SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Changing Scripts Podcast. Every Sunday we'll have one of two types of episodes, all of them revolving around learning and using Mandarin Chinese. One type of episode will be my updates on what I'm learning, how I'm learning it, different quirks within the language, and sometimes information about China itself since I am living in Shanghai, China right now. The second type of episode where I'm interviewing people that are either learning the language like I am, or people who grew up with Mandarin Chinese and have learned other languages. These kinds of podcasts are passion projects. They're created from a place of deep interest, and they need to find other people that have those interests. And the best way to do that is word of mouth. So you can go fill out an Apple Podcast review if you really want to, but honestly, I'd much rather you tell a few of your friends about this podcast. Thank you so much. This week on the Changing Scripts Podcast, we're going to get to the viewpoint of Hol Weiwei, her English name is Liz, who is a native Mandarin Chinese speaker. She grew up with both Hunongha and Shanghai, and then she learned English, and actually she was reading science fiction in English when she was already 14 years old. She is now a simultaneous interpreter, and we'll talk about what that entails in this interview. Liz's viewpoints on how she learned both Chinese as well as Shanghaese and English are really, really fascinating. Because Liz is an interpreter, she dives into different layers of differences in languages than we've talked about necessarily. She dives into the trying to get the personality characteristics of the speaker in the interpretation that she's doing for her work. We talk about books because she's a book lover. What language she dreams in, different movies and stories that come up in both languages. And Liz, just so you know, is a natural storyteller. So there are going to be moments where you're gonna want to sit back with whatever beverage in whatever comfy chair you are and just absorb her gifted storytelling abilities. Without further ado, here is Liz. Thank you so much, Liz, for joining us today on Changing Scripts Podcast. Thank you for inviting me. Um can you quickly introduce yourself to our listeners?

SPEAKER_03 2:12

Hi, my English name is Elizabeth, and my Chinese name is Hua Weiwei. Hua is the surname. Literally means fertilizer land, which is very rare in the Chinese surname system. And Weiwei means the rose that survives. So I'm really happy that my parents named me in this way.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

That's beautiful. What should I call you today? Whatever you please. We usually start with your language background and then we move into languages learned later on. Let's dig into your first language. What was your first language that you learned?

SPEAKER_03 2:45

Mandarin is my mother tongue. I'm a Chinese and I was born and raised in Shanghai. I had um I have a a fair good competency in Shanghai dialect, but not as well as Mandarin. Mandarin is the language that was taught, spoken in school and at home.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Okay. Do you have any memories of learning the language, either speaking, writing, reading, any part of it?

SPEAKER_03 3:10

I'd like to think that my mom's wise, so I was taught by I think from age three to age five, I was taught ten characters per day by my mom. And I used to practice two hours a day, just writing these characters when my mom taught me what it meant. And the funny funny thing is my mom actually taught me to run characters for ups and downs. So throughout the entire elementary school, I confuse up and downs all the time in writing checks. But I am I'm very fortunate to to have my mom teaching me these characters when at the age maybe around four. That was the best time to memorize, to learn language.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

Absolutely. Now 10 a day sounds like quite a bit.

SPEAKER_03 3:58

It sounds like a lot, but it did not feel like a chore when I was little.

SPEAKER_02 4:02

I just saw that, oh, I was joined to little painting and little pictures.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

That's what I saw. I have to ask you about how you did it. I have flashcards behind you, they're really awkward and horrible, and I'm sure they're they don't look like the words they're supposed to. But I write them in pencil because every now and then I realize how horrible they are, and I erase it and I redo it. But I've been told that the Hansa characters look very different if they're written in pen versus pencil. So what did you use when you were practicing?

SPEAKER_03 4:28

I think I started with pencil, and it's also recommended somehow that the pencil has a softer touch because the tip is made of um carbon, so it offers a softer touch. Okay. It's easier to write on. When you have a ball pen tip or you have one of those phantom phantom pens, then the the strokes has to uh requires more strength or power to write them. So the character comes out a little bit different.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

Right, right, right. And how many times did you write each one?

SPEAKER_03 4:59

They always say that a character you have to write it, literally use it for more than twenty times. But I think the more the better. Because somehow that you're not only writing uh a picture, there is some some heritage, some cultural heritage behind it because Chinese character is evolved not from letters but from small pictures that you used to write on the walls. Now we study simplified Chinese character because this is simplified for the Chinese government to eliminate illiteracy in China and that's a necessary move. But the more complicated traditional characters are the real Chinese Mandarin characters that evolved from pictures. Yep. It literally tells a story.

SPEAKER_01 5:44

Some people, when they're a child, they really start to like to read or they really like to talk, whether it's to their stuffed animals or to their family members. Some people lean towards a specific language skill that they really like. Did you have one of those that you really like to do?

SPEAKER_03 5:59

I wasn't much for speaking, that's for sure, because I was very shy and timid, and I had a bit of a stutter. So that further made speaking to other people a little bit off-putting. So I was more about a doer, I was I was very much into reading and I never liked fiction facts and science, it's always my thing. But I loved science fiction from eight to now, non-stop.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

Yeah, you're still reading it.

SPEAKER_03 6:22

Absolutely. I thought all I've read all the classics, some when I was capable, sci-fi novels, I read them almost exclusively in English.

SPEAKER_01 6:31

Yeah. What as a kid?

SPEAKER_03 6:34

Since age 14.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

I've been told that in Mandarin there is a lot of science fiction being written. Yeah. Um did you have a favorite science fiction book or series in either either or both languages?

SPEAKER_03 6:46

I read science fiction both in Mandarin and in English, and somehow that I'm not saying all of them are, but science fiction I think has been fostered and developed longer in Western countries than it is in China. And then somehow some of these classic uh authors, they their their their their capabilities and their command of words when language goes beyond just imagination, they connect really well with with the with the audience, the readers. And they manipulate how they think and feel really well in a way that I I I truly appreciate. But if you if you look at in the past 30 years, is probably when the um uh Chinese science fiction started to develop and um most of them has a bit of a undertone of this male chauvinist in there that makes me a little uncomfortable. Even was the very few like a three-body science fiction team.

SPEAKER_02 7:43

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

SPEAKER_03 7:44

That was uh the part one is okay, yeah. The part two and part three, the way that it's written in Mandarin, yeah, which is its mother tongue by Liu Tsuin was just not good.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

But doesn't English science fiction kind of have that tinge to it too?

SPEAKER_03 8:00

Not really, no. It's so diversified that you can't really grasp um even with one writer like Neil Gaiman or with um was uh was added the three giants, you can see that each book there are nuances, differences that makes it unique. Neil Gaiman did American gods, right? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

That has a massive male chauvinistic side to it, yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 8:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:23

I couldn't actually finish that one for that very reason.

SPEAKER_03 8:25

It's a little annoying to read.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:28

But if you go beyond it and you see the the the world that he constructed, it was quite in quite amazing.

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Exactly. Yeah, I want to push through it again because my husband just read it the whole way through and he kept telling me parts of it, and I'm like, I wanted to get to the mythological part, and I just got I kept getting stuck on the guy-ness of the main character, and I was like, I need to get past that. Have you watched the TV show?

SPEAKER_02 8:49

Not yet.

SPEAKER_03 8:50

No, I think I uh maybe watched one or two episodes, but that's it.

SPEAKER_01 8:55

It's a little bit not faithful to the ah well then never mind. I don't want it doesn't have to be, but I think for that one I want it to invite me back into the book, and I don't think it would do that if it's no, probably not. So do you remember your first trip to the library?

SPEAKER_03 9:09

There is no library in my elementary school, junior, and uh senior, so the first trip that I ever made to the library was I think the second day that I enrolled in the university, Fudan University, and um because library was a place I've never visited, so I went there and I was absolutely this wow effect because it was so many books. It was the first time I've seen so many books in one room.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

I haven't been inside Fudan's University's library, I can only imagine how big it is.

SPEAKER_03 9:39

It had this really old yet kind of I would say approachable maybe is the way it feels close to me, but at the same time it feels distant because there are science, science building where it's full of this books that nobody reads and collect the dusts, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:53

But uh literacy is is something I would love, so I embarrassingly follow some book Instagram feeds and different kind of social media feeds, and people will literally post pictures of libraries and bookstores. I like libraries and bookstores, but I I really just want to read the books.

SPEAKER_02 10:10

Right.

SPEAKER_01 10:10

But I'm it's so addicted to watching, like there'll be pictures and I'll just kind of stare at it. And in my brain, I'm going into that library and I'm gonna sit right there and I'm gonna read that book from over there, and and then this whole story kind of just creates itself, and I'm like, that's awesome. What just happened? It's amazing how different libraries look differently and feel like they'd be comfortable to read this kind of thing or that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_03 10:33

Yeah, there is a character to each one of them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Do you have a favorite library in Shanghai?

SPEAKER_03 10:38

I do go to Shanghai Library often, but to be honest, it's a little disappointing for the fact that uh you need to have a reference deposit which is a thousand to be able to borrow any of the books in English which was uh was published in the near five years. And a lot of them are tool books that I don't really need.

SPEAKER_02 10:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:58

But for any literacy, e they have very few copies of it. Like I have a I have a book list on my phone. People recommend good books to me that they feel they feel that they've learned a lot about about this book uh from these books. And uh I have this list. Uh once in a while I would go to the library and then search through their system. Or also I can do that on a WeChat public account at Shah Library. But often these books are not available, or there is some kind of uh error with the numbers that they can't be found. So I would say the hit rate is about two out of five. If I get two out of five, I'd consider myself lucky. So that's the one way that I start to buy books. Yeah, try to buy ebooks instead of going there, because going there is like a half day trip or something, right?

SPEAKER_01 11:47

And it's pretty packed a lot of times. It's hard to find a seat if you want to actually sit and read there too.

SPEAKER_03 11:51

Oh, it's impossible unless you go there super early as soon as it opens. The best sunlight uh was at the top floor, yeah. Where the news newspapers are, but there is no war socket, so ah yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

Yeah, that happens. Have you been to the library? There's one in Pudong, not close to the Metro, that's all I remember. As we I think we ended up walking for like 20 minutes from Metro Station in Pudong to this gigantic library.

SPEAKER_03 12:20

I don't believe I've been there. I would love to.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

No, it's one day it is beautiful, but each floor has different starting and uh opening and closing hours, and where we sat down was this beautiful area with like those kind of shared desks right near windows, and it was very quiet and lots of books. It was beautiful, but we got there about 10 minutes before it closed because we were reading the signs of the floor we came in on, not the floor we sat down on.

SPEAKER_02 12:43

Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:44

It was very confusing, so each floor had different times. But I think if you get there early enough, that's not going to be an issue.

SPEAKER_03 12:49

It's the same with Shanghai Library. Shanghai Library is this? Yeah, each floor. I think from the second or the fourth floor, it has a different uh closing. It opens at the same time, but it has a different closing time.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

That is slightly confusing. Well, I would I would I would look it up for you. It's a it's a beautiful building and I keep meaning to go back, but the the difference well the it being so far from the Macho and the the closing times being I could probably read the times now, but at the time we were still fairly new to China to Shanghai this time around. And so we're just staring at the signs and going, let's just sit down and see what happens. And that's what happened. We sat down for 10 minutes and we're like, we have to go now. Oh but that's awesome. Isn't it beautiful? And they have a lot of English books and a lot of obviously other books. Oh, many different many, many different subjects. They have a lot of science stuff, a lot of history stuff, a lot of a lot of stuff. I don't know if you can check them out there.

SPEAKER_03 13:42

I probably can because I just realized that I have this membership card uh from Shanghai Library which is connected, meaning that I could actually borrow books from the library that's closest to me, which is Jing'an Library. There you go. Wait, there's a library in Jiangan? Shanghai Library is an entire library system. Yeah, yeah. So it has one branch in almost mm each district in Shanghai, and also that does not include other libraries and collectors. Okay. So yes, the closest to me is the one on Xing Jia Road and it's Qing'an Library.

SPEAKER_01 14:13

Very good.

SPEAKER_03 14:14

They have a much smaller collection, but you can actually borrow and return books there so you don't have to go all the way.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

So they're just different branches of the same. And at home, you said your mom was teaching you the characters. Was Pudanghwa spoken at home, or were there any other dialects spoken at home?

SPEAKER_03 14:28

My mother's from Sichuan province where they speak Sichuan dialect. And then she taught me uh Mandarin in Sichuan. So I speak for Shanghai dialect, Mandarin and the Sichuan dialect. How different are those three? I I'd say that if well in the eyes of a foreigner, these are three different languages. Shanghai dialect I don't really.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

But for you, how different do they feel?

SPEAKER_03 14:55

I know that Shanghai dialect is very, very different from Mandarin. It's not uh a written language and has so many slans that's drastic. It's I think it's closer to Japanese than it is to Mandarin. Even people as close as Nanjing, they don't understand a word of Shanghai dialect. You can literally say nasty words to people from Nanjing right in front of them. Why would we do that?

SPEAKER_01 15:18

No, I'm kidding, I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_03 15:19

I actually put that as a prank in school.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

And I still feel bad about Did they ever realize what was happening? No. Okay, that's good, that's good. Then you don't need to feel bad. But I've I've heard that. Is it just the sound of the language that is similar similar to Japanese?

SPEAKER_03 15:35

I think so, yeah. Like if we if um if a friend of mine and I were going to outer provinces and we speak Shanghai dialect, often we're mistaken for Japanese tourists. I have heard that a few times.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Yeah, I I interviewed a young lady recently who was from Songjiang.

SPEAKER_02 15:52

Right.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

And she was saying that that happens to her all the time when she's in a store in Shanghai, out of Shanghai, even when she was up in Qingdao one day, people were like uh started talking to her in Japanese or even Korean sometimes. And yeah. Very easily. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It sounds close to Japanese. Okay. I still can't hear the difference between Purang Kwa and Shanghai's, but I'm hoping someday it's gonna come.

SPEAKER_03 16:14

It will it will come to you. Yeah, it has a ver quite large difference because Shanghai dialect is very lippy, lippy movement. So most of our pronunciations were done between the T's and the the lips.

SPEAKER_01 16:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 16:26

So it goes much, much faster than Mandarin. It can go much more faster than that. So it's more the front of the mouth where it's put on much more than that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

Oh, okay, okay. Right now I'm catching like a word or a phrase here and there. I think once I can understand full sentences, it'll be like, oh okay, now I can hear the difference, but it's it's the long process. There are people from so many different parts of the country here. Right. That it just when I think I have the sound of a word or phrase down, I'll hear it a lot of different ways.

SPEAKER_03 16:55

Well, it's not a language you can easily obtain no matter how long you live here. It's not a language that you can speak easily unless you were mm emerged into that.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

So the script is part of the reason that pulled me into learning Mandarin Chinese this time. Because it's it's beautiful and it's mysterious, at least simplified is because it's kind of hiding part of the meaning.

SPEAKER_02 17:18

Right.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

The strokes are like meditative.

SPEAKER_02 17:21

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 17:22

But I've noticed when I talk to people about this, people tend to use character when they mean word. And I know that there are radicals, there's there's strokes, there are elements, there are radicals, there are words that are phrases, sentences, and so on. And that characters can be words, and words consist of characters. But here's the question. To somebody coming into the language new, somebody just arriving to China or just starting to learn Nandar and Chinese, how would you describe the difference between a character and a word in Chinese?

SPEAKER_03 17:55

A word could often be consist of more than one character, and a character is just a character. And the character can be further dissembled into different parts. Often that there are structures such as left and right, top, bottom, top, mid-bottom, and outside and inside, and these are the basic, I would say, framework of a Chinese character, which is often evolved from a picture. That's why most of a Chinese character can be written in literally like a square. Right? And that's where the beginners learn characters and words. The difference is Chinese characters often you could use it as a Lego block, and the Chinese character is a Lego block that comes with its own meaning, but its meaning changes when it's combined with other characters to form words, and that's what truly makes Chinese Mandarin as a language makes it difficult to learn. Because uh not only that you have to learn the meaning of the words, which could come in 10 or 20 different meanings, but when it combines with other um other words to uh other characters to form words, and then it has a very specific, very identified uh meaning, and it uh sometimes changes in different context, but the meaning is there, so that's a difference between Chinese character and word.

SPEAKER_01 19:19

When children are learning the language in school, like in primary school, is there talk about syllable versus word? Each character is basically a syllable, right?

SPEAKER_03 19:30

Yeah, you could use that as such a metaphor.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

Like how is the language talked about? Like, do you talk much about words and sentences and that kinds of things when it's when it's talked about in the world?

SPEAKER_03 19:40

And somehow that for a country that has so many thousands of years debatable, seven or five thousand years debatable, sure. But our way of demanding being taught is very primitive. Meaning that okay, um many Chinese children at age or three um can already form sentences. Also they can't write, they can't read, right? But they can already talk in that language somehow, uh in communication with their whoever. And then when they go to school, often that our Mandarin textbook is consist of um I think one book has maybe 18 to 20 texts, and they're often dialogues or perhaps a section of um um of some books, some articles, and then you pick out the words that you don't understand and you give them a pingying. And pingying is the I would say that instructions or pronunciation of a specific word, but it has no meaning whatsoever. And the pinging did not come originally with the words, it was invented afterwards. Like 1950s, 1960s, yeah. Because back then most people they speak Mandarin but they don't read and write, they're illiterate. Right. So uh pinging was an invention, which makes it even harder to to learn mandarin because the word and the character uh the pronunciation and the the character has no direct correlation to it whatsoever. But there are some some meaning to it if you recognize the words, and often uh if there is a word that you don't recognize or haven't learned before, you can sort of guess the pronunciation.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

The sound components. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:16

Yeah, there are there are a basis to how the pronunciation can be.

SPEAKER_02 21:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 21:21

So we do practice in Mandarin learning, we do learn new characters at class. We were taught the pronunciation of it, and we do have to go home and write it twenty, fifty times. And the one of the major exercises we have to do is write essays and articles. It's the best way to practice it.

SPEAKER_01 21:40

It really is. This doesn't sound primitive, this sounds good because every time you're in English, just after I finished primary school, like the generation after me, they stopped explicitly learning grammar. Like I learned grammar, I underlined things, I circled things, we we and we got into grammar identification when I was at elementary school. And then it Stopped in the US. And I don't know what they do now. But honestly, when I was doing that, I was so bored. I feel like if I would have been within a story or a dialogue, it would have had more meaning and it would have stuck better than just going, this is a noun, this is a verb, this is an adjective.

SPEAKER_03 22:15

Oh, that's kind of boring.

SPEAKER_01 22:17

Right? Yeah. So I feel like within stories and dialogues might be more interesting to learn language.

SPEAKER_03 22:22

Well, we kind of have to learn that in in that way because the Chinese character itself bears meaning. And if you're just memorizing it, it's extremely confusing. So there are some really interesting mistakes made. Oh, example times. For example, for example. I think there are some uh screenshots in a group that was posted, and there was this elementary schools making mistakes in misused characters because they uh share the same pronunciation. Oh, right. That's the most common one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can't remember anything specific, but I just remember laughing laughing really badly when I read them. It was and language is also in a way that it it sort of reveals the thinking pattern or the or the way that one thinks. So the usage of language or the choice of words and tonalities are very specific to individuals.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

Yeah, so true, so true. If you're enjoying this conversation about the Chinese language and would like to participate if you're studying the Chinese language, or if you come from the Chinese language and have learned other languages, either perspective is greatly, actually both perspectives are greatly appreciated on this channel. Let's have a conversation. Let's tape that sucker and let's get it into this podcast. Contact me and let's etch out the details on how to get you and your valuable language learning experience onto this podcast. All of my information is in the show notes. Also, all over social media except Facebook. I am Steph Puccio, S-T-E-P-H, F-U-C-C-I-O. That includes Gmail for my email, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and LinkedIn. So I look forward to hearing from you. You were reading science fiction at 14, so I'm assuming you started learning English pretty early on. When did you start?

SPEAKER_03 24:11

Not voluntarily. My parents saw that English will be evening English classes will be a very good way to get rid of me. So from the fourth grade in elementary school, which compared to now is already pretty late. Because now the kids start to learn it in kindergarten, right? What is fourth grade? Is that like 10, 11 years old? Yeah, it's really, really late. So I I have about three nights a week that I would take take English classes. Actually, it's uh I think it's new concept, right? New concept. That's the whole like a systematic learning with each book contains 144 classes lessons. And did that for a couple of years, learned nothing.

SPEAKER_02 24:51

What what okay?

SPEAKER_03 24:52

Because I was just not interested.

SPEAKER_02 24:54

Ah, okay.

SPEAKER_03 24:55

I don't understand it. And these are the scribbles, this letters. I I didn't get it. No.

SPEAKER_01 25:01

Can we talk about the classroom for a second? Like how many kids were in the classroom with you?

SPEAKER_03 25:05

To be honest, I have most of my classmates, were there? I had of I think 42, maybe 43. What? Class in the elementary school, just one class is that size. In the night school? And at night school, it's at least two-thirds of it.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_03 25:19

At least two-thirds of it.

SPEAKER_01 25:20

That's a big language class for a night school, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03 25:24

No, there are like seven or eight of them every night.

SPEAKER_01 25:28

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_03 25:28

I only took English classes. And then there are like maths, physics, and everything.

SPEAKER_01 25:33

Yeah, I started teaching at one of those, but in Taiwan. Like six to nine at night was when I thought. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But our ours, well, ours is a little bit different because I had a North American boss and his Taiwanese wife, and the classrooms were very small. I think it was anywhere from like 15 to 20 students.

SPEAKER_03 25:50

That's much better.

SPEAKER_01 25:51

Yeah, yeah. 40's a lot.

SPEAKER_03 25:53

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

Was it just the teacher lecturing, or did you guys actually use the language? Like did you practice in class?

SPEAKER_03 26:00

There's no time to practice. These classes make me feel like they're pushing um a dead horse forward, like dragging them through the store. I I am the dead horse and for dragging me, but I'm receiving nothing. For me, it's just really, really boring to sit in a class listening to stuff that I know nothing about for three hours a night. You know, I would have to use that time elsewhere.

SPEAKER_01 26:23

Okay. But you clearly learn the language to a high degree. So how did you get here?

SPEAKER_03 26:27

I used to, of course, when I was in elementary elementary school, I'm reading Mandarin, and my most interesting and interested subjects was classic literacy and both Chinese and uh foreign classic uh classic literacy and uh science fiction as well as science. So I used to ask so many questions that drive my parents crazy because they can't answer any of them. And um I I have always been a very inquisitive, a very curious and person, and uh now that I look back, I'm so grateful that my parents did not impose any restrictions um on me just because I was a girl, because I realized lots of girls are my age, they're they're enclosed in a way. And um, so my favorite story at that time, well I've read 20 times minimum, was this um little tiny tiny book. It was so small, it was like uh half-size of a palm, and there was a simplified version of a Dumas classic, which is Monte Cristo. And it was yeah, it was it was like it made it so simple read for uh elementary students. I read it so many times, and once I thought I would really love to read the full volume of it when I was in high school. So, what was it about that story that it was it at at the surface it sounds like a revenge of a man that's been wronged and become a victim of various political and material gang and all this games, right? And this very little town that he was meant to be happy and then he was wrong, he was imprisoned, he was enlightened in prison, he escaped, inherited fortune, and then come back for like a proper hero comeback style, right? But no, it's a love story, it's absolutely a love story. Wow, okay, because after he came back, yeah, he found the love of his life that no, he was with the love of his life, and on his wedding night he was sent to prison. Oh yeah, no, the story was so good, it was so gripping, absolutely amazing.

SPEAKER_01 28:43

And how old were you when you got when you got your hands on that story?

SPEAKER_03 28:46

Oh, I was really young, uh seven, maybe eight. Oh wow, yeah, and I started reading that reading the Chinese version of it because that's my love my favorite story, so I I went back to read it and that wasn't enough. I asked my uh my parents to buy me the the the full book of it, and somehow that they just didn't, I don't know, maybe they weren't interested or they think I spent too much money on books or whatever, but I didn't get the real version until um I was in senior high school.

SPEAKER_01 29:19

Like 15, 16-ish. Yes, okay.

SPEAKER_03 29:21

So prior to that I've only read everything in Mandarin. Yeah, I didn't read anything in English, yeah. But that was the first book, but I couldn't find um a Chinese version of it. Yeah, and then I knew that it was written in French, yeah. And then later translated into English, but I didn't know that back then I thought it was written in English. I thought that why do I have if I'm capable, if I have time and effort, and I can ru I can I I my English was okay at that time, was actually not okay, it was pretty bad. If I could have the full course meal in its original you know state, why uh do I need somebody else to tune it up for me? So I started reading it in English, and the only thing on each page that at least 30 or 40 words, vocabulary that I have to consort to dictionary, and I did not have an electronic dictionary whatsoever back then. Yeah, yeah. You literally have to flip through pages, and that's what I did.

SPEAKER_04 30:23

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:24

And the only reason I did it to go through all the trouble is because the story is amazing.

SPEAKER_02 30:31

The power of story. I love that, that's beautiful.

SPEAKER_03 30:36

Absolutely, it's still even the remains today, and that that it just started this, I would say, this flood that cannot be stopped. This absolutely unstoppable force. Yeah. Wow. And I've been reading English, yeah, uh reading English since then.

SPEAKER_01 30:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:54

To be honest, my English is a lot better than my Mandarin.

SPEAKER_01 30:57

Well, there's always a price to pay, right? You have to use yeah, what you do what do we say? In the 80s in the US, we had this thing for like there was like a fitness craze, and they were like, if you don't use it, you lose it. Same thing with languages.

SPEAKER_02 31:11

Oh yeah, that's all true.

SPEAKER_01 31:13

If you don't practice it, even if it's one you grew up with, it gets weaker.

SPEAKER_03 31:16

Yeah, it does. Yeah, um that's true actually, and that's how the words uh evolve and sort of like individualized or personalized. You can so easily identify them now. And uh part of my job that I really enjoy is that every speaker has a distinctive character, is like fingerprint, never duplicated. And there are some speakers are just so charismatic. Yeah, you literally got sucked into their little universe and you don't want to leave voluntarily. Like I stay here forever. I can listen to this person speak forever.

SPEAKER_01 31:51

It's like audio art or something.

SPEAKER_03 31:53

Absolutely, that's beautiful, absolutely, and then there are some speakers who are like after 30 seconds, I want to go. Please, I'll pay you to go.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

And this makes sense. I listen to a ridiculous amount of podcasts. I think I say that a lot of time. And there are some podcasts that are about subjects that I don't care about, but the person who is running it, even if it's a group of people talking, the person who's running it is so interesting and has such a strong personality, or they use some really juicy vocabulary that I haven't heard in a while, and I'm like, oh, I like you. They're gonna make me use a dictionary book in my first language. Yeah, let's go. And so I'll listen to like things on finance and kind of like a philosophy one. I'm listening starting to listen to, and I think that his personality through his voice is so beautiful, and the way he expresses himself, I'm just like, oh, that pause, that word, that sentence, yeah, it's like what you're talking about. It's just like, what is that thing that they're doing?

SPEAKER_03 32:51

And there I I could give you an example in this that often when people get on stage, they have a specific purpose, an agenda, a message that they must get across. So the audience, after a whole day of conference, are getting pretty tired and a little anxious because they're looking forward to the content that they're looking for something and that they're there for a purpose. And then after a whole day of conference, uh the last speaker of the day went on to the stage very slowly. This is a very small, this 92-year-old man who is the founder of either I think it was I think it was a conference in financial investment or some kind of high-end tech stuff. And then he went on to the stage and his speech time is supposed to be 20 minutes. And he spoke so slowly that I could feel, even in the uh SI booth, um simultaneous in Tabur booth, I could feel that the audience are getting a little um unsettled. They are impatient, they expect uh the master or the founder of a specific industry to give them some uh hicks or tracks or cheats that can make advance their own agenda, right? But this little old man slowly walked onto the stage, and of course, as an interpreter I had to prepare for for for everything a 20-minute, 20-minute speech, seven pages of BPT, the shortest I have ever encountered. And there is no words, only pictures. Yes! I know. I was like, oh, I I I don't have to prepare anything, but that's also antagonizing because often, based on my experience, if you only have pictures, it means you're going to say a lot of stuff that's not there that I cannot prepare for.

SPEAKER_01 34:45

Right.

SPEAKER_03 34:46

So when he walked onto the stage, often people that are the founder of something they have a lot to say. But this beautiful, this beautiful 92-year-old man, you can you can feel that life is life is slowly leaving him, but he's he's still there and was this full spirit. Yeah and he spoke slowly. He's one, he's the slowest speaker I have ever encountered. He literally came up with about 23 to 25 words per minute.

SPEAKER_01 35:18

How much do people usually do?

SPEAKER_03 35:20

Minimum 150. To listen to his speech at first first few couple minutes, literally the audience has to has to get used to such a slow pace. But the upside to it is that you calm down and you start to truly listen. Seven pages, seven stories. Whoa. Seven pages, seven stories, nothing to do with the finance field that he's in, right? But each equally captivating. And the whole audience went quiet. And now I'm I'm talking about a conference that housed more than eight hundred audience, not a beep, nobody left in that period of 20 minutes time to take a call. Nothing. It was silent. It was the most quiet room I've ever been in. I don't even remember that I enjoyed it literally, because as a SI, I'm accustomed to fast thinking, but that's what I'm trained for.

SPEAKER_01 36:18

Simultaneous interpreter, as well. Okay, gotcha.

SPEAKER_03 36:20

And then I have to think really fast, I have to work for it really fast, I have to do so many things multitasking at the same time that I'm constantly adrenaline high. And that's the only way you can do it. When he comes onto the stage, everything calms down. And it just this stay, this serene state that I'm in that I just feel so privileged that I got to translate for the speech because we alternate every 15 and 20 minutes. So it could have just easily been my partner. And all of us just listen to the stories. The stories are somehow loosely related to the field, but it's all the anecdote that you never ever hear or see from anyone else that only he knows. It makes me feel like we're truly getting insight of the history of that entire industry, how it came to be, who did what, and you never hear the story anywhere else, and that's the true treasure.

SPEAKER_01 37:22

That's beautiful. So when he was done, what was people's reaction?

SPEAKER_03 37:26

It was silent for a minute.

SPEAKER_01 37:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:28

Because people are still waiting for him to come up with like the next one. Because he didn't usually conclude that this is my speech, thank you. This is basically a cue to applaud, right? Right, right, right. But no, he didn't. He just stood there, he didn't say anything, and just stood on the stage, and it took the audience a while to respond to it. And then it was just this ocean, this thunder of claps, and then he just walked slowly. Literally, people stood up, clapped, and watched him walking down the down the stage.

SPEAKER_01 38:01

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_03 38:02

Nobody wanted him to leave.

SPEAKER_01 38:03

Right.

SPEAKER_03 38:03

And it was so amazing. It was not the most brilliant speech, but definitely I can feel that there is a connection, and this is the power of words.

SPEAKER_01 38:12

It doesn't I and I I feel the need to do this comparison with what you said with the horse in the classroom, with this captivating captivating speech across the board in any country, in most countries, most. Not all, nothing's all. This is what happens in the language classroom, and part of me is trying to figure out why and how we can change it, or how we can change it outside of the classroom. Like, why does the language classroom turn into that excruciating experience? Instead of the beauty of words, like this this gentleman captivating 800 people, because that's what language is, that's what drew me into language and reading and stories and people and personalities and experience and the way that it was told makes a huge difference. Huge difference.

SPEAKER_03 39:00

How do we find that middle ground or just inject that beauty into those classrooms instead of the uh I think most people are interested in story and telling way of of learning, right? And we always learn different things from the same story. And then for me, the sum of the stories they have a lot of conflict, but this kind of Hollywood style sort of force-fed storytelling on its plot is really good. Getting old because um language, after all, is the fruit of thoughts. So the more you think about it, the better you can express yourself. So often then you make a lot less mistake um in writing than you would in talking. In writing, you feel as whether it's the emotions embedded or the meaning is somewhat filtered and it's more pure, and it's easier to come up with the beauty to find or even to create beauty in writing. But in speech is a lot harder to do.

SPEAKER_01 40:00

It is a lot harder to do.

SPEAKER_03 40:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:02

A lot, a lot, a lot. And you can your edits in writing are generally a lot more invisible. But you have to fix your speech. It's unless you're doing what we're doing now, or I can literally delete, re-record, and do whatever. In in when it's in real per in real life, it's really you your mistakes are audible. You have to go backwards and say, Oh sorry, I meant this, or oh no, how did that come out of my mouth? Yeah, it's it's much, much, much harder to do that before it it exists in the world. Okay, so other languages. So we've got Mandarin Chinese and the uh Shangha'iese and Swiss. Shean dialect. Sichuan dialect, okay. Did you learn anything after English? Any other languages?

SPEAKER_03 40:44

Well, I am required to learn German. Oh, uh, and pass exams in about a year and a half because I'm studying and I'm trying to acquire a BA from the Shanghai Foreign Language in Institute. So the second foreign languages are more required. And uh the choice at the time was German and Japanese. So I would have preferred German because it's closer to English. Which I now I know it's wrong, but I presume at that time that it would be a little bit easier for me.

SPEAKER_01 41:17

Um I have heard different things I okay, full disclosure. My first second language was German, but it was in a language classroom and I was a very rebellious teenager. I hated being in any class, let alone the language classroom where I didn't understand anything that was happening.

SPEAKER_02 41:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:32

Um so I have a very visceral reaction to that language, which is awful because uh we went to Germany last year on vacation and I loved it. So I kind of thought, okay, I need to revisit this because this could be a place we could live in the future. So I have to separate my teenage classroom angst from No, but you are not who you are. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:52

Yeah, you're not who you were.

SPEAKER_01 41:54

But why is it so difficult?

SPEAKER_03 41:55

So I I was just thinking, like, okay, for to be able to express one message or one meaning that are Mandarin in English, and then you have to learn German in Korean, say, wouldn't that get really confused?

SPEAKER_01 42:08

It is a little confusing, I think. It might be. It might be. Yeah. What I've heard happening is that as you're learning it, if you need to say something like very quickly, one of your other languages that you know well might come out first.

SPEAKER_03 42:23

That's why you see Chinese today, they mixed our language with English, because the English comes out faster. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:29

That's what else me. I I look forward to the day when when that happens to me.

SPEAKER_02 42:33

Well, but it will happen.

SPEAKER_01 42:35

Well, it happens, it happens to me sometimes when I'm trying to say something very quickly in Chinese, some Spanish will come out because I did learn a little bit of Spanish in in uh university, I suppose, and a little bit in Latin America while traveling. But when I when I say a little bit, I mean a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 42:50

Yeah, but still, but it's that's how your brain's wired.

SPEAKER_01 42:53

Yeah, and I learned that trying to get around, take taxis, order things, talk to people, flirt, date, that kind of thing. So like I had practical language then. I know, right? I mean it'd be more per se, but but it was very functional language. And what I'm learning I'm learning basically the HSK stuff now, which isn't necessarily functional language. That's not. So when I'm out in public and I hear something and I understand it and I wonder which apply, Spanish or English comes out. I'm like, that is not helpful right now. That's how it's collected. Yeah, it's very strange. The first time it happened, I've just kind of laughed, like, but I can't even follow up with that in Spanish. Like it's that's how low my level was there. So I'm like, well, that's two dead ends right next to each other. So how long do you need to study it for and how high a level do you need to get in German?

SPEAKER_03 43:42

I believe that the um the exam in German is pretty much in writing. Oh so for rudimentary levels there are two large books, literally like two thick books. But other than that, most of them is in writing. They don't really expect n Expect a student on my level to be to be that fluent in German. So I think it's just elementary levels where you maybe master um a thousand, maybe a thousand five hundred words in in German and some basic grammar. So you could carry out a day-to-day conversations and be done with it. Anything more than that would require more than two years of study.

SPEAKER_01 44:23

Yeah, for sure. For sure. Do you have plans on how you're going to learn it?

SPEAKER_03 44:29

Well, the school that I am writing is not the university but a third-party sort of agency. We're supposed to offer us training in German classes on a weekly basis, but they failed because there are an insufficient number of students. Oh no. For me, I am not a big big fan. I like to study in my own pace. So this kind of uh one-on-one session is always better for me. So I actually found uh a British guy who works in Shanghai uh who stayed in Germany for four years and speaks Florent German. And then he needs to learn Mandarin.

SPEAKER_01 45:07

There you go. Language exchange.

SPEAKER_03 45:09

Exactly. So um start from maybe early of October, then we'll start uh a weekly exchange. Perfect. But you know, I'm in a market for looking for a for uh a German native speaker because I can't really verify. I mean he's a German learner, so maybe he could uh teach me a lot of experiences he accumulated in learning that language. But pronunciation-wise, I'm a little bit of a stickler for pronunciation, so I would prefer maybe a native German speaker to do the exchange with me in a living downtown. He isn't, so it's going to be a little bit of trouble for him. So if audience, anyone who's learning Shanghai, who's a native German speaker, who wants to learn Mandarin, please do reach out.

SPEAKER_01 45:56

There you go. You heard it, listeners. Let us know. You can also have online ones, but since Shanghai is so diverse, you don't really need to go into the online ones ones.

SPEAKER_03 46:06

Yeah, online one online classes is only good when it's raining and you don't feel like going out.

SPEAKER_01 46:10

Yeah, but but I mean like you could have somebody online who's you could have somebody in Germany that you're talking to on a weekly basis, but because there's so many people from so many different places in Shanghai, it doesn't feel like you need to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_02 46:22

I always prefer face to face to face.

SPEAKER_01 46:24

Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely.

SPEAKER_03 46:26

And besides, there are a six or seven hour time difference.

SPEAKER_01 46:29

Oh yeah, that.

SPEAKER_03 46:30

Yeah, and I I travel often. The internet connection I would say is not always optimal, and some of the tier twos are easy.

SPEAKER_01 46:37

Agreed.

SPEAKER_03 46:38

I experienced that pain last year. Exactly. VPM is not the point anymore.

SPEAKER_01 46:42

Trying to upload YouTube videos at like six in the morning because at night too many people were using the things. Five-tar hotels. We skipped over the English stuff way too quickly, I think. Because we went from Do you want to revisit some of that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because we went from the class that was horrible to the book that was wonderful. Yeah. So was it just reading then that kept you going in English and got you to a high level?

SPEAKER_03 47:06

Like well, reading along opens the door for someone to truly understand English as a language, but without the foundation of literally memorizing vocabularies, understand uh going through a lot of reference books, asking around when you have a question, have some the somebody's questions answered, yeah, and most important of all daily practice, you'll never get nowhere.

SPEAKER_01 47:31

Yeah. So who were your go-to people? Were there teachers or people around you, family members? Like asking.

SPEAKER_03 47:37

In high school I was lucky enough to actually work part-time for a European company and work closely with engineers. They're from all over the world. Yeah. So they are, I would say, my my troupe of teachers and uh they taught me so much. But mostly it's because I always ask questions and I'm just happy that the questions that my parents can't answer, they can, or at least they try to. Right, right, right. At that time the internet is popular, but not on most of the English websites and stuff. They're still too difficult for me. So that um I think I kept the habit of asking questions without emotions. Like if I ask a question, it's because I truly want to know, not because I'm prying into anything. So I start to have all sorts of I mean, all sorts of conversations, topics with people. And that's also what getting into um being an interpreter because uh if you think about this profession, it's unique in a way that a dialogue or so much information is exchanging between two parties or even three parties, and then the interpreter is the third or the fourth party that is not engaged in the inf in the information exchange at all, but is somehow is facilitating it. So I have the best job in the world because I get paid to learn and often from the best.

SPEAKER_01 49:01

That's true. How do you juggle both languages at the same time though?

SPEAKER_03 49:06

I thought it would be a struggle, but no, it isn't. And I um with a lot of lot of practice, I'm not kidding, a lot of practice, right? You can literally switch from one language to another seamlessly. And that's what we do on job set all the time. Sometimes from one sentence to another. It has happened that sometimes I don't realize which language I'm speaking in. Like I that's so cool. Now I look at you and I you're Caucasian, I'm Asian, then I I don't know, maybe subconsciously I talk to it in English, but I could be thinking in Mandarin right now. Right. And a couple of minutes ago I was, yeah, and then I switched. Yeah. And sometimes I dream in English, which is really bizarre. Because you didn't even realize. I didn't even like for you, dreaming in English is normal, but my mother tongue is Mandarin, so dreaming in English kind of scares me a little because it's so weird. I didn't realize I was dreaming because I had a whole conversation in my dream at the age of uh I think 18 or 19. I think that's where the click. That's that's the switch, switch off. And uh I scared myself a little the next morning when I realized I was dreaming in in English instead of Mandarin because it never happened before.

SPEAKER_04 50:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:22

But then it happened a couple of times and you kind of get used to it afterwards. It did happen just about six months ago, and I was doing a consecutive inter interpretation between two parties, and I was hired by the foreign party to negotiate uh against the Chinese party. And the Chinese party understood a fairly good amount of English but not proficient enough. So when she she tried to be said something in Mandarin, and then I was supposed to translate into English to my client, and I just said it repeated literally, summarized and repeated in Mandarin without realizing it. My client was nice and polite enough not to interrupt me, so I went on for like five minutes.

SPEAKER_02 51:05

So how did you know what you were doing? I realized I was I thought I was translating in in English the whole time when I was talking in Chinese.

SPEAKER_03 51:16

Right, right, right. As soon as I started speaking, everybody looked at me, but I'm accustomed to it because I'm consecutive interpretation when you start talking. People always look at the interpreters, which they shouldn't, but they do anyways. So I said, huh, you know, I just kept kept it going. And like four minutes later, when I'm finished, then my client said, Can you repeat that in in English? I literally said to my client, like, didn't I just do that? Then everybody looked at me and they realized that I was talking in Mandarin, right? And I thought I was talking in English.

unknown 51:47

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_03 51:48

Because those two languages are such a blur to me.

SPEAKER_01 51:50

Right. Do they feel different? Do they taste different? I've heard people say different languages feel like different colours or something.

SPEAKER_03 51:58

Not that advanced. But but is there any different like a m mix firing system in the like a brain? Right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 52:06

No, I would love to have that, but no.

SPEAKER_01 52:07

Do you feel differently when you're speaking the different languages at all?

SPEAKER_03 52:11

You know that the hit film Arrival?

SPEAKER_01 52:13

Yes, the alien film.

SPEAKER_03 52:15

It actually discussed uh a very interesting linguistic phenomenon. That when you learn a foreign language, uh you build different pathways within your brain. And the more pathways building, it cultivates the brain, it trains the brain to think differently. So you adopt to uh a different way of thinking. And I found that to be true because English in its structure is very logical and it's very fully structured. And of course, besides a poem and stuff, you have to partner on it. Most of the day daily use English is very structured and very logical and lenient in a way that it's uh extremely predictable. Its structure is predictable. So when you learn that language and you learn it well, and you start to think that way as well, and it changes how you think, and you can spot the difference very clearly between Chinese uh young children and uh uh foreign kids. Foreign kids are more direct where young Chinese kids they are all over the place, their thoughts and behaviors are all over the place. So I feel bad for the kindergarten teachers because there's a bunch of unruly kids to rule over. But if the other way, like you're a foreigner and you're learning Mandarin, and then I suppose that you would adopt to a more three-dimensional way of thinking, you would have associations made with specific words because that's how the Chinese language is structured. A word is like a stem cell that connects in a three-dimensional way that connects to multi multiple words and they mutate into different meanings. In English, I say the words could do that, but not the sentence. The sentence is more logical, more lenient. And in Mandarin, the sentence can also be extremely mutable. Yeah, they can be segmented, placed into different places, and then sometimes the meaning changes, sometimes it doesn't, depends on the context. And that's what makes Mandarin super hard to learn. And in a way, once you're learning, you're the way that you think changes as well.

SPEAKER_01 54:23

I have a new YouTube channel called Tube to Pod, and what I want to do in this channel is have micro videos of people answering three questions about podcasts. My goal for this channel is to bridge people from YouTube over to podcasts, not to replace their YouTube viewing, but to supplement it with podcasts. A lot of people apparently still are not listening to podcasts, still are unaware of what they are, what they can do with them, what they can learn from them, that kind of thing. So the three questions are one, where do you listen to podcasts? Two, why do you listen to podcasts? And three, what is your favorite podcast at the moment? Now, if you're interested in participating in this, you can either post a video under two minutes on Instagram with the hashtag tube to pot. Or you can email me your video and I'll post it on the YouTube channel. If you put it on Instagram, I'll record it, copy it over onto the channel. If you send it to me via email, I'll post it over onto the channel. And if you are more tech savvy than clearly I am, and you know a better way how to get other people's videos onto YouTube, please let me know. Because right now I'm doing a copy and paste kind of thing. So I really look forward to your participation in that. Again, it's under two minutes, it's three questions, it's super easy. I want to expose people on YouTube to another audio experience that I think they would really, really enjoy to spread the joy of podcasts. I think there's a lot of specific niche content out there that can teach us a lot about the world and a lot about the things we're already interested in in moments of the day when we're not doing anything else with our brain. So, yeah, it's a push to people to learn more about the things that they're already interested in, or learn about things that they don't even know exist yet. Anyway, tube to pod. I'll also put the link to the new channel in the show notes. There's like six HSK levels. I'm using them just mostly to get a lot of vocabulary in. Right. Because I want to read, and I think reading reading is when I'm going to start noticing the structures and get more familiar with how the words are used. So I'm getting a lot of vocabulary exposure at first. Finished two of the three, the third one's in December, the test. Coming from English, I'm very verb-focused. And I taught English language for a number of years too, and I taught Chinese students for a number of years, and I noticed that they'd always forget to inflect their verbs. And I I'm not mean, I don't read pen, I'm you know, I'm just like, look, meaning's being lost. The time in English, the time's really important in a verb. So we've got to start working on those. Forget everything else your other teachers used to mark, we need to work on those first. That's really, really important. So I know as I'm learning Chinese, I know I'm putting too much emphasis on trying to understand where the verbs are, what the verbs are. Wait, why are the verbs so slippery? So many different things, but that's a verb. What's happening to my verbs? And I I know I'm doing that coming from English, and I know that it's not going to be as rigid as a verb in English, even though verbs can do other things sometimes. In English, it's not as confined.

SPEAKER_03 57:21

In rendering, there is very strict uh temporal tense in the sentence. There is past, present, future, and but it's not in that one word. Exactly. If you could add words or subtract word or remove its location to indicate time, it is not the change of the word itself. And that's make it interesting.

SPEAKER_01 57:45

Because I feel like I'm going on a word search to find what the time is. And I'm like, I thought I hated verb inflections because I think using time words makes more sense. And at least I did until I think I learned how to not use the language that didn't use them, or that did use them. And so now I'm kind of like doing a word, this is the first time I'm saying this, oh, this is funny. Because I I do I know I'm putting an over-emphasis on that one word. Right. Or even just the you know, the phrase over. I'm like, where is it? Where is the time? Where's it? No, it's gotta be somewhere else. And I'm looking around the sentence, and even if I'm studying, I'm looking at the grammar explanation, and then I see it in a sentence. You'll find the pattern go in the opposite direction when you were learning English. Did you have any moments like that where you knew you were bringing over something you learned in Mandarin into English and it wasn't making sense?

SPEAKER_03 58:31

No, a lot of the Chinese students find it confusing, but I've always found it so clear because English grammar has strict rules to follow, meaning that literally these sentence intervalations can't get out of the framework. There's so many exceptions. There are exceptions, but there are even rules to exceptions. Right? They're not really exceptions. I mean, there are just a bunch of exceptions that follow a different rule. It's not written into the rule book that's what they are.

SPEAKER_01 58:57

So verbs are very important in English. What's really important in Mandarin Chinese?

SPEAKER_03 59:01

It depends on how you look at it and how you use it individually.

SPEAKER_01 59:04

If you're using it, what's really important for me?

SPEAKER_03 59:07

I trust that the Mandarin for me, the most important part is to get the message crossed loud and clear without any misunderstanding, to be to be understood and to understand others' intentions. And it's not always easy.

SPEAKER_04 59:22

Why?

SPEAKER_03 59:22

Because when people think and talk in Mandarin, the language is flexible. And the worst part of Mandarin is that a lot of the information goes unsaid. It's between lines. So to decipher them is extremely difficult. I constantly have to verify, even with my parents, with Mandarin, you can say ten things in ten sentences, and ten of these things, ten messages are with no correlation whatsoever. But when it's being said in different sequence, it triggers different uh response and misinterpretations, and that's what Chinese people do often. Because when they communicate with another Chinese person, there's a pre there is a preconsumption that you know what I'm talking about, so I can skip that part. But no, I don't know. That's the difficult part.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:15

Is part of that like formality or because there's different ways you can say stuff in English too. Like you can say, give me that, or can I have that? Would you mind if you pass that? I mean, there's different, is there any of that?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:27

Yeah, you're you're talking about pronouns and you can say that pronouns, but when you say, um, can you pass that I do do this for me and that and this and all that pronouns, it literally represents a very specific thing that you already sort of agreed on between two parties, you know. Okay, so there's a lot less misunderstanding. Okay. But in Mandarin, it could be ten different things that that that that particular word represents, and often you don't even see the word in the sentence. Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:56

Because it's being spoken.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:57

Yeah, and my mom does that all the time. Yeah, with Chinese female, it's amazing. Sorry, the guys are yeah, pretty much like straightforward way of thinking. Maybe they were born this way or somehow, but when they talk, there is less missed bits in the words. But when you talk with female, literally they can talk about five different things in four different sentences, or in the same conversation, and it makes it so difficult to understand.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:23

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:24

So I constantly request like, do you mean that? Do you mean this? It's I think it's necessary advice so much misunderstanding.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:32

Can you think of any example?

SPEAKER_03 1:01:34

A couple of days ago, a client booked me on two different occasions. So these two different occasions are um there are two different industries involved together with documentations, agenda, location, all of this needs to be confirmed. And then so she mentioned uh the two different days and asked me if I was available. My answer was yes, I'm available on both days, right? And then good. And then she starts sending me documentations and uh uh locations without specifying which was which. And that is I wouldn't say typical Chinese behavior, but this is very typical in the language to go amiss. Because for her it's perceived that I understood which was uh which material uses on which date. And then I try to figure out without alarming her, so I open all the documents and there is no dates on them. I felt like I I looked really foolish in Chinese culture to reconfirm the dates and the material that goes with it. Right. I think that's why Chinese find it really difficult to apologize or to admit their mistakes because there are so much content that just went missing in the conversation when you're talking Mandarin. It's very easy to go missing.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:49

Things that I can relate to it now are the constant verification with DD drivers. Regardless of a pin on a specific spot, are you there? Are you definitely there? Are you right there? I hit the old ride, you're shaking your phone, that you open the door and they say, Is it this? Yes. Are you going here? Yes. And they'll ask like two times during the ride, and I'll be like, Yeah, is it?

SPEAKER_03 1:03:13

They just want to make sure you understand.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:16

And I feel like even in the the brief conversations that I have in in cafes or if I'm buying something somewhere, which is unfortunately the only transactions I can do because they're very short right now, I feel like there's extra questions with the same information. Is that possibly from part of what you're talking about? Is the confirming that's because you're a foreigner.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:36

With Chinese, there will be less confirmation needed. But the confirmation here is different from a general conversation because you're going through a transaction to make sure that you know your end of the deal. Just to make sure that you don't fire a complaint against them later. And that's the purpose for this multiple times of confirmation. But in the general Chinese conversation, often that you can see a lot of the content in the conversation is is missing, and it's difficult to grasp, and that's poses a very big trouble for me because I'm constantly wondering, like, okay, what's this and what's that? Especially in Mandarin literacy, there are so many things that's just not there. Like, why can't it just be there? Why can't you just make it clear to me?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:22

It drives me crazy when you don't complete the sentence.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:25

Are there writers that are more explicit in their meanings? Are any of those popular?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:31

Or just in existence, not even popular, but there must be, but most of the Chinese literacy, um, when I read, it's just I I think most of the time this literacy, these articles literally just recorded a very simple story. I go to the park, I saw the flowers, I loved it. The end. But just the way that it was written and it was interpreted into so many different ways. Like, why is that necessary? But I don't think it's a very Chinese thing to do. I think it happens in in the entire literacy world is to understand what the mood the author was going through, what happened to his or her life at that time that encouraged the butt come on, a story is a story, enjoy it. That's why I like science fiction because there are not so many historic things behind it. You could enjoy it as a story as it is.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:23

Oh, I cannot agree with you more. I grew up loving reading, and so I thought, oh, natural, I'll just go into studying English literature in university. And my first literature class, I walked out of. I was like, what are you doing to this wonderful story? Sorry, you're gonna be kids. Like you're killing. I literally walked out of class. And I was like, nope, nope, nope, we're gonna go general, general something until I finally moved over to science for a little while. Because I was like, no, you're you're killing it. You're killing these beautiful stories, you're doing it too much.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:54

It's one thing if something means this to me as I'm reading it, but. To go, this is the way we should read it, or this is the agreed upon translation or interpretation, or let's all just sit around and talk about our interpretations for a while. I'm like, doesn't move anything forward. Exactly. It's one thing to share stories, but I don't know. For some reason it just I couldn't I couldn't stand it.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:17

One of the greatest work ever written, which I actually absolutely love, is uh the story of the Red Mansion.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:26

The story is one of the four most famous literacy ever written.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:32

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:33

Uh sorry, the dream of the red mention. That's the offician official English uh name of the title translation. But the original name is actually called um the legend of uh the story of uh stones that doesn't make any sense, but it told a story, a fictional story of an aristocratic family, a huge family, and it's all it's very similar to some of uh the English literature, but it featured 88 characters.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:08

Whoa!

SPEAKER_03 1:07:09

Eighty-eight characters, and each character is portrayed in a way that is so distinctive that each character they have down that alley that each character had uh no more than 30 or maybe 40 words featured in this in this artwork. Yeah, and each one of them you can memorize them so vividly they jump out of it. What is that like? They are alive, you can't deny their existence, they are real, so real to you, and each one of them is so unique to you, yeah. And somehow that it's so fitting. And in their interactions, you see the beauty and the ugliness of human nature. That is beautiful. Absolutely, that's something worth a read. And there are a lot of study groups or scholars try to interpret deeper into the meaning. I don't think it's necessary.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:03

Yeah, it's all just right there.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:06

When you read there is one story that I remember vividly, that all of these, what we say, ladies from respective families, right, they they are they're very talented and they're very well taught, very civilized, right? Very respectful to each other. So often now what they do is that in the mid-afternoon after lunch, they would gather in the in a garden and they would drink tea, play chess, play instruments, write poems. Beautiful, lots of beautiful poems written in there. Absolutely beautiful. But they are still always uh mortals, regular human beings. So one day they uh they had a visitor. The visitor is supposed to be really high and loose, kind of out of the world because she's a nun. So she studies uh Buddhism all the time. Uh nun, and then she's very well respected. She was invited to the family to conduct some kind of religious ritual, and when it's done, she she joined them this young girl. So actually, most of them are age 15 or 16, full of vigor, creativity, and all that. They're having fun, and then there is a cup of jade teacups, very very small but exquisite. Because they're rich, so very small and exquisite. So that very afternoon, one of the distant relative who has fallen and uh who in the rural area is pretty much a farmer. So this old lady came to visit one of the girls. One of the girls is a distant relative, but they're so poor that when this old lady came into this beautiful courtyard and she was absolutely stuck. So there is a series of descriptions saying how out of place she felt, and then there was this drastic difference of class that she felt, she sensed, and then she awkwardly sat beside them, and she was feeling that this is not my thing, but she was being very kind and greeting everybody, everybody was greeting her back, and then it was the tea serving time, so the green tea was being brewed and poured, and then she didn't know which cup because there are quite a few cups already lying around on the table, so she picked up the cup, the jade cup, and then start tasting the tea because she has travelled afar and nobody has really offered her any drinks, so she had several and she made a fool of herself. Oh, yeah. She made a fool of herself, and uh at the end, the nun offered the jade cup to the old lady as a gift of her visit. That would represent a small fortune for someone who's coming from such a poor family. So she she was really moved, and the Jacob was they used this kind of silk handkerchief. So the handkerchief wrap it around and they gave it to her.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:00

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:01

So you think superficially that's a great deed, right? But the truth is the reason that this Jacob was offered to her as a gift is because the nun thinks that a peasant has drinked it and it's dirty and it can never be washed clean. And then she's not supposed to think that as a nun.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:18

Right. Is it the nun that offered her the oh yeah? Ah yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:23

There is always two sides to the story. And that's that's the beauty of reading these stories. There are so many layers to peel over.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:32

Is this available in many languages?

SPEAKER_03 1:11:35

Yes. And the the English translation is very, very good.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:39

It is good. Okay, cool. Cool, cool, cool, good.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:41

Very, very good.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:42

I wonder if there's a bilingual edition.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:44

There isn't.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:45

I'm gonna have to go to the bookstream.

unknown 1:11:46

Damn it.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:48

Because there are just so many, many chapters, the bilingual edition will be this much.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:52

Oh, gotcha. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:53

Yeah. But it will be a very interesting, interesting read for you guys to read English one and then for me to read a Mandarin ones, and then we can meet up and discuss.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:04

Sold.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:05

That that will be so cool.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:07

That would be really, really cool. I'm so game for that. One of the book groups I'm in, actually, they only do books. I always forget if it's just based around Shanghai or based around China. They're the book group that I uh read the Remembering Shanghai. Did I get that name right? Yeah, I read that one for them. Um I wonder if they would be interested in doing that too. We can get a bunch of people around to talk about it, maybe.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:32

Yeah. I think that's a good idea. It's a really interesting discussion.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:35

It would be, it would be, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my goodness. Okay, we're gonna have to plan after this. Uh I love how into storytelling and stories you are. It's so fascinating. And the way that you you tell stories is really captivating.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:50

I love reading stories, and I I love some of the stories, the way that they're being taught is absolutely captivating.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:56

It really is, it really is. And I'll tell you what, I've I've had some eye issues over the past few years, and it's something I've talked about in the podcast before. And so I actually stopped reading like paper books for a while because I get really bad headaches and it just doesn't feel good. So I switched over to as much audio as I could, and then for books that I couldn't find in audio form, I just was like, I guess I'm not reading those for now. And I've been able to read a few in paper form right lately, and it's it's challenging. I have to like do like an hour and then walk away and I'm done for the day. Like I can't sit in a corner and read for hours anymore, but I can do it occasionally, so that's reopened back up, and there's a lot more in audio now, so it's it's a good time to have eye problems.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:40

Okay, then I have a question for you. Yeah, yeah. Uh, do you feel differently when you let's say that you read the same book on paper and versus audio?

SPEAKER_01 1:13:50

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And depending on the book and the narrator, if uh i it it it could vary. Like Harry Potter, I went through the entire series in audio, and I'm really glad that I did because I could just close my eyes and see it.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:07

Me too.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:08

And not worry about the words or and I don't like her writing style for the first book. I I didn't like that. I thought it was very immature and it didn't really appeal to me, so I'm glad that I could go into the story and not worry about it. So it really, really depends on the book and the netwriter.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:22

And I did a whole audiobook for Twilight because I don't think it's worth the read.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:26

I actually just did the movies and I was really surprised that I got into the movies. I don't think I've ever admitted that out loud before.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:34

I can tell you that the audiobook, the writing, is absolutely idiotic.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:38

Yeah. Well the story's really ridiculous.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:41

I had a junior English level, like high school English novel. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:45

Yeah, something that goes with the shortest book I've ever read with Fifty Shades of Grey. And why am I reading this? This is so boring. Why am I reading this? Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. And it's about an hour, it's done.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:58

I keep waiting for the good parts of it. Why everybody was never happened? Never happened. Yeah. Like what in the movie was even worse. Like, why am I doing this stuff? What is happening? And I'll do audio and fiction, non-fiction, I'll do podcasts, I'll do like lectures and all that kind of stuff. One of my favorite one of my favorite creative people is Elizabeth Gilbert. She wrote the book A Prey Love, which is not by any stretch one of my favorite books. It's not. It's an interesting story. It took people imagination and did something with it. But when she talks about creativity, I think she's on fire. It's amazing. Like, have you seen her TED talk on creativity? No, I haven't. I'm going to send it to you. I'm going to send it to you. It's it's truly, it's like 15 minutes that will make you think for like 15 hours. Ooh. It's really, really good. And then she wrote this book called Big Magic, which is mostly matter-of-factly, but chapter five is life-changing. She describes how to let creativity go. Not to claim it, not to possess it, how to kind of just coexist with it, and it kind of lets it flourish more if you stop trying to possess it. And it's just really cool way of looking at it. And it's just, it was like, whoa, that's that's crazy.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:15

Doesn't it sound a little similar, like a theater activity that you would often enjoy?

SPEAKER_01 1:16:24

We're not uh are you speaking about a very sensual activity?

SPEAKER_03 1:16:30

No, we're not censored.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:32

We're not we're not censored yet. Maybe season three. Yeah, no, oh gosh, you're so right. I'm gonna think about that for a minute. Listeners, let us know what you think about that analogy. Now you already answered the dream question, so we're not gonna do that.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:50

Oh, we have a question about dreams.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:52

Yeah! The the the one of the women I was talking about earlier, oh, who grew up in uh Song Songjiang, she um she wanted to know in future interviews what peop languages people dream in, but you've already answered that.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:06

You but I think apart from uh the language that you're dreaming, my dream I would say is quite unique because it's always a complete story and it's always an adventurous story. Whoa. It's always a bit of a life-threatening, but not really being killed. Very, very adventurous story.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:24

And the story always has a completion, like it's not you never wake up before the story's over.

unknown 1:17:29

What?

SPEAKER_03 1:17:29

Yeah, but half of the story I'm literally directing, rewriting it the whole time when it's happening. So it's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:35

Okay, do you must I was meaning to ask you this earlier. Do you write? No, I don't. How is that possible? Because it's so awful, my writing is not good. No! Okay, but I mean you I need to take writing. You've got to do some sort of storytelling. Because if you're if you're editing your dream, if you're like directing your good dreams and doing that and you've got the the power of storytelling behind you, you're you're wasting your talent.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:00

Thank you. Now I know that what I can do for the rest of my life when I uh retire. I think it'd be really awesome to write some of the stories in a conversation with people's opinions. Um one of the reasons that drives me to do what I do today is because I realize people are so diversified, each one of them are absolutely unique in in his or her own way or she he own way.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:24

And in a way that it's so unique the way that they think, so the way that they express themselves are different. And for me, I drive tremendous joy from listening to people from all over the world and then try to interpret and try to match their speech style, not just to deliver what they're saying, but to actually match their style. It's a challenge, but it's so much fun. That sounds so difficult. So, in one of those market research, often that the moderator is talking with six or more people to conduct the research, and it's a QA style, like the moderator would ask questions like you're asking me now, and the respondent will respond. But each one of them, they all come in different backgrounds, maybe they have similar interests or so, and but each one when they talk, they all use different styles. So, my ultimate goal in conducting or translating this kind of market research is that without looking at the audio, because the session is being audio and video recorded all the time for research purposes, but my ultimate goal is that if you listen to my translation, I hope that you could distinguish each uh respondent by my different choice of words, and that'll be so awesome.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:36

So I can tell why you're not writing now, because you're all of your creativity is going into that master masterpiece. Yeah, no, seriously, that's a that's a lot of mental energy to be able to recreate the person, not just the words.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:48

Yeah, absolutely. That's amazing. Yeah, and the best uh the best of all is that when the um when my audience is looking at the things happening but they're not hearing anything in the original context, and sometimes when they make a joke, it's not really funny translating into a different language. Yeah, so it really takes wits in the split of a second to be able to be able to translate that, and then you see people who is listening to the original Mandarin conversation, they laugh and then half seconds later the foreigners start laughing too.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:17

Okay, that's a good point. What would you say is the biggest difference between the humor in Mandarin Chinese and in English?

SPEAKER_03 1:20:23

I would say that some of the like the points of humor, right, are absolutely universal. But some of the words are so embedded in culture, like pawns, that just some of the things is not possible to translate. Yeah. Like I try to translate for uh do the subtitle translation for a lot of comedy, like the Big Ben series, and also the uh the two broad girls, yeah. Like a practice because I don't get paid for it, okay. But some of the pawns are so difficult to translate. This is where your capabilities are you have to be so creative. Oh and there are some subtitle translators that are absolutely amazing, they get me floored all the time.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:06

I often wonder about Big Bang, because when we were in China eight years ago, we we left for about eight years. Our 1920-year-old students were really into the Big Bang theory.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:17

I am so addicted.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:18

But and I I like the show. I'm watching it and it's in its final season apparently. But um, but I watch it and I think how okay, words, yes, yes, yes, but there's so many cultural references, like so many, that I have to sometimes think, huh, oh I get it. Or or I'll be like, if it's something really new and I've been out of the country for a while, I'll have to kind of Google it and go, oh, that's what they're talking about. Yeah. So I'm like, how do they get those cultural references?

SPEAKER_03 1:21:44

Research.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:45

Fair enough.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:46

I think well, for translatory research is a huge part of my job. It takes more time than actual work. Um, but for the audience who is watching that as comedies, they either get it or they don't get it. If they're really interested, they might dig into that. Sure. It's a personal choice, but it's very popular in China, the Big Bang Theory.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:05

I I keeping up with a Kardashian is probably more popular amongst the Millennium.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:09

Oh no.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:10

Really?

SPEAKER_03 1:22:10

Yeah. I I'm sorry to the fans that like it and to the audience that likes it, but um I know it's the kind of lifestyle that the Millennium generation is really into it. But sorry, I'm a little bit older than that and I appreciate a higher league of fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:26

It was just so slow. I I tried to watch one episode because I was very curious what people were intrigued with, and I almost fell asleep. I was like, nothing's happening.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:33

Exactly. But some sometimes these Millennium people, when they when these things happen and that they would feel like, oh you know what, I'm living my life, they're living our life, their life too, at the same time, and I feel like I'm right next to them. I understand that kind of uh okay, I would say companionship.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:52

Sure, sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:52

But in life, in real life, a lot of the times most people live with lots of disposable hours to spend and are bored.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:02

They must be, because it's one of the slowest things I've ever watched in my life.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:06

I didn't even bother with it.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:08

I don't oh it's I think I lasted like 15 minutes. It was it was bad. It was bad. I don't know. It's not like I didn't watch stupid stuff when I was their age. Of course I did. I watched MTV mostly from like my teenagehood until I don't know early twenties. I just don't watch MTV. Well, I don't because they they stopped playing music. Like it was it was a mixture of programs and music, and then it just the music went away and I'm like it's less and less now.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:38

It's it's more about getting advertisements and getting paid. But in the past, there are some decent music.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:44

Yeah, and there were some decent shows. Like The Real World was funny in the first few seasons. I think it's still going.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:51

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:52

So I think it's like 20 episode season 20 or something. I'm like, okay, I think we've played all that out. I think we're good. I don't know. I don't know, I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:00

But in comparison, I would have much preferred British episodes because it's short and it's compact, especially Downton Abbey. Oh my god, the translation. Oh really? I mean when you listen to it, it's really not much. That's the way they talk. But when you write down the translations, uh, there's so much to learn from and it's so proper English. Uh Julian the writer actually won the um best writing for Emmy, right? Best writer. Yeah. Absolutely gorgeous. And then in the way that the they delivered these lines, you know that their emotion tumbling beneath the surface.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:40

And it's it's so you can't see it, but it's just right here behind their I can feel it's like tumbling down.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:49

Did you ever see the movie Remains of the Day? Um super old movie now.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:54

No, I don't think I have. Well, what's the story?

SPEAKER_01 1:24:56

Emma Thompson, well, the main actors were Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. Anthony Hopkins. Oh yeah. And they were two uh servants in this super proper British household many, many years ago. And they apparently had a thing for each other. They were very fond of each other, but nothing ever came of it because they were just trying to play their role in the house. So it was just a series of them not telling each other how they felt about each other. Like they're always around each other and always being overly formal, but always be like, but you'd never see that. But you could kind of tell it movie with them not doing anything, and I was sitting there just like it now. And I was like, come on, let's go. Do something, say something, you don't have to do it in public, just like slip them a beautiful poem or do you act it?

SPEAKER_02 1:25:52

Drop it, drop it, drop it.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:53

But they never, I don't remember the ending to be honest with you, but I'm pretty sure nothing ever happened. But if the whole movie was just kind of that repressed fun of it, yeah, exactly. But oh now I have to watch it. Two of my favorite actors of all time, and I was just like, why did you do this to me? Yeah, but that's that's the whole joy. I know.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:12

It doesn't necessarily happen to be like super happy endings, but no, but it's just a charisma.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:19

I wanted them to have one moment of acknowledgement that they both felt the same way. I wanted them to know.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:25

Yeah, but wouldn't that be a lot less torturous for the audience?

SPEAKER_01 1:26:30

Yes, but it could just be at the end. Oh come on. For the last like just have them like brush hands for the like the last second and then they're done or something.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:39

You want the last second of release.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:42

Ah I want them to I want those characters to know that they were loved. Instead of just being lonely, lonely people just fulfilling their you know, their sir servanteal duties is not even a word.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:59

Well, that's a very good word if it wasn't there. Yeah, it should be a word.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:02

Oh, I totally feel yeah, I wanted them to know that.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:07

I think it reminded me of one of the I don't even remember remember the name of the movie, but uh it was because of World War II. Then the boy and the girl were separate, they love each other, but they didn't express that. And then the boy was on the way after the war to find uh find a girl, and uh he got some kind of injury and actually died the night before she was supposed to met the girl, and that was after maybe 10-12 years in uh the time span. And he thought the girl was alive, but actually the girl was actually killed three days after they departed. And it was absolutely gut-wrenching when I saw the story, and I think it's quite recent, I just don't remember the the movie where where it was in hours. I think I was the only one who was crying in the whole movie. I was crying.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:57

I would be crying for that, I would definitely be crying. I think I'm much more of a people got together and knew they loved each other and then things went horrible.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:07

You see that the reality is the girl has died a few days after they've departed with a boy. But he doesn't know. Didn't know. And is that a sense of longing, that kind of gravitating towards her. And then he didn't know that he was going to die that evening. He saw that he just had a cold. And he's uh he's troopmates, someone who come back with him, kept comforting him, knowing that kept saying that, oh, you're going to see her tomorrow, you guys are blah blah blah. Right? And the truth is that he knew he wouldn't survive the night. And he didn't.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:46

Did he because he didn't know she was dead. Did he try to contact her that night?

SPEAKER_03 1:28:50

They tried, but there was no communication between the two countries. So they've not contacted each other for many, many years.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:57

So he died not knowing that she had already died years ago.

unknown 1:28:59

No.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:01

And he did not even realize that he that he was going to die that morning.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:05

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:06

And the night before, he he's more experienced troop mate already, uh battle mate, already knew that he's not gonna survive the night. So he kept dying. So he kept, he knew, and he was crying when he said to him. He was already pretty much like he said, Oh, you know what? I feel really tired. I think I'm gonna you know close my eyes for a little bit and try to catch an early bus or something. He said, No, he said, Yeah, sure, just relax and you know what to build up your strengths, you're gonna need your girl tomorrow, but he knew that he's gonna he's not gonna make it. And I was crying the whole time.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:40

Yeah, but you were in a movie theater. Nobody else crying and nobody else was crying. How is that possible?

SPEAKER_03 1:29:44

I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:45

They were lying, they they went home and cried for hours.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:47

Very possibly convinced.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:50

I just have very little self-control, so I just like no.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:54

I love after after a good cry, I feel so light. Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, so I'm like, no, if it happens, there you go.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:01

Crying is like the best detox, one of the best detox.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:04

That's wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:05

Yeah, sometimes I'll intentionally watch a sad movie. Oh, that's great. It's advised to do so.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:11

Yeah, oh good. Once in a while, when you feel like all of those negative emotions build up, from work or from whatever that makes you unhappy. If you put up, it's gonna hurt your organism.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:22

I need, I need to. It just it it's like a cloud over my head and it's just kind of pushing me down. Oh no, I gotta get rid of it.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:27

Sad movie that's you know it cries our eyes out and it feels so relaxed and so good. We must sound so weird right now.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:34

I'm telling you, listeners, you gotta try this.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:36

No, this is very, very good.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:39

Oh yeah! Okay, so check it out. So on this podcast, we have both people learning Chinese all stages through and people who grew up with Chinese and learning other languages. So, what questions should I ask future guests?

SPEAKER_03 1:30:53

Instead of saying question, I would um I would say that why don't we invite the audience to share one of their most memorable experiences in language learning. Maybe then then we go from there. What do you think? Yeah, it could be both for for for language learners of any kind.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:12

Yeah, what do we want them to share? I like it. Um let's do it.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:16

We could let them share some uh doesn't necessarily have to be awkward, but something that is unexpected, something that surprises them or even scared them a little. And then I always feel that when you're closely connected to these true emotions, and then this is where it sparks. This is where you feel that you're truly connected to a human being, disregard of the physical distance, because you can simplicize, you can relate to that emotion. So I would I wouldn't okay, I would dare to say that the scariest moment that you've uh you've encountered in learning a language and living in that country, or it could be the most touching moment, right? Right? It could be it could be something that reaches deeply. Yeah. Something that you as a foreigner or as well as a foreigner, I would say foreigner not because you're coming from another country, but because you're learning a foreign language.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:16

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:18

You've realize that in your dealings with people who spoke a different language, perhaps, you know, there are so many interesting things to share.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:27

Absolutely. And those deep emotions connected to the language make it stronger and and and easier to retain the language, and it just it becomes real.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:35

Always, like the memory is is always must better uh better constructed or memorized through the emotions.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:42

What should we have them tag it so we can follow this and they can follow it?

SPEAKER_03 1:32:45

Strong stories.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:46

Yeah. So thank you so much, Liz, for coming today. This has been so intensely interesting. Seriously, no, I really appreciate this. When you dive into language, you dive into someone's soul in a way, right? You're going into their their childhood and their emotions and their dreams and thoughts and yeah, it's all interconnected. So I really appreciate you sharing this with not just with me, but with our listeners.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:08

Ah well, uh audience, I don't know who you are, but I hope that through this session of podcast, we bring each other a little bit closer.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:16

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Changing Scripts Podcast. Again, if you are learning the Chinese language or if you're coming from the Chinese language learning another language, I'd love to interview you for this podcast. Please feel free to contact me in any social media way that you see fit. Go ahead and contact me, and we will hash out how to get you on the sound creation known as the Changing Scripts podcast. A lot more is coming your way soon.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:51

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