling ever.

SPEAKER_01

Even if it got marked down, I refuse to use it. Even though our computer we'd bought in the US and the spell checker would automatically want to fix everything to American English, I just refused. I'm very stubborn like that. I tried really hard to keep my accent and my vocab, but of course you slowly adjust over time. I ended up somewhere in the middle. So my American friends thought I sounded Australian, my Australian friends thought I sounded American. Which by the way is how my accent ends up most of the time now. I'm still a bit on the Australian side of the line because I haven't been back here that long yet, and I've had a couple years in Australia, but yeah, I can, I mean, I already hear my vowels have started to shift back towards the American side.

SPEAKER_02

Do you find that your accent shifts depending on who you're talking to at all?

SPEAKER_01

Not really. I know that that's really common. A lot of the TCKs I work with will switch mid-sentence even depending on who they're addressing. My my whole accent shifts. So I don't end up, I I don't have a pure Australian, a pure American accent. I have an accent that's somewhere in the middle, depending on who I've talked to last. And when I was dating my husband long distance, I was in Australia, he was in China, he's American. My housemates reckon they could tell when I've been talking to him because my accent would slide just a little bit towards American after a couple hours on the phone. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02

Well, for the listeners who may might not be familiar, can you quickly describe I know you can. Can you please audience quickly describe what TCK is?

SPEAKER_01

Oh, yeah, sorry. So TCK is an acronym that stands for third culture kid. Third culture kids are anyone who spends a significant portion of their childhood years, so before age 18, living outside their passport country due to their parents' choice of work or study. So it's expat kids. And that's what my work mostly centers on is understanding that perspective and teaching others how to understand and support TCKs.

SPEAKER_02

So, okay, so 13, you're in the US, you're in Connecticut, and you were there until when?

SPEAKER_01

I was there for two years. So the Australian school years and the US school years are six months out. So it was during grade nine and ten of my Australian school years. So I did a quarter of grade nine in Australia, then a quarter of grade eight in the States, all of grade nine and half of grade ten in the US, and then started grade eleven in Australia. It was very confusing.

SPEAKER_02

Wow. That that's a tricky time. High school's a tricky time to be doing that kind of Oh my gosh, yes.

SPEAKER_01

Now with what I know in my TCK research, I realize at 13 and 15 that's a really hard age to be doing those kind of transitions. You're a business family, they don't give you any cult cross-cultural training or support anyway. So we were a bit um I I didn't realize until 10 years later that I'd had this cross-cultural kind of stuff going on.

SPEAKER_02

Since I heard of what TCKs were like a couple of years ago, I've been wondering what the difference between TCKs and immigrant kids are. Not immigrant kids like they are the ones that moved in, but both my parents are from Italy and I grew up in the US, but I don't have a lot of American culture in me. And I find myself watching TCK videos and just tearing up and like going, I understand that.

SPEAKER_01

There is a huge emotional equivalence between the TCK experience and the immigrant kid experience for a very important reason. That's because in a lot of ways it's the same experience but reverse. So both a TCK and an immigrant kid have the conflict between the place my parents come from and the place that I'm living in. The big difference is that for an immigrant kid, you legally belong in the place that you're living and that you're building your experiences in.

SPEAKER_03

That's true.

SPEAKER_01

But you feel this sense of I'm supposed to have this, I do have this connection, I'm supposed to feel some kind of connection to my parents' country. And it depends on the kids. Some kids feel very connected to that culture and others really feel a disconnect to that culture. But the place you're living in is a place you're legally connected and recognized. For TCK, the place that they're living and having their experiences is not the place they have legal connection, and everyone looks at them and assumes that of course they're connected to their parents' country, even if they've never lived there. So there is a lot of emotional overlap in the experience. But yeah, in some ways it's sort of a reverse. So I talk a lot about cross-cultural kids as a wider umbrella, which is anyone who meaningfully interacts with more than one culture before the age of 18. So that includes immigrant kids, refugee kids, borderlanders, so people who live like on a border in a sort of an ethnic group that crosses a border, international adopted kids, biracial and bicultural kids, or multi-educational cross-cultural kids. So that's someone who's living in their passport country, but going to a school that's using a different education system. So for example, kids in China who are going to a school that has an American curriculum, something like that. They're going from a one culture to another every day from home to school and back again. Yeah, and domestically mobile kids as well, all fit under this wider umbrella.

SPEAKER_02

I'm glad that that exists. I didn't realize there was a bigger umbrella than that because there is not just with my own experience, but I've noticed other groups that seem to like connect to DCKs too. So that's really cool. There's quite a bit of, especially Chinese girls that were adopted and brought to other countries. Do you do any work with those groups specifically?

SPEAKER_01

What I do is work with the ones who come back. So kids who were born in China, adopted by foreign families, moved overseas with them, and then came to live in China as foreigners with a foreign passport and their foreign adopted family. So I have a section in my book that looks at that overlap being both an internationally adopted kid and a TCK. And I also look at kids who are both an immigrant kid and a TCK, or both uh parents from different families and all different cultures and also a TCK. So I look a little at those overlaps between those different kinds of cross-cultural experiences. Because it's a very specific experience to be living in your birth country as a foreigner.

SPEAKER_02

When you when you talk to the return returnees, are they called what do I what do I call them?

SPEAKER_01

Well, when the parents do it, so when the parents who are raised in China as Chinese live overseas, get a foreign passport, come back, they're called highway in Chinese, like sea turtles.

SPEAKER_03

Right.

SPEAKER_01

They've got a foreign passport, but you know, but these kids, yeah, they don't have that sense because they aren't culturally Chinese because they haven't been raised by a Chinese family.

SPEAKER_03

Right.

SPEAKER_01

They're only genetically Chinese. So yeah, it's a really I'm not quite sure what you would call them either. Because I talked to kids who never left, always grew up in their birth country but were adopted while living there and stayed living there but now adopted by an international family and having an international passport but still living in their birth country.

SPEAKER_02

Whoa, I hadn't even realized that was happening. Okay, that's well happens in China too. That's what I'm thinking. When it happens in China, what languages do they grow up with? I'm obsessed with language.

SPEAKER_01

What languages did they grow up with then? It depends greatly on the age at which they're adopted. And I know kids who were adopted later who basically lost Chinese almost completely, as in and didn't want to, didn't connect with it as a language, didn't want to speak it.

SPEAKER_03

Right.

SPEAKER_01

And I think that was partly because it was survival when they moved to the US speaking their English at eight or nine or whatever.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Speaking English was as and then they come back to China a couple years later and you know pick up the Chinese really quickly, but maybe their accent's from a different part of the country, but they want to identify as foreign, because that's part of their survival. Yeah. I know it's one family I knew that had several adopted kids, and they all reacted differently to the experience. So one went completely, I want to be only seen as Chinese, another went completely, I only want to be seen as foreign. There's kids in the same family. So whatever coping strategy they pick up, I think.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Um Wow. Yeah, that is entirely. Okay. Remind us the name of your book, please, so the listeners can't call Misunderstood: The Impact of Growing Up Overseas in the Twenty First Century.

SPEAKER_01

Okay.

SPEAKER_02

Let's come back to your own narrative, but I have a feeling that the TCK research is going to come weaving back in and out throughout the conversation.

SPEAKER_01

It's quite hard for me to keep away from it, to be honest.

SPEAKER_02

So I don't want to keep away from it, but I but I do want to focus on your language journey well. When you were growing up in Australia and in the US, what languages did your parents speak? Because you mentioned that your mom liked language.

SPEAKER_01

My mom had studied German all the way through high school to the point that she did it by correspondence at the end because they didn't offer an advanced German class at her small town in the country. But both my parents were raised only speaking English. So I'm quite unusual for an Australian. 25% of Australians were born outside Australia, of Australian citizens, passport holders, were born outside Australia. So, but in my family, all of my grandparents and six of my eight grandparents, great grandparents, were born in Australia. Which is extremely unusual and really only happens to people who are in country towns or who are indigenous, which yeah, it's also usually people who are in country towns too. So I was raised in Sydney, but my parents both came from rural areas where they had, yeah, long history settlement. So I go back to the first white settlement in Australia on both sides of my family.

SPEAKER_02

Oh wow. Now, how many do you have siblings? I have two younger sisters. Are they language oriented?

SPEAKER_01

Nope. Do you are the enough? They both did language oriented. In school because you had to.

SPEAKER_03

Sure.

SPEAKER_01

So one did Japanese, the other did Indonesian. And then when we moved to the US, you switched to French because they didn't have Indonesian there, obviously.

SPEAKER_03

Right, right, right, right.

SPEAKER_01

But yeah, but they both gave it up as soon as they could.

SPEAKER_02

As did I with the way that I I took German in high school, and it was it was taught in a way that made me want to run for the hills and do anything else with it. And I was a huge bookworm as a child, so it was very surprising that I didn't like to play with the words on the page. But oh my god.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I feel like I would have given up on it too. I mean, I think in middle school, high school, you forget more than you learn in language classes. There isn't a huge, it's very divorced from reality, and it's generally not that interesting. My first year teacher was really interesting, but not so much after in in Mandarin, but not so much after that. But I just there's this series of kind of coincidences that sort of kept me in it until I had done it long enough to really be interested.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And well, it it doesn't also doing it in high school, it doesn't take advantage of all of the excess energy you have as a teenager. It's sitting down with the book where you're talking about talking to someone doesn't really inspire.

SPEAKER_01

That's true.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I mean it was pre-internet, so I mean there's a lot of there there there wasn't a lot of opportunity for actual communication with native speakers or other folks using the language and stuff like that. So I get that, but there's still other ways they could have done it.

SPEAKER_01

Oh yeah. And like I said, my first the first year that I did Mandarin, my teacher was quite engaging and interested, but yeah, not so much after that.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. They they didn't really, but there's I mean, one thing that I learned from teaching language for a while is that you know, there's so much pressure above uh the teachers that they have to do certain things, they have to use certain things. So I mean I my my now that I'm an adult, I have much more forgiving nature towards my high school language teacher, but the system is who I'm angry at now.

unknown

Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_02

They're the ones perpetuating it.

SPEAKER_01

But I think the reality is it's always going to be difficult to learn a language when you don't have the opportunity to be using it because it becomes just something in a book, and that's what makes language interesting. It's alive and you use it to communicate. And when you're learning it out of a book, you aren't using it to communicate, you're just accumulating knowledge.

SPEAKER_02

It's so true. It's so true. And I I don't know how high school language because it's still mostly taught in high school in the US. And I I don't know if they're using those resources, I don't know if they're encouraging students to do extra stuff outside where they can use it as a communication tool with people that have like interests in those kinds of things. I don't know. But I'm I'm kind of hoping. Well, since Tally and I are hoping and dreaming about language learning in the classroom, let's do some other hoping and dreaming about language learning in general. I would really, really like to spread the word about the Changing Scripts podcast. So people like yourselves who are curious about Mandarin Chinese or really want to see the different ways that people develop a language learning story of their own. So let's do this. Can you help me with this? I would like to request that you stop the podcast right now. What podcaster says that? I do. Stop the podcast right now and send the information about the podcast to one person. It's that simple. You can either take a screenshot of the podcast from whatever app you're in, or you can give them the website. Changing scripts.podbeanb E A N dot com. Also, I can be reached on any social media platform with the same username, Steph Fuccio S-T-P-H-F-U-C-C-I-O. Whatever you do, however you share the Changing Scripts podcast, I appreciate what you do, and I hope you have a really good day.

SPEAKER_01

And then when did you move to China? Was that after high school? Yeah, that was after university. So I started Mandarin before I moved to the US. I started Mandarin when I was 11.

SPEAKER_02

How did that happen?

SPEAKER_01

Oh, it's just one of the languages on offer at school. You had to pick a language at grade seven. My options were Japanese, German, and Chinese. My sisters were doing Japanese, Mama done German. So I picked the language that no one at home could correct me in. Totally. That was it. That was the only reason I picked Chinese. So I had two years in Australia doing it in school. Then we moved to the States where I couldn't do it, and Dad told the company that had provide tutors for us all for our languages because we couldn't do Japanese and Indonesian Chinese in school there. My school, by the way, offered I think 12 languages, including Latin and ancient Greek, but no Asian languages at all. So I actually did a year of Latin while I was there. But I did Chinese with a tutor for the two years I was there. And that's when I started to get interested because I really got along with her, and it was more interactive at that point. Like I'm talking to someone and she's making me talk to her in her language, and she was using these great books from Singapore that had pictures that were made for kids. And you know, I'm probably made for someone five, ten years younger than me. But I liked that it was stories and it was nursery rhymes and it was songs and poems, and I found that way more engaging than what I'd been given before. So I got way more into it. My mum got really excited that I was getting into it. Grade 11 and 12 is quite separate for us. So we have grade seven to ten is what we call high school, and grade 11 and 12 we call college. And so, you know, she's applying to the schools, and there are only two schools in the city that had advanced Chinese, and so she tried to get me into the school closest to us that had that, and that was my reason to go to my out-of-area school, so I kind of had to do it then. Had a chance to go to China in grade 12, which kind of cemented that, oh, this really is because I got to use it, you know, had a host student that I stayed with for a week in Hangzhou and went to class with.

SPEAKER_02

Before we go to China, and I know we're in China and I'm saying this jokingly for that grade 12 experience. Let's backtrack a little bit. Did the kanji in Japanese help you at all when you switched to Chinese?

SPEAKER_01

No, I hadn't ever got to kanji. I'd only done is it katakana is the one? I know it's hiragana and katakana, and I always mix up which one's which, but I'd I'd done those sounds that like the phonetics, but not the kanji. So I hadn't done it.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, okay, okay, okay, okay.

SPEAKER_01

Hmm. So I was starting from scratch at 11 with characters.

SPEAKER_02

Do you remember how they st how they taught it? Did they teach it with pinion? Did they teach the characters?

SPEAKER_01

We did characters and pinion both from the beginning.

SPEAKER_02

Like what was the classroom like? Was it mostly the teacher talking?

SPEAKER_01

Were the students talking with each other in dialogues, or what was how we definitely weren't talking to each other in dialogue, not at that school. That was asking for trouble. We had a lot of troublemakers in our class. We were very unruly. I mean, and this is a public school where you had like 30 kids in the classrooms. You've got 30 energetic seventh graders and one teacher. I was amazed they could keep our attention at all, which is why after that year it really went downhill because we didn't have a teacher who could do that. I know we did basic dictation, we had word lists that we were learning.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_01

I don't even know if we had a textbook, to be honest. Oh, you know, it's grade seven. You're not really paying that much attention, I think. And I'm certainly wasn't paying attention to like teaching and learning methods at that point in my life.

SPEAKER_02

Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure.

SPEAKER_01

You were just doing what they were put in front of you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

What was the easiest part for you and what was the hardest part?

SPEAKER_01

I always talk to characters a lot faster than everybody else. I think because I am a visual person, they always made sense to me. I found tones incredibly difficult.

SPEAKER_03

Yep.

SPEAKER_01

Even as a musical person. It wasn't until university that I learned to think of the tone as part of the sound of a word. I was thinking of it as there's this sound plus a tone. I still now, mostly fluent in Mandarin, the words I'm most likely to screw up tones tend to be easier words that I learned when I was younger and I wasn't paying attention to tones.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that is part that I struggle with a lot is pinion being taught separately than the tones, and then they're coming, then they come together in really fast conversations.

SPEAKER_01

Well, we always had like when we learned pinion, we learned pinions with tone markers. We've never got pinion without tone markers. We're taught it from the beginning with tones, but I think it's really hard to conceptually understand that the tone isn't an additional extra, it's part of the sound.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_01

Ma and ma are two different sounds completely. It's not ma with a different tone added, it's two different sounds.

SPEAKER_02

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_01

And conceptually, I think that's really difficult. And I didn't get that until later, until I'd done linguistics and then did a different tonal language.

SPEAKER_02

Started that at 11 years old, and how long did you do that for?

SPEAKER_01

I never really stopped.

SPEAKER_02

Whoa, okay.

SPEAKER_01

I did Mandarin non-stop until I ended up in China. That's not true. I had one six-month break right before I moved to China where I wasn't studying it formally.

unknown

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

But I studied Mandarin formally from the age of 11 till 22.

SPEAKER_02

Wow. Okay. So let's go through. So first was in junior high and then high school and college. And then uni in Australia, yeah. University.

SPEAKER_01

And then a year at university in Beijing.

SPEAKER_02

Wow. Okay, what would you say in all those different contexts, which of those learning contexts was the most productive for you in moving forward and feeling comfortable with the language?

SPEAKER_01

It's a hard question because I'd had 10 years before I got to China, but definitely doing it direct method 20 hours a week in a classroom in China was by far the most productive and helpful in every way.

SPEAKER_02

Savage. And your brain didn't fall out while you were doing that.

SPEAKER_01

No, but I mean it was the first time in a long time I was concentrating on one language at a time. I did more than one at a time most of the time. You know, even in junior high, I was doing Chinese officially in school. But you know, all of grade eight, I was learning Malay unofficially from my friends. Because my two of my best friends were Malay diplomat kids, military kids, and our Chinese teaching was really, really boring. So we spent most of the time, they were teaching me Malay in the back of the class, we weren't learning Chinese. Um like I would like one of them would write me a letter with whatever new vocab she thought I didn't know from it, and then I would try a reply to it, and any words I didn't know, I'd write English, and she'd add that to my vocab list the next time, and she'd correct, she'd give me the corrected letter back and a new letter.

SPEAKER_02

Oh my god, that's very stupid.

SPEAKER_03

Wow.

SPEAKER_01

Like I said, I've always found language fascinating. This wasn't something I like thought, oh, I should do this. It was just my friends were talking and I wanted to be able to understand them. I first learned the first phrases I learned were that's it's not funny and stop laughing, or mean, because they thought it was really funny me trying to learn to speak Malay. So as for the first phrases I learned, like one of them would sneakily teach me a phrase to use to the other one a lot of the time. Because I was never gonna be able to really engage in conversation with them, but just being able to speak a little bit of their language to me felt important.

SPEAKER_02

I think you would know the answer to this question then, because I lived in Kuala Lumpur for about six months and I was teaching English, and a lot of my students, 99% of my students were from other countries coming into Malaysia to study and then go to Malaysian universities. And they always used to ask me, teacher, the locals why do they always say la? Why do they always say la? And now that I see la in Chinese, I'm like, okay, I don't fully understand all of the hats it has yet, because I'm still still learning. But is it a direct one-on-one correlation between the mandar the Pudonqua Law and the not at all completely different?

SPEAKER_01

So I learned Malay from my friends, and then I learned Indonesian at university, which are basically dialects of the same language. It's kind of like Australian and American English rather than English and French language. Sure. So different vocab and different emphasis and different accents, but it's the same core language. Most of the time, the la you're never gonna get in a textbook because it's slang rather than you know standard. And it's very like, yeah, it's making it's softening, making things more casual, making things more gentle. It reminds me more of like a ba in Chinese. That's you're you're turning a statement into a suggestion, like it's that kind of, you know, I'm making my words more gentle and more pol, not polite, but friendly, maybe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It becomes more of a laws of a laugh, but it's the same general idea.

SPEAKER_02

Okay. Sort of like East Coast US kind of you know or yeah or okay, like that kind of Yeah, something like that.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. And I from so not from my own experience, but from my other friends, I know that in Singapore, Malaysia, and different places, they've got like all these different ways in which they can use it to mean all these different things. Um very complicated and like all these different implications you can make with it. But yeah, I'm not cleaned in that.

SPEAKER_02

No, me neither. I just it just hit me when you said that. I was like, oh my gosh, you would know this answer. Because I think I'm very curious about that. Oh my goodness. Let's do the list, shall we? You said you know 12 languages. Uh well.

SPEAKER_01

I don't know. I've studied something like 12. I usually forget them when I listen. So let's see if I can get them all. So first was Japanese, then Mandarin, then Malay, Latin in the US. In my undergrad, I did six, so which includes Mandarin and I usually count Indonesian Malay as just one language, so we won't add an extra one for that. Then I did Canto, Korean, Arabic, Thai. I did some Cambodian when I was living there, Khmer, Khmer, whichever way you want to call it. And then I did Koiner Greek and Hebrew with my master of divinity degree. So I think that's that's 11. That's 11.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, you have a lot of different scripts in there. Was it helpful? I love scripts.

SPEAKER_01

I love learning these scripts.

SPEAKER_02

Honestly.

SPEAKER_01

My last year of my undergrad, I was doing Thai and Arabic. I only needed one more credit. I did one more for my other my major and I need one other credit. And I was trying to continue Arabic or Thai. I'd gotten a slightly better grade in Arabic, but we hadn't done Thai script yet, so I kept on with Thai so I could learn the Thai script. Because we didn't keep the Thai script until second semester.

SPEAKER_02

See, you just my heart just soared. That there's this music to my ears. Music to my ears aren't yet.

SPEAKER_01

I never did learn Cambodian script though, because it's basically like so Thai is like simplified Chinese and Cambodian is the full form, sort of. Like they didn't simplify it, so it's way, way, way complicated. So I never even started with that.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, see, I had heard there was a connection between Sanskrit and Thai.

SPEAKER_01

Is that there is a strong Sanskrit connection, yes. Um so they have letters in Thai that are silent because they're there because they're in the Sanskrit word. So you don't pronounce them in Thai, but you write them because it's a Sanskrit origin word.

SPEAKER_02

Oh my god. I'm gonna have to think about that one.

SPEAKER_01

But the we do it in English all the time, right? We have spelling that's come from another language and we just don't pronounce the you know the T on ballet or whatever. So they do the same thing in Thai. Very true, very true, very true.

SPEAKER_02

Well, I start when I started learning Pudanghwa this time, I decided to do it through reading. I I my main goal, it's still there because it's gonna take me years to get there, is to be able to read. And I can read my HSK2 slash three text, okay, but that's very, very graded stuff. So I can finally read in the characters, but and that's why this is all called changing scripts. Like it started with the YouTube channel where I kept showing people the scripts and like over-describing the meaning in the characters. I mean, starting from radicals all the way through the words and that kind of thing. And then it like bled onto this. So ultimately, I would like to get to the point where I can read like novels and websites and holy cow, social media if I can, and share those kinds of things. So ultimately, I want to get to being able to function within the language written-wise, so I can share those things over in English. So that's the same. So when you said you like scripts, I was like, Yay!

SPEAKER_01

Yes, well, but Chinese isn't so much a script, right? So all the other scripts I've done, they're all alphabets. Korean is an alphabet, Arabic's an alphabet, Thai is an alphabet, um, Chinese is not an alphabet, and so it's a completely different system of thought, not just system of writing, which makes it so much more difficult. You can't just learn a set alphabet and then be able to read.

SPEAKER_02

I know. Depending on how I'm doing in a given day or study a session, I either love that or hate that. Fascinating.

SPEAKER_01

I also find it frustrating to be fairly fluent in the language and still not be able to completely read because I can read an entire sentence and sometimes still not quite understand what it means because I'm like, well, those two characters must be a different compound that I haven't come across. So even though I know both those characters, I don't know what it means in this context. Right. It's so frustrating.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. No, I've heard that. I've heard that what is it, the four character idioms are very different.

SPEAKER_01

Uh yeah, I'm telling you.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Which I haven't even touched yet. I barely know the word.

SPEAKER_01

I know a couple of them, but only like one or two that I might be able to actually drop in conversation. I really should learn more of them, but can't be bothered, to be honest.

SPEAKER_02

I don't know. I'm I I'm looking at it as a global language. I I probably read more stuff online in the diaspora than in mainland Chinese. But yeah, so I'm looking at it as that. So I I'm hoping I don't have to get to that point to learn them because idioms are hard.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Well, my thing is that there was a huge shift for me, right? So I studied for 10 years outside China. So I basically learned to read and write before I got here. And then I learned to speak and listen after I got here. So I had two very different learning experiences, really, and went from trying to read to just being functional. And at that point, reading became less important. I get that.

SPEAKER_02

I get that. So are you saying you didn't you you didn't feel like you could converse in the language before you moved to China?

SPEAKER_01

I don't think I realized how much I couldn't until I got here. Because I I mean I could do basic stuff. So I'd come on that trip in grade 12 and I've been able to have conversations for various reasons. I had the second best Chinese on the trip. There was my Chinese teacher and then me, and that was it in terms of people who could speak Chinese. So I did have a lot of opportunities to use it, and I could carry on basic conversations, and that was really exciting, and it was something that really propelled me to do Chinese at university and get into a program that would send me to study overseas. But when I got here, you know, you do an entry test where they work out what level you're going to be at, and they're testing you on different things. So I don't think they actually tested our spoken, but they tested our reading comprehension and our listening comprehension in particular. Um they test a few different things, and whatever your lowest score was, that's the class they put you in. Yeah. I got assigned to the second term class, so about 10 weeks in, having done 10 years of Chinese. Oh my god. And I get the textbook, I'm like, I can read this entire textbook. I was quite offended actually. I went and complained, and they're like, well, the rule is you have to do one week in the class you're assigned to, and after that week you can switch to whatever level you want. But you have to do one week in the class you're assigned to.

SPEAKER_02

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, this is so annoying. I'll be back in a week. Fine. I go to the class, really, really liked the teacher of that class. He was doing his PhD in Chinese linguistics. He was really loved the students in my class. Like, oh, it's gonna be so sad to leave this class. The second day of class, we have our first listening comprehension class, and it slowly dawned on me, oh, I actually need to be in this class because my listening comprehension was that bad. Wow. Reading the entire textbook, but doing it as listening comprehension, I was struggling to get two out of ten right. And at that point, my whole attitude shifted and I went, okay, I'm gonna stay in this class. My goal now becomes that I don't get by, that I understand and know and can use every word and every grammar pattern in this entire textbook, and that I get my listening comprehension up. I found that for the first year or so I had I was looking at the characters in my head when I was trying to say something because my written was so much stronger than my spoken. And I'd hear someone talking to me, and I'd be like, I bet if you wrote that down, I'd understand it, but I don't. I can't because I'm not an auditory person. I had trouble processing what someone's saying at me. And so yeah, my goals changed at that point, which looking back, it was now the foundation for living here for a long time was a really good thing. But at that time I didn't expect to be staying here long term, so it was just a fortunate thing.

SPEAKER_02

Wow, this resonates with me so much right now. Yeah. I've been doing the HSK series this year because I just needed a huge vocabulary dump. I needed to get past the shock of the characters. I I and I needed a goal. I needed a variety of goals. So I'm doing something.

SPEAKER_01

Having goals and having something external that's keeping you accountable.

SPEAKER_02

Exactly. And the first few months I was kind of just pulling together different resources online, and then I switched over to HSK, and there's a lovely series, the standard course series, where somebody else plans it for you. And I was like, good, done. Being an ex-teacher, I had no wanting desire to create my own curriculum for a couple of years. So I'm just following that. And my reading got like like you were saying, like the characters were a lot easier for me than I had thought, and I really like playing with them. But the listening kicks my ass more than I can say. More than I can say. And I keep putting off that like I want to do online tutoring or something like that where I can take it wherever I go, but I keep getting swamped with keeping up with the schedule to make it to the next test, and I'm just like not motivated to speak at this level because it's just so awful. But I know I'm gonna end up at the point where you were, well, I'll have to go backwards and add the speaking part in. But I I don't know, I've heard people say that the reading and writing component of Chinese and the listening and speaking part almost feel like two different languages. They are, effectively.

SPEAKER_01

It's one of the reasons I think Chinese is so difficult to pick up. So a lot of people they sort of assume once you've lived in a country for a couple years, you've picked up a language and you don't pick up Chinese. No. And I think a large part of that is because the the written and spoken don't reinforce each other. So in most places, you know, you learn a basic alphabet, and then when you're wandering around life, you're looking at signs and you can sound them out and you can start to read them. You can't sound Chinese, so you you're not getting that automatic reinforcement everywhere you go in your environment. You can be completely illiterate here, even if you can speak the language, and you can be completely literate and not be able to communicate. Yeah. Because they are so completely different. I mean, there are connections. Like I found sometimes when I'm reading, if I come across a thing, I'm like, well, it must sound something like that. Oh, it must be this word, because that word makes sense in this context, and that makes sense that this word would look like that. Because there are some connections, but not universal, certainly not able to be sounded out. And so the only people I know who have really gotten super fluent in Chinese, and especially if they've got the written, have done it by doing full time study at some point.

SPEAKER_02

Right, right. Do you think the people That go in and do uh the reading, writing, listening, speaking at the same time. Do you think they have to go slower because it's so much all at once than somebody who would do one set and then move on to the other later?

SPEAKER_01

That's a hard one to answer because again, my experience is really unusual. I definitely got more out of that lower level class because I could already read and write, because I wasn't trying to keep up with the reading and writing. I could focus on the listening and spoken. But for me, because I don't learn well auditory, I needed that extra help. So I don't know. I feel like different people have different strengths, right? Some people are really strong with the oral, some are really strong with the the written. And I think whichever one you're strong at, that's what you end up focusing on, and you end up weak in the other because it's not mutually reinforcing.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were talking about language guilt in a previous uh interview. Because it's like when you do kind of shift a little bit to get better at this one because you realize that's gotten a little weak, then you're like, uh-oh, now I've I've neglected this part. So you go back over and do and like you'll do some writing for a while, and you're like, uh-oh, no, I haven't done listening in a while, and you come back, and yeah, so just the constant maintenance that never seems to be enough. How do you feel about your different language skills in in Mandarin now?

SPEAKER_01

I definitely get language guilt of my writing, reading, writing should be better than it is. But I don't know, I at a certain point I got to the point of going, you know what, my goal is not to be, I don't know, the best everything. I want to be functional, and I am functional.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I can read Tabagore most things. If I have to look up some stuff, that's fine. And I'm very fast at looking it up these days. I can translate into English from Chinese to English quite well. I can get by. What I can't do is read Chinese for fun, not relaxing for me, because it is still work because I still have to look things up. I still have to, you know, and I I keep thinking, you know, if I just made myself do more reading, then it would get easier and I wouldn't have to do that, blah blah blah. And I keep having these plans and ideas, and I should do this, and and I just never do because it's it isn't fun, it is hard work.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And I know that you have to put in that work to get to the place where it's fun, and I just keep having other things that I do instead. So it just is like writing. Um, exactly. Like these other things are more important to me, and that's okay. And I think eventually I've gotten to the point I'm like, well, I'm okay with my level where it is, and you can always be better and you can always do more, but you know, I'm functional, that's all I need, and I'd rather spend my time on other things, and that's okay.

SPEAKER_02

Have you ever gotten to the point with reading where you're reading and not translating it in English in your head? Like you're just okay.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I I don't I don't translate to English if I'm whether I'm speaking or I'm reading, it's in Chinese.

SPEAKER_02

Do you remember at all when that happened? Like a year in, five years in, that kind of.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, it was definitely not a year in. Okay, so there's a couple of different things going on, right? I think partly because I started so young, I didn't question it. I think, especially when you're a bit older and you're learning a different language, every language approaches thought differently. The way you craft a sentence and the way you do things. And so I think being 11, I just didn't question, okay, that's just how it is. I didn't fight.

SPEAKER_02

Can you dig into that a little bit more?

SPEAKER_01

Well, just the fact that you arrange sentences differently. You time is conceived differently, the order in which you put things is different, and there's no reason you can explain why. That's just how it is. Every language does it differently. And so I think I had that instinctively felt comfortable to me before I'd actually thought about it. What was harder for me was being able to do Chinese and English at the same time. So for a long time, after I was able to converse very fluently and easily in Chinese, what I couldn't do was interpret. So I couldn't have you say something to me in English and have me translate it to someone in Chinese and back again. I couldn't interpret conversation because it was like this clunky gear change happening in my head to go from one language to the other.

SPEAKER_03

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_01

And that shift took several years here. I remember several years of always something thought, oh, I can translate, but I can never be an interpreter because I can't think like that. And at a certain point it just happened. It would have been probably when I was working in a bilingual environment. At some point, it just, I don't know. I'd always had like the English part of my brain and the second language part of my brain. And at a certain point it shifted, and I have an English part, a Chinese part, and every other language part of my brain. Um I can switch between Chinese and English. I can do Chinese and English at the same time, and there is no gear share. There is no I'm like, I was doing it this morning. I was talking to my sister on WeChat on a call in English while at the grocery store talking in Chinese, and I had absolutely no conflict doing that. I didn't have trouble switching between the two. I wasn't speaking the wrong language to the wrong person, like, but that took a long time to come.

SPEAKER_02

You mentioned time in there. I love playing with time between English and Chinese. Is there very different if somebody were to say to you, hey, how do people like grammatically speaking, how is time dealt with in Chinese? How would you answer that?

SPEAKER_01

I think I've written a blog post about this. I may have just thought about doing it. So in English, we see the future as forward and up. Chinese sees the future as behind and down. So linguistically in Chinese, you're looking at the past. In English, you're looking at the future.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, oh, oh, oh, okay. You studied Greek. I've heard that hand gesture-wise in modern Greece, in modern Greece.

SPEAKER_01

I haven't done modern Greek. I only did koina, but yeah, okay, keep going.

SPEAKER_02

Okay. I've heard that they when they point, they point in front of themselves for the past because you can see it. Oh, really? Yeah, that's fascinating. I don't, I've never actually heard that from a Greek person. I've just kind of read it on linguistics y websites and whatnot. And so I don't know, but that sounds familiar. Anyway, sorry, you were saying No, that's fine.

SPEAKER_01

Uh I mean that's what I was saying. Like that's that's the direction it goes. And it means that Chinese time can be really counterintuitive to English speakers. I still sometimes have to stop and think because to say, you know, Xia Gue, Xiao being down, xia vi is me, like on top up is last month.

SPEAKER_03

Yes.

SPEAKER_01

I've got xia down. I still Shangha still sometimes feels a little awkward to me.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And same with like, you know, tientian, holdien. Like Hol Tian is behind me, but that's actually the day after tomorrow. Right? Like things like that. It took a long time for that to come more naturally, that concept of time being so different.

SPEAKER_02

I have a flashcard with like morning, afternoon, and morning and evening. Yeah. No, it's morning, early afternoon, like noon and afternoon. And I confused them to all heck until somebody actually said kind of what you're saying now that it's sort of opposite to English. And then it started to, I could at least read them and get the right time of day.

SPEAKER_01

I still didn't introduce them yet. The zhong wu for the middle of the day, the wall is the meridian. That's midday. So shang wool and shu. Yeah, like it's above and below, right? It's the wrong way around. Right. Yeah. Because I think on top of it. As the sun is rising towards the meridian and shia is falling away from the meridian. Keep that. That's how I started that one.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_01

Oh boy.

SPEAKER_02

And without the inf inflected verbs that English has, it seems to be a million other ways to signify time within a sentence. And I still don't really understand a lot of them yet, but I find myself hunting around the sentence for time.

SPEAKER_01

What I've found is that people who know a little Chinese feel like it's very simplistic because it's only things you can't do. Whereas in reality, it's extremely complex, but it's very subtle because it's not, yeah, it's not conjugated to tell you how to do these things, right?

SPEAKER_04

Right, true.

SPEAKER_01

So it's things like kan shu to read, right? Kan wan shu, kan la shu, kan shu la are a slightly different completed version of reading a book. Thai kan shu. Like there's all these little things to like, so it's kind of like having conjugation, except not. Um Chinese is that it's vocab-based grammar. So the verb is always the verb is always the verb. Right. It's just what you do to it in a sentence that changes it. I actually really like that. I like that way of doing things. Well, it's it's easier to read individual words, that's for sure. But very hard to get the implied meanings. That's the tough part, right? And that's why I found listing comprehension really difficult. Because they weren't asking me what's the subject and the object of the sentence. They were asking me more subtle questions about what's happening in the sentence, and that I didn't get.

SPEAKER_02

I'm kind of lost in the thought that you just had. I wonder if that's what the lexical grammar is. If that's no, I think lexical grammar is when shoot, my master's is absolutely not not to its friggin' paper right now. But I think lexical grammar is when grammar and and vocabulary are so intertwined. Yes, that's lexical grammar, yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_01

So yeah, so it's more vocab So Chinese is not about what particle do you put on, what ending do you give to the sentence, it's about what order are the words in. Right. And just the implied meaning.

SPEAKER_02

That's a lot to think about. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01

It means that it takes a really long time to get that kind of native understanding in Chinese. And that even as someone who's fairly fluent, I can miss those meanings sometimes. I mean, there's lots of implied stuff that I get automatically now that a lot of other people don't, but there's still more that I won't get. Yeah. Because it's just I it's really hard to learn that stuff in a textbook. But the only way to learn it in real life is to be in settings where you are able to ask questions and see it in context. So it's really hard.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Well, here's the thing. I've taught first language speakers coming from Chinese into English, both in in China and well, and Malaysia too, and in the and in the US. And I'm always wondering why so many things are missing in English.

SPEAKER_01

As in the complexities that we don't have?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah. Like I understand the verb.

SPEAKER_01

Because of the the history of the language, because English be kind of became a core language in a situation where a lot of people were not speaking as a first language. So you dropped all the hard stuff.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, because all those nuances that we're talking about in the language don't exist. Give us that meaning. They don't even make it over in direct translation form. They're just it's just very, very basic noun verb, yeah, maybe adjective somewhere, kind of like very, very choppy English.

SPEAKER_01

So historically, you had this weird hodgepodge happening in in England at the time, because you had the original Anglo-Saxons, you had some leftovers from Roman occupation, but the Romans have left. You're getting Normans, you're getting Norse, you're getting the Angles, who that's where the English language came from. So what you had is you had a mixture of people, and the Angles language became kind of the sort of more common language that people were speaking together and across those groups, but it meant that most people speaking it wasn't their first language originally, and so they were dropping all the hard bits, and so the those Germanic grammars are dropping out, and they were picking up some of the French grammars because they were easier. That's why we have two different grammar systems, right? So you've got sing sang sung coming out of the Germanic, and then you've got the E D type endings because that's easier. So most modern verbs, we automatically use that sort of the French case ending kind of way of doing it, because it's easier than changing the vows. So you've got this weird hodgepodge because it was second language speakers were pushing the drive to create the language as it is now. And so it was a very odd way that a language could be created, a very strange situation, which is part of why it's such a mongrel language, but also why it works well as a sort of common language because it's pretty not flexible, that's the wrong word. It's not flexible, but it is missing a lot of the nuanced stuff. Yeah, I think English is a really easy entry language, but very difficult to master. It's very hard to sound native in English, written or spoken, unless you really are raised to it because it's weird. Right, right, it doesn't make sense, but it's really easy to get started in English. Whereas Chinese is really hard to get started in.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, no, that's very true. That's very, very true. The initial shock is much, much less.

SPEAKER_01

You've got to learn a lot before you can do anything.

SPEAKER_02

You know what else is shocking? I listen to a lot of podcasts and I watch a lot of YouTube channels. It's part of the reason why all my projects are pod tubes and not just podcasts and not just YouTube channels. However, the language learning process and language learning stories that are being told, I find they're more on YouTube than they are on podcast form. There are very few podcasts that I found that cover language learning stories. This is my call to you. What language learning story-oriented podcasts? Not teaching a language, but stories specifically, people's relationships with multiple languages, their intimate details about learning the language, how they feel about the language, what they do in the language, that kind of thing. I know there's other people doing it. There must be. So if you listen to any podcasts about that, please do send them my way. In social media, my handle's the same literally everywhere. It's S-T-E-P-H-F-U-C-C-I-O. I really look forward to your feedback. Thank you so much for passing on any information and any podcasts that you find. Let's get back to Tanya and her language learning story. Okay, so if we look at measure words, for example, which drive me crazy, but whatever, they exist a few. I was a little bit shocked that there were so many measure words in Chinese because I feel like that's one of those nuances or the specificness of language that was getting lost when Chinese speakers were speaking English. So the fact that that layer was there in Chinese and did just didn't make it over when they'd be speaking English was kind of confusing. I feel like it was just dropped. I assume people would be like directly translating everything from their first language into their second, and I feel like a lot of things were missing that were actually in the first language.

SPEAKER_01

So what do you mean directly translating?

SPEAKER_02

In Chinese, if they were going to say these five books, what would that be in or these these that these ones basic words and they would say five books in English? So there'd be like a this, these is missing, and the sort of well they wouldn't use the j in English, like you wouldn't say this.

SPEAKER_01

You just there's a lot of things you don't use in Chinese, like you don't use personal pronoun pronouns very often. There's all these identifiers you just skip completely. You have to add in if you're doing English, which English speakers speaking, Chinese tend to add in these things that aren't supposed to be there all the time.

SPEAKER_02

I don't know, I don't know. It's it's very, very interesting. I I I don't think I can answer the question that's in my head well enough now. I'll ask you again in a year from now.

SPEAKER_01

Sounds good. One thing I want to say about measure words though is what really helped me is when I realized that in English we use measure words for pieces of a hole. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in Chinese you use it for everything. And so I I think once I finally worked that like I'm like, oh, it's just I have to think of this as a piece of a hole. Like when I think of something as a piece of a hole, like automatically, like it has to have a measure word, it doesn't sound right without it. And that suddenly made it so much easier for me to think of measure words not as silly and annoying, and additional, like, oh no, that's just it doesn't sound right without that.

SPEAKER_02

And that's part of the torture of doing this so late in the game is that I have like 15 years of language teaching under my belt. So I when I hit measure words and started to complain about them, I started to remember the matching activities I did with my students with a package of crisps, because we're using a British English book, and you know, a pack of crayons and all of those quote unquote measure words, you know. And I was like, oh yes.

SPEAKER_04

We do do this.

SPEAKER_02

Memorize, just memorize it, damn it, because you'll need it.

SPEAKER_01

And the other part that helped me the most was learning them in categories. Yeah. All the things that use jung, all the things that use tiao. Yeah, because you can see the logic. Once you put them in a category, like, oh, it's things that are like this, fit in that category. I mean, not always, but that gave me more of a sense of concept and made it easier to pick the right one. And I mean, I still sort of have to just go with gh because I've forgotten whatever the specific one is, but that's okay.

SPEAKER_02

That's fine. They're they're less awful now once I realize that we do have kind of an equivalent.

SPEAKER_01

Do any of the HSK tests with that part of it? I did HSK for like about, I mean, a few months after I got here, and I've never done another one since. I keep meaning to. I reckon I should be about a seven, eight, depending. Well, I should have been an eight, I don't think I am anymore. But somewhere.

SPEAKER_02

I actually changed it. They used to have 12, but now there's only six levels. Oh, I thought it was 11 the last time I remembered looking at it. I think it was only two or three years ago, so it's pretty recent that they should they shifted a lot of it over here.

SPEAKER_01

So I have no idea what I am then. You're probably a six. If six is the highest level, I'm definitely not a six. Um my writing's high enough.

SPEAKER_02

But you can actually take the computer base now and type with pinion in pits.

SPEAKER_01

Oh no, no, I just mean my my my written won't be high. My written is okay, okay. Yeah, that would be that would be tricky. Yeah, five and six. I don't have enough of the um the nuance. I'll know all the words but not know all of the combinations and stuff like that. So I get that. But like I said, I haven't I keep meaning to go back and doing an HSK, but I just keep not getting around to it.

SPEAKER_02

Unless unless you read it, I don't really see why it would be well.

SPEAKER_01

I feel like the re the main reason to have it is like I have the skills, but I can't prove it on a piece of paper. That would be a reason to do it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

But five and six are supposed to get heavy into the literary text, very heavy into history and literature and whatnot.

SPEAKER_01

So that's four would be where I'm I would be able to walk it in without having to actually do much study.

SPEAKER_02

Wow.

SPEAKER_01

That's five, six is where they do that.

SPEAKER_02

That seems really high. Oh my gosh. Yeah, no, it's intense. Anyway, from the first part of the HSK3 book to the second part. So for the first half of the level to the second half, the vocabulary goes from pretty concrete things to very abstract things. So now when I see measure words, I'm excited to see an old friend, versus before like, oh, here we go again. Now I'm like, no, I know you. You're generally a one-character word, and I know you're going to like you are part of something.

SPEAKER_01

So that's really funny.

SPEAKER_02

I hate them a lot less now that I have like influence and and words like that that I'm like, wait, how am I using this word? Okay.

SPEAKER_01

It's just part of who I am at this point, honestly.

SPEAKER_02

I I believe that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I may not be a hundred percent fluid, I'm never gonna be native, but like it is part of who I am.

SPEAKER_02

Oh yeah. I mean, do you feel like you're a different person in some in some regards when you're speaking, Puranghua? Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Like Paya and Tanya are two different people. They've got a lot of overlap, but they're not the same person. Oh how are they different? So Paya is definitely not as articulate as Tanya. Um, she's much more likely to obfuscate and lie and you know, tell a story instead of try and tell the exact truth. Especially before I was married, like, and people keep asking you that question. Like sometimes it's just easier to create a fictional fictitious partner than have we lectured again on how you should get married and have kids already. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, sometimes it's just easier to create a story. And I still do that sometimes, you know. Sometimes just culturally, I find it easier to tell a story that fits their assumptions. If it's not someone I it's someone uh stranger that I'm only gonna see one time, like not someone I'm regularly interacting with, but um yeah, I I don't know, it's I present myself differently. Taya also gets frustrated a little bit faster, I think, than Tanya does.

SPEAKER_02

These were conscious choices, or are they just kind of happening?

SPEAKER_01

No, it's the influence of the language and culture, the way I inter I mean it's not it's not really about the language as it is the context in which you use it. When I'm speaking Chinese, I'm speaking to Chinese people, I'm speaking within a Chinese cultural context, and the way that you present yourself is different. What's acceptable is different. Let's talk about dreams.

SPEAKER_02

You have 12 to access. What what languages do you use?

SPEAKER_01

I dream in the contextually appropriate language. Oh my god. Do you really dream in multiple? I will dream wherever the dream. So most of my dreams are in English because most of my dreams are taking place in an English-speaking country or with English-speaking people. If in the dream I'm in China talking to a Chinese person, I'm gonna be talking in Chinese. Okay. I've had dreams where I'm switching back and forth because I'm talking to my foreign friend while I'm in a taxi in China, so I'm switching from English to Chinese. I've had dreams where there was a book that was in Korean or something like that. I don't know what. But you know, I've had I remember having a dream. I was in Cambodia, I was visiting my best friend. Like, I mean, I physically as a person was in Cambodia when I had this dream. And in the dream, I was trying to talk to, I think I'd come back to my hotel room and I was trying to talk to the cleaning lady who was in the room when I got there, but my Cambodian wasn't very good, and I was speaking to her in Mandarin, and I even in the dream I knew that Mandarin was the wrong language, but I couldn't think of the Cambodian words. And my best friend came and was laughing at me trying to speak Chinese and knowing that I'm speaking the wrong language, right? So even in the dream, like I I, yeah, my brain likes to organize its languages into the right places.

SPEAKER_02

Oh my god. Have you ever dreamt in a language that you don't actually know?

SPEAKER_01

Not that I can think of, not that I'm aware of, certainly. I've definitely had like I remember one of the times where there was Korean writing in a dream that I knew even in the dream wasn't real, like it wasn't correct. It was squiggles. It was supposed to be Korean, but I knew it wasn't actually Korean.

SPEAKER_02

Right, right.

SPEAKER_01

And I've had dreams where I'm trying to read something in Chinese and the characters aren't fitting what they're supposed to fit, like the characters aren't right, and I know they're not right, or something like that. My brain is much too rational, even in dreams. Okay, so my favorite example of how rational my brain is is you know, dating my husband long distance.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I've had dreams where he was in the dream, but even in my dreams, he was still in a different country. I couldn't, my my brain couldn't put us in the same country in my dreams.

SPEAKER_04

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01

But when I was here visiting, he would show up in my dreams, like in the same place. Because now I was in the right country. It was so ridiculous. Like, come on. This is the whole point. My brain should be able to put us in the same place when I'm dreaming, at least, right? But no, apparently not.

SPEAKER_02

No, it's better. It's better. I've had periods of time where my husband actually is remote right now, but where he's been remote for longer stretches. And it's better if they're not, because the if in the dream they're physically there and then you wake up and they're not, it's worse. Trust me. That's a good point. Really crap. Yeah. No. So that's like your brain is doing your service there. So you've got 12 languages, Tanya. Do you want to learn any more?

SPEAKER_01

Oh yeah. I love language. I would always take an opportunity to learn another one if I if it came up. Especially if I lived in another place with a language, I definitely want to work on it.

SPEAKER_02

Are there any on your wish list for the future?

SPEAKER_01

Oh gosh. See, there's a big difference between my real wish list and my theoretical wish list. So my theoretical wish list, I'd love to have French because I think it'd be a really helpful language for a lot of reasons, but I really don't want to actually learn French. I really hate learning European languages.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, I'm looking, and you don't know, you don't have many in that.

SPEAKER_01

No, I avoid them. Arabic was way too European for my liking. I mean Semitic, but I much prefer my Asian languages. Why? Mandarin's really where I started, and so that concept-based rather than grammar-based, like different kind of grammar. Like I like that lexical grammar better. So what I didn't like about Korean was the grammar was too rigid for me, to my liking. I'm not I'm not sure what it is. I think for me, because I'm Australian, Asia was always closer.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

I had more friends from Asian backgrounds. I was Asia felt like a closer place to visit, so they feel like more practical languages to me. I think that's a large part of it. I've used all of my languages at least a little bit in some context.

SPEAKER_02

So I think I veered you off of the list.

SPEAKER_01

You were saying the theoretical list and then the For a long time Canto was high on the list, but I was decided that there's it's way too hard to learn and I have English and Mandarin, so I can live without it.

SPEAKER_03

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

But in terms of languages, I think would be interesting to learn. Like I'd love to go back and sort of fix up some of them. I'd really love to go back and get my Thai conversational actually useful. That's definitely that's a that's a real shelf dream I'd love to do, spend some time there studying at some point. I would love to live somewhere that I learned another language. Because for me it's a very practical thing, right? I I want to learn languages because I want to use them, because they teach me something, because they're helpful. More of a theoretical, I'd like to learn languages rather than having ones I want specifically to learn.

SPEAKER_02

Right, right, right. With all the different scripts that you've learned, what would you say is the most interesting difference between them? I don't even know if that's a question, but vowel placement, definitely vowel placement.

SPEAKER_01

So I've done Greek, Hebrew, Korean, Thai, Arabic scripts and Chinese scripts. Well, every language has vowels. It's a matter of how they show them. Uh right. That's why I say vowels are fascinating in scripts. So with Semitic languages, they often just drop writing the vowels in. Um so that's Arabic and Hebrew both will just not write the vowels all the time. Or more importantly, what they'll do is they'll write in the long vowels and not the short vowels, is more likely what happens. What I find interesting is the placement of those vowels, you know, where you put them. And one thing I found really confusing when I hit Hebrew was my brain was mixing up Thai and Hebrew vowels, which everyone was like, What? Like, no, no, but wait. Because in Thai, vowels can go in all sorts of different places. So some vowels go before the consonant, some go after, some go above, some go below, and some go around, like especially dip and trip thongs.

SPEAKER_02

You're talking about in the mouth, right?

SPEAKER_01

No, no, no. I'm talking in the script.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, in the script. Okay, sorry, I don't know much about that script. Okay, gotcha.

SPEAKER_01

So, in if I write my name tanya in Thai, if I use that a vowel, I would write the ah and then the t and then the n and then the y and the a. The at is a vowel that goes before the consonant it's attached to. So it's at t to say ta.

SPEAKER_02

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

Right? So generally speaking, e vowels are above and o vowels are below. So the ooh, o are below. And Hebrew was the opposite. The e's were going below and the ooh's were going above. And I spent months mixing them up because my brain had been primed by the Thai way of doing vowels. Korean is an alphabet, but they form it into characters, right? So Tanya in Korean, you have T and A next to each other, the N underneath them, and then a separate character, the YA.

SPEAKER_02

How how do you keep them separate?

SPEAKER_01

Well, like I said, I have the English, Chinese, and everything else parts of my brain. So whatever language I'm doing, when I first started out, before I had a separate Chinese section, whatever language I was doing, if I'd forgotten something, I was missing something, my brain would automatically pull Chinese because it was one I knew best. I found doing Latin in high school in the States, I would often start a sentence with war. Like I would write the character war and then write most of the sentence because the pronouns in Latin were folded into the into the you didn't write it separately most of the time. And so, but my brain as an English speaker wanted to have a pronoun at the start of the sentence, and so I would just fill it in in Chinese before I wrote my Latin sentence. And it wasn't deliberately, it was just happening. But after my Chinese part of my brain showed up, I found that I would borrow from other languages and not from Chinese because now it was in a separate part of my brain. And so I would pull from Indonesian frequently and sometimes Cambodian, because that was one I'd done most recently before these last two. I only have trouble when I'm missing a word, like when I'm like, I don't know what the next word is, and my brain tries to fill in the gap with a different language. So that's why I think getting the vowels in Hebrew wrong was really throwing me because it was the only time that I've really confused languages like that. Wow.

SPEAKER_02

I could think of so many people in my master's program for it's for a second language acquisition who would love to study you.

unknown

Really?

SPEAKER_02

Not not in a weird dissecty kind of way, but just uh how did you do this?

SPEAKER_01

In a question and answer kind of following you in your but I think doing two at once is a big part of that for me, right? So I was most of my studies, I've done two at once. So I did, you know, it's Malay and Chinese in middle school, and then it was Latin and Chinese in the US. I was just doing Chinese for two years at the end of high school in university. First year it was Chinese and Indonesian, the next year it was Chinese and Korean, no, Chinese and Canto, third year is Chinese, Korean, and fourth year is Arabic Thai. So it just became normal to me to be having multiple ones going at once and separating them out as just different subjects. The hardest was doing Korean Chinese only because I would have I was doing an advanced Chinese unit that semester where I was studying modern Chinese literature in Chinese. So the lectures were in Chinese and you had to write essays in Chinese, and the class was half native speakers. And but but the way my schedule worked out, I would have three hours of Korean, walk to the next classroom and do an hour of a Chinese lecture on modern Chinese literature. And like my brain was just mush. It wasn't a switching languages problem, it was just a straight-up exhaustion problem.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, yeah, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_01

Even to do that in your first language back to back would be tiring, and then to do it in two foreign languages, but that was also the semester or the year that I was doing linguistics, and linguistics just opened up so much to me because you know, by the time I hit linguistics, I had done one, two, three, four, five languages before I got to linguistics. I didn't know linguistics existed. It was one of those things I'm like, how have I not known this existed my whole life? And you know, so I had practical examples already for a lot of the stuff we were discussing, and it was explaining things to me. Doing linguistics and then doing Thai the next year is why I finally got, I finally understood the concept of tones. It was really, really helpful. And so that actually was made it easier almost to be doing those two together because I had this extra layer coming in and helping me.

SPEAKER_02

So, what I love about what you're saying is that although languages come relatively easy, there is effort, and that's really here. Yeah. So, with you know, AI, machine learning, all the technology that's coming up and becoming more and more prevalent in our daily lives, if they did come up with the chip, would you want to be able to implant something in your brain to just get access to any language?

SPEAKER_01

Well, that depends how I have access to it, right? Is it gonna auto-translate for me? Am I gonna still hear the original, see the original? If I could switch it on and off, then yes, definitely. I wouldn't want everything auto-translated. Kind of like, you know, Facebook tries to auto-translate stuff for you, and you can tell it to turn off the translate function for certain languages, or tell it to never translate Chinese for me or something like that.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. So you can turn it off, you can turn it on it only if you needed it or wanted it.

SPEAKER_01

Then you wouldn't language is all about communication, right? And it would be lovely to have the ability to actually communicate without the barriers of getting languages wrong. Except that there is no such thing as a perfect one-to-one translation because there's so much extra information coded into language, and you miss that. And that's why I love learning languages and studying them because you pick up things you would not know otherwise. And especially a language like Chinese, there's so much coded because it's such a concept-based language, there's so much that you can never put into the translation.

SPEAKER_02

You've mentioned that phrase, concept-based language, a few times. Can you dig into that a little bit?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, I think it's part of what separates Chinese out from so many other languages, is because it is pictorial, it never moved away from being concept-based. So mostly if you go way, way, way back to like really early language, generally maybe you'll start with a concept, then you string some concepts together to make a sentence, right? We're talking like cave drawing type stuff, right? Like really early language. And at some point we develop phonetics and we write out the sounds of what we're saying, and you know, the system develops from there. Chinese never gave up the pictures that are concepts. So in Chinese, you don't have the phonetic sound of what I'm saying, you have this concept plus this concept equals this concept. English words tend to be concrete and discrete in a way they're not in Chinese. In Chinese, for example, the water, the word shui for water, it doesn't mean H2O. It means the concept of liquid, basically. That's why if someone if someone says, What do you want to drink? and you say shui, they're like, Shama Shui, what kind of shui? Because as an English speaker, you think, well, I just said water, that's what I want. Well, they're like, No, you said you want a drink of something liquid. You have to specify what kind of shui. So much of Chinese, each word is this nebulous concept that you then specify by adding more words to it, adding more concepts to it. That's why you get those fun translations like electric shadow and electric brain, because you're adding these two concepts together to create the concrete word.

SPEAKER_02

See now, yeah. Hey, I just I went to a translation event uh recently, and one of the translators from Chinese to English was talking about the ambiguity of Chinese and that too many translators overexplain when they translate it into English, and they need to leave room for that space. Is that part of that concept?

SPEAKER_01

Yes, exactly. That's exactly what it is. It's why Chinese poetry is notoriously difficult to translate because the poems are intended to be ambiguous. You're supposed to bring your own meaning to it in a lot of ways. And so much of Chinese language is really difficult for English speakers when we're used to this very precise everything's explained for us. We want all those pronouns that aren't there. At a certain point, when you get more comfortable and familiar with Chinese, not as a textbook language, but as a language you're using every day and seeing other people use. I mean, I got when I stopped dropping, I started dropping the pronouns. I didn't I realized I didn't need them. It was implied. I know I know who we're talking about. I don't need the pronouns specified. It doesn't want that same specificity, but it's going to imply all these deep things, right? And that's where it gets difficult. It's what which implications need to be spelled out. What I was talking with a friend about recently was the how to say think. So usually you get taught that the word for think is like x or something like that. But that doesn't work in most contexts because there's all these different ways to say depending what kind of thinking you're talking about. If you're saying I think like I thought this, but I was wrong, you use i we. If you said I think this, but I'm not entirely sure, but I'm pretty sure like your m way, if it's more of a if I have a feeling it's gandry, you know, it depends what kind of thinking these implied meanings. And so you in English, each time you translated it, you're gonna say I think. You're gonna say use the same verb think, but it's gonna imply something different. And you know, do you say I thought but I was wrong in your translation? No, you're just gonna say I thought. And in an English speaker, we usually get the implication that I thought this means that I was wrong from the context, but maybe not, but you can't just you can't translate all of those pieces, right? The complexity where languages don't completely overlap each other.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, for some reason, within the first three levels of HSK, I have about three or four words for worry.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, really? Which one? Like Banshin.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that one's that one's the new one. And uh Jou Jou. See, I'm I'm back so Jauji. Jouji, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's another one. And I forget the third one because that one's really, really, really new. But I'm like, wait, should I should I be worried that there are so many words for worried in the first few child like well for me, those I wouldn't translate Jalji as worried usually.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, I guess it was to me, yeah. Jalji has a sense of urgency to it. Dan Shin has a sense of just that worry inside yourself. Jalji is more like an emergency, kind of urgent kind of thing to me. But it says they're saying, you know, relax, like you don't have it's like it doesn't have to be this fast, it doesn't have to be immediate, like give it some time. Dansin is like, don't be worried about this, you know.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And looking at the characters, that makes complete sense to me. Because when I see the the Shin one, I think it's an infernal, quieter kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01

Because it's heart, it's inside you.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So that actually makes a lot of sense. Now I I haven't gotten that from the context yet because two of the three are really, really new, but I was just looking at going, why are there so many words for worry?

SPEAKER_01

Why are we talking part of why I think what's really hard about Chinese is that you you need so much context to explain it's seeing people use it. So for me, the huge, the biggest step for me in going from basically functional to fluent was working in an open plan office where I was the only foreign employee. The boss was American, it's an American couple around the company, but other than that, I was the only foreigner. And I'm in this open plan office, and so all day, every day, I'm seeing and hearing my co-workers use Chinese and seeing them speak. So I'm seeing the same sort of five, six, seven, eight people speaking differently to you know, trying to coax a supplier to do something for us, to do a favor for us, trying to like this recalcitrant supplier who hasn't done what they said they would do, or they're joking with the DHL guy when he's we're trying to keep him occupied while we're waiting because we haven't quite got the package ready for him to take, or they're chatting with each other, or they're talking on their phone to their partner, or like they're like complaining at their mum on the phone, or they're you know, the the seeing the same people use the same words in different contexts, how they would change their tone of voice to change the meaning, how they would and I still remember the first time I successfully used Chinese sarcasm in that office, in that context, when I was learning how to use the language to convey different meanings, which is not about what the textbook says, it's about how is the language used in context by people. Yeah, and I think that's in every language something that is really it's a really hard jump to move because it requires you to be in a context where you know enough to understand what people are saying and can start to put those pieces together. And like, I don't know how you teach that. I don't know that you can, I think it's only an experience there.

SPEAKER_02

I agree in teaching English, like we'd use video clips and different kinds of things for our advanced students to try to expose them to it, but I was like, I can't teach you how to use these, I can't teach you humor in the language because depending on where you are in the English speaking world, native or non-native, it's gonna be different. Exactly. So I I can expose you to different things, but that's then you have to go out into the world and and figure them out where you are using them. Okay, so 25 years of learning a language, what is the most helpful resource that someone can put their hands on? So not a work environment because that's can't buy that. Is there a useful resource that you could recommend to folks at any level? It doesn't have to be at the beginner level, but at any level.

SPEAKER_01

The first like three or four examples that come to my mind all rely on a native speaker being part of the equation. Um, and I'm trying to think of something that doesn't involve that. Watching soap operas.

SPEAKER_02

Why soap operas?

SPEAKER_01

Because they tend to be very repetitive. You get the same phrases over and over again, you get the same information over and over again, right? Um, because I mean think of like you know Days of Our Live of All and the Beautiful. You can skip it for a week and you come back and watch it and you still know what's going on because they repeat the same things over and over again, right?

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, true.

SPEAKER_01

So soap operas can be really helpful for that. They tend to have lots of big dramatic pauses so you can catch up what was just said. Um do you have any shows I found most helpful for Chinese? Was I honestly cannot remember the name of it because it was like, I don't even know, like 2005 I was watching this. And my at the time I had an American flatmate and a Chinese flatmate, and a Chinese flatmate loved this show and would watch every night at 10 o'clock. We'd watch this show. And so I started watching it with her, and it was a Russian soap opera dubbed and subbed into Chinese. And why it's felt was it was these Russian names that are like five, ten syllables long, transliterated into Chinese, and so you've got this huge like gap where you hear them go, Anasatasiya Makasamov, Allah something right now. It was a big gap to help you catch up on whatever you just heard because you don't have to pay attention for those like couple of seconds. It was great. Oh my gosh. And that was only my second year in China, it was around the time I started in my first bilingual job, and so it was really good timing for me to be getting that kind of helpful input as well. And then sometimes if I was at home during the day, there was like a communist revolution era period drama that I would watch. The same idea, right? Yeah, like you get to hear the stuff over and over again, like you didn't catch it this the first two times, but the third time you're like, Oh yeah, this is what they're talking about. Soap operas can be really helpful, I think. Because more modern shows, the more interesting shows, they speak really fast, they use a lot of slang.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Soap operas are a bit dumber, so they're better for language learning.

SPEAKER_02

So they use more base, not basic, more standard put on than slang.

SPEAKER_01

I'm not sure they use more maybe they do. It's just more that it's more repetitive. You get way more chances to keep catch up.

SPEAKER_02

So that's a really, really, really good tip. Do you do you consume a lot in Chinese in your entertainment in your life?

SPEAKER_01

It goes up and down, but at the moment, not really. Yeah, not much at the moment, actually. I mean, I read a lot on Taobao. You read on Taobao? Well, yeah, because I'm reading the descriptions of what I want to order and okay.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, for the listeners, it's sort of like Amazon, only a million times bigger. Anyway, um so you're reading the description. Oh, right, right, right, right.

SPEAKER_01

And so currently I'm learning a lot of photography, vocab, because my husband's a photographer and I've started helping out the business. Um, especially with ordering products and stuff. So I've been learning all the vocab around that.

SPEAKER_02

That is very specific vocabulary. Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_01

I feel like that's with Chinese, everything is specific vocab, right? So it's one job I had to learn publishing vocab, and another I had to learn textile vocab. But I also find that it's logical to a degree. Like when I when I hear a word, I'm like, oh yeah, that makes sense. Now I can remember that. Like the first time I heard the word lens in China's with Jingpol. I'm like, oh, that makes perfect sense. Jing pole. Yep, together that makes sense that that would be lens. And so when I've heard it once, I now know the word. I find that at this point, then the vocab acquisition is much faster. There's a lot of vocab I don't know, but when I went to go learn it, it happens quickly.

SPEAKER_02

Is it Xiaoxin or Xin Xiao that's careful? And it's like Xiao Xin. Yeah, that one that happened with that one for me.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02

That makes complete sense.

SPEAKER_01

When I'm talking to someone and I don't know the specific word, I talk around it and they're like, oh, you mean dot dot dot. I'm like, oh yes, that's what I mean. As soon as you say it, not just because I've described it, but like, oh, that makes perfect sense, and that would be the word.

SPEAKER_02

That is one part that is beautiful. Keeping in mind that in the podcast, I interview folks like yourself who learned language, well, you didn't learn it as an adult, but learned it after your first language. And I also interview native speakers who grew up with Mandarin Chinese and then learn other languages. What questions that I haven't asked you might be interesting for either one or both of those populations?

SPEAKER_01

How you learned emotional vocabulary. Because I find that in When you do your classroom learning, your official learning, you tend to it's much more intellectual. I didn't learn how to communicate feelings until I was talking with locals and they were talking to me about stuff. Actually, the way this really happened most for me was a friend who she was Chinese, and we mostly spoke Chinese to each other because very early in our friendship, my Chinese became better than her English because I was still studying when we met, and it was switched somewhere on the line. So these days we're almost completely in Chinese when we communicate. And uh so certain uh early in our friendship, she was dating a guy who was American-born Chinese, so he could speak Chinese, but he couldn't read and write. So when they were together in person, they spoke Chinese to each other, but when they were apart, like you know, even if it was just texting during the day, while he was on business, they wrote emails and text messages in English. And so she was asking for my help with translating some of what he was saying and with composing some of her own stuff, which is like, I want to make sure I get this right, and I'm not sure I'm getting the implications correct in English, or I'm not sure I'm understanding his implications. And so for me, that process was huge, actually for both of us, of learning that emotional vocabulary and that way of speaking personally in another language, having someone to talk it through with, like, so how would you say this? And when you say this, what do you mean? And talking about having that conversation around those things, but I don't know how you learn that otherwise. I mean, it's not something I would have thought to try to learn, but it's still one of the things I find harder. You know, I get to a certain point and I've run out of ways to express my emotion about something.

SPEAKER_02

Right, right, right. Well, that's interesting. I I haven't gotten emotional in Chinese yet. I can barely order a coffee, but um you think I'm kidding.

SPEAKER_01

But I feel like that would be a really interesting thing to talk to people about. It would. How do you learn that? How do you get to being able to talk about that?

SPEAKER_02

Because teaching languages, like we would do things like customer complaints and like getting angry and being sad and talking to your friend if something bad happened to them. But it was a very delicate how you feel about things in the very. We talked about like what you would say in the conversation, but we never got into that, what you're what you're tapping into and expressing how you feel during that period.

SPEAKER_01

I think that that's part of what's hard about becoming fluent in the language and why you're a different person in different languages, is because your ability to articulate how you feel is limited by your linguistic capacity.

SPEAKER_02

Definitely, definitely. Oh, I have a new last question then. That wasn't the last one. I lied. Jeremy Tang was on here recently, the author, translator, playwright, and Bollywood star. He wanted to know what language people felt they had ownership over.

SPEAKER_01

Ooh. And see, this is why I tell I say I've studied all these languages, but I only feel ownership in English and Chinese. It would be the way to express it. Like I can I could do some basic, like give a taxi directions or basic greetings in like maybe half a dozen other languages, but I don't feel any sense of ownership with any of the other languages.

SPEAKER_03

Right.

SPEAKER_01

Um Chinese, like you know, is a language that I feel is mine in a way. It is part of who I am. I feel like I have a right to be connected to this language. Is it equal to your ownership over English or are they different? No, definitely different. In some ways, I feel like the Chinese is much more hard won to get to a point that I feel that I have a right to be seen as a Chinese speaker. I actually had a really powerful experience about after a year after I moved to Australia. So there were a couple people that I lived on campus with who I would speak Chinese with, one from Singapore, one from Taiwan, like different places. There was one girl who was Malay Chinese and would never speak to me in Chinese. Even if I was in a group of people who were speaking Chinese, she would address me in English. Even if I said something in Chinese, she'd address me in English.

SPEAKER_04

Sure.

SPEAKER_01

I I forget something had had prompted this, but she came and she said, you know, I have always underestimated how much Chinese is part of you, and that it's not like a novelty that you really do speak Chinese. And I didn't acknowledge that, and I'm sorry. And from now on, I will speak to you in Chinese. And it wasn't the language wasn't important, it was the recognition that you are allowed to be a Chinese speaker, right? Kind of. You know what I mean? That I recognize you as a Chinese speaker, even if you're white. And that was hugely powerful for me that someone would recognize my ownership of that language.

SPEAKER_02

Did you ever find out what got her to that point where she realized that and then made that?

SPEAKER_01

I there was something I can't just can't remember right now off the top of my head, but there was something that had happened. But something had clicked for her that you know, you lived there a long time, you really do speak this language. You don't have to be ethnically Chinese to be a Chinese speaker. Like something clicked for her.

SPEAKER_02

Right, right. Do you get a lot of that resistance from folks when you try to use No, actually.

SPEAKER_01

I don't think I've ever had that resistance from local Chinese people, only from um overseas Chinese people, local Chinese. The best is when they hear me speak before they see me. That's hilarious. Because they have a very clear Beijing accent these days, too. There's this huge double tape and they turn around and like, wait, that is not the face I was expecting that voice to have come in. So that's really fun. But no, there's generally from local Chinese, there's a real sense of it's not pride, but like there's an appreciation that I have taken the time to really speak their language.

SPEAKER_03

Right.

SPEAKER_01

And I think there is a set well no, it's not pride, but like of that they're being seen that I've valued their language.

SPEAKER_02

And I think they understand the the mountain that it is to go from other languages into Chinese, and when you do anything, they're like, you've you've tried. You've you've not tried, but you communicated something in it. Thank you. I think there is a certain for that.

SPEAKER_01

And then I often get really interesting questions because I get here's the question I've always wanted to ask a foreigner, but I didn't have someone who could answer this question. So I get a lot of really interesting questions.

SPEAKER_02

Like, what's the most interesting one?

SPEAKER_01

Some of them are like, especially if they're Chinese people who spend a lot of time around foreigners and have observed foreigners and don't understand certain aspects of the way they interact. Yeah, like I know a lot of people who live in like the expat bubble, and so they live in these big houses, and they kids go to international schools and they have nannies and drivers and cooks and all this kind of stuff, right? And I'll like I've had times where I've had dinner with someone and they've sent me home with their driver, and the driver will be like, so I think Chinese, not English. Like, because these are the people who communicate in English with their employees, right? A lot of the time. And then there'll be this, so and these questions come out about the way foreign families interact, and yeah, like questions about why don't, you know, why aren't they intergenerational family units? Like, why don't grandparents live with their kids?

SPEAKER_04

Sure.

SPEAKER_01

I get questions about eating habits, like, you know, do foreigners eat rice, do foreigners eat pork or whatever it is, you know. Questions about like views on politics or yeah, all kinds of stuff.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that is I sorry, I sighed right there because there's the the China foreigners dichotomy where China is one place and foreigners are all the same outside of that, and that just frustrates me sometimes. So that's why I was for that moment not free what you were saying. Just to clarify. Because there's there's a lot of different types of foreigners.

SPEAKER_01

But I think when linguistically it's either you speak Chinese or you don't, and if they've only ever lived in China, like they haven't seen those different things. And sometimes I do get questions along those lines, and sometimes I'm able to add stuff where I'm like, well, this group, maybe from this country, might think this, or from this scenario might think this, and from Australia, we're more this way. And yeah, um, I have had I have had Chinese people apologize for misguessing, like they'll guess I'm from America and then apologize when I'm not, or something like that. A lot of people, especially when my hair used to be a bit more red, I would get Russian all the time, was the guess.

SPEAKER_02

Right. Oh my goodness. So thank you so much, Tanya, for coming on Changing Scripts. This has been an absolutely illuminating conversation.

SPEAKER_01

I'm glad it's it's always fun to talk about this stuff.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Changing Scripts Podcast. Just a quick reminder that all the information is available in the show notes, which, if they're not available in your podcast app, you can find them at changing scripts.podbean.com. That is changing scripts with an S at the end.podbean.com. You can also find all of my podtube experiences at Steph Puccio, S-T-E-P-H. Weebly W E E B L Y dot com. I have three different podtube experiences because I am that crazy. I really look forward to your feedback and if you're interested in being a guest on the podcast. Thank you so much and slash in more soon.

SPEAKER_00

Membership fees apply after free trial. Cancel anytime. You know what's wrong with health and fitness? You weaponize it against yourself. Why didn't you go to the gym today? You're so lazy. Ah, why did you eat that? You have no self control. Stop it. At Beachbody, we think training and caring for your body in a way that works best for you should be about loving yourself. Let us help you without all the judgment. Here's how. Go to Beachbody.com to claim your free membership and start feeling great.