Ian:
Hi, my name's Ian. I'm from the UK, from Northern England, and I've been living in China altogether for about 9 years. I currently work in language testing, and I started learning Chinese a few years before I came to China on a sort of a very ad hoc basis.
Stephanie Fuccio:
All right, before we dip into the learning of Chinese, I would like to dip into your language background as a whole. Let's dig back from whatever you can remember from your childhood about what was your first language? Let me just say that.
Ian:
English.
Stephanie Fuccio:
English. Okay. So, when you were learning English, either at home or at school, do you remember any part of that process?
Ian
I do at school. Yeah. I remember the reading and writing part. Speaking, listening, not really. No, not too really.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:00:48 - 00:00:50
Why does the reading and writing part stick out?
Ian00:00:50 - 00:01:10
I remember my first few weeks at school having a board with flashcards stuck around the outside. I remember To, T-O. And I remember I had a teacher who said tut, tut, like that. And I said to, because I'm from a different area. And I remember that really stuck out because she was constantly correcting my accent.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:01:10 - 00:01:13
Right, right. Did you grow up in a different area and then move in there?
Ian00:01:13 - 00:01:27
Yes, I moved when I was 3 and a half from Northeast England to Manchester, which was a very different accent. But I also remember getting confused between words like the, there, the ones beginning with TH, they looked similar to me. I remember.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:01:27 - 00:01:52
That's interesting. That's interesting because I grew up with Italian parents who spoke different dialects of Italian. And so, when I went to school, I remember similar flashcards and I remember looking at the words and going, huh, that's not how I've heard it. Like hearing people say it, looking at the word and going, that's what that is, because hearing it from different accents for so long. So, that's interesting that even within English, there's, there can be that, that, that big a difference.
Ian00:01:53 - 00:02:07
I remember as well piecing together words, like whatever that's called, where my exercise book had something, education committee. And my second year, I remember being so pleased when I managed to piece out the different sounds.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:02:07 - 00:02:09
Education committee. What grade were you in when you had that?
Ian00:02:09 - 00:02:11
Second, yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:02:11 - 00:02:11
Really?
Ian00:02:11 - 00:02:15
Well, it was just the, it was the, you know, the maker of the exercise book.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:02:15 - 00:02:16
Oh, okay, okay.
Ian00:02:16 - 00:02:17
It's a textbook.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:02:17 - 00:02:25
I was like, geez, you guys were advanced. So you were reading like the back of the book, the inside of the book? Oh, okay.
Ian00:02:25 - 00:02:28
I've always been like that. Yeah. Anything I see, I need to be able to read.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:02:28 - 00:02:36
No, me too. Before I start reading a book, I have to look at all the parts of it and I have to know what's in there. Yeah.
Ian00:02:36 - 00:02:37
The general shape of it.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:02:37 - 00:02:40
Yeah, that's me too. That's funny.
Ian00:02:41 - 00:02:41
Wow.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:02:42 - 00:02:49
Do you remember any part of the language being more enjoyable or less enjoyable to learn in school or out of school?
Ian00:02:49 - 00:03:23
Reading. Yes, definitely reading. I really enjoyed it. It opened up a whole world of autonomy and just knowledge, I think. And also the escapism with stories and things like that. I loved that independence. And I think I always found writing quite a lot harder. I think I was quite good at it at school, but I just found it required a lot more effort. Right, right, right. And I think speaking, I always had a bit of a problem with expressing myself properly. Whereas with reading, it was just a fluid, you know, Literally constructing new worlds in my head.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:03:23 - 00:03:33
Mm-hmm. Oh my gosh. We are, we're so carbon copies right now. Except for one thing. For me, reading was, I did latch onto it early, but it was very difficult for me at first.
Ian00:03:33 - 00:03:33
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:03:33 - 00:03:54
Making the sound appearance connection or the sound text connection was really, really hard for me. But once I did, I was always reading. Like my parents would come into the, like knock on my door and be like concerned that I was in there too long reading. Right? And they're like, are you still alive? I'm like, are you kidding? I've been to different worlds already. Look at me, still alive.
Ian00:03:54 - 00:03:58
I used to, I was well known in my family for locking myself away in the toilet.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:03:58 - 00:03:59
Yeah.
Ian00:03:59 - 00:04:11
Because I could, I could lock the door and nobody could disturb me. And my, I remember my dad in particular going mad and, uh, banging on the door, saying, hurry up, the whole family here. But that was my private study for reading.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:04:11 - 00:04:20
Right, right, right, right, right. That's hilarious. What part of writing do you remember? Do you remember what part of writing was Why was it difficult?
Ian00:04:20 - 00:04:55
I think because you have that time to assemble your words and you can always shift things around. And I think even when I was very little, it was like I always thought, does that sound right? Should I write it better that way? And I'm still like that. I can never finish a draft because I'm so perfectionist with it. Whereas with speaking, you don't have that luxury, obviously. But yeah, I think that's what it is. It's that perfectionism that really irritates me. You know, I really know what I want to say, but I never feel I quite express it clearly enough.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:04:55 - 00:04:58
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's never finished.
Ian00:04:58 - 00:04:58
Yes.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:04:58 - 00:05:09
I remember hearing a writer, I don't remember exactly who it was, but I remember them saying a writer will never think anything is finished. So literally what, when it's done is when the deadline is. Yeah. If, if there is a deadline.
Ian00:05:09 - 00:05:19
And that's a unique, yes, I think I've, I'm, I think I'm quite bad at that, setting my own deadlines. If someone else is doing it, I'm quite good at meeting them, but I, I, Yeah, I'm never finished with my old stuff.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:05:19 - 00:05:30
You mentioned one of your teachers in primary school. Do you remember any of the methods that were used in addition to the flashcards, any of the methods that were used to teach the language?
Ian00:05:30 - 00:05:53
You know, I don't really. That's the only thing that's really stuck. I do remember doing a lot of reading, you know, all the phonics, is it? The whatever. And yeah, reading things out loud. But you know what, I think, I think I was quite quick at getting the reading, so I've forgotten the process, if you know what I mean.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:05:53 - 00:06:02
Yeah, no, me too. I do remember the sound emphasis on things, but once we got to whole chunks of words and sentences, I don't remember anything.
Ian00:06:02 - 00:06:13
Yeah, that's it. But I remember some of the books we had and we had series, you know, graded books. Um, and I remember really getting into them. You know, I just really loved the stories, but I think that's when I really learned first.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:06:15 - 00:06:44
Wow. I'm jealous. The graded books we had were so, like, the content was so boring for me. Like, it wasn't until like I got a library card and then was like checking my own stuff out that I was like, okay, this is cool content. The stories were just so, I know they were made for kids, but they seemed so un— like not colorful at all. They were very dull and like matter-of-factly, like I feel like they didn't get into the heads of kids. They were just writing about kids in the stories.
Ian00:06:44 - 00:06:50
Yeah. So we certainly had some like that. Yeah, which were quite dry, but I remember others getting really quite interesting.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:06:50 - 00:06:51
Yeah. Oh, that's cool.
Ian00:06:51 - 00:06:58
But it was that thing of, yeah, the first library experience and all that, I think was, uh, that was when I got really excited.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:06:58 - 00:07:05
Oh, library experience. I haven't even been asking that as a question. That's a really good point. Do you remember when you started to get into libraries?
Ian00:07:05 - 00:07:16
Yeah, I remember my dad taking me. It was probably that same year, actually, the second year of primary. And He introduced the whole concept. I remember it was a Monday night. It was winter.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:07:16 - 00:07:18
Oh my God, you remember that?
Ian00:07:18 - 00:07:53
He took me in and I was fascinated by the whole process. What is it? What does it do? And, you know, he told me how many books I could choose and got me my card, which really was a piece of cardboard at the time. And I was just fascinated by the whole checking out process. To me, that was all, I think I love processes like that, learning about a new system. And yeah, I remember going home with those books and just Loving that, sitting down with a little pile of books and even without starting to read them, just looking through, like you said, the shape of the books and what was in it. That was, uh, yeah, it was just something to really get into.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:07:53 - 00:08:06
Loved it. I think one of the first questions I asked was, how many can I take home? Yeah. Because I was like, wait, all of these? I can read all of these? All of this is available to me, but just not all at once.
Ian00:08:06 - 00:08:11
And they had different limits on fiction and nonfiction. So you had 2 quotas you could fill.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:08:11 - 00:08:25
Yeah. And I think at the time, let me think, 'cause I started going to libraries, I'm guessing in the mid-'70s. So I, I don't remember checking out records. I don't know if that was a thing, but I definitely remember cassette tapes in the '80s.
Ian00:08:26 - 00:08:26
Yeah. Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:08:26 - 00:08:36
'Cause we moved to New York, Pennsylvania. I remember checking out like cassette tapes, uh, but not many. I do remember it being mostly books, books, books, books, and later magazines.
Ian00:08:36 - 00:08:36
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:08:36 - 00:08:45
Which was just crazy to check out 'cause it was like, okay, now this is Like modern, like current, super current information with glossy pictures that I don't have to buy.
Ian00:08:46 - 00:08:56
Cool. Oh, our library must have been poorer because we had a big rack of magazines, but you couldn't take them out and they had a thing that set off the alarms if you tried to.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:08:56 - 00:08:57
Yeah.
Ian00:08:57 - 00:08:57
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:08:57 - 00:09:20
Yeah. Some did and some didn't. And I moved around a lot. So that was one of the first things I looked for was what can I check out here that I couldn't in my last library? Yeah. And it's one of the first things I actually do when I move to a place. And my husband and I actually go to libraries when we go on vacation. We'll tend to go to libraries in the place that we're in because the structures a lot of times are also beautiful.
Ian00:09:20 - 00:09:43
Yeah, I, I was quite surprised. I was back in the UK, um, for a couple of, well, 18 months, and I actually signed up for the local library, which is now in a brand new modern building. Yeah, I was just amazed by how the process has changed, and the staff is so minimal now, and it's all, you put the books into a machine which checks them out. And every, the thing is as well, though, the amount of stock has decreased Because they share it among different branches.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:09:44 - 00:09:44
Yeah.
Ian00:09:44 - 00:09:50
And now you can do all the digital ordering of the books and they arrive the next day or even the same day. So it's a very different experience now.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:09:50 - 00:09:54
It's a really different experience. I, do you remember, um, card catalogues?
Ian00:09:54 - 00:09:59
Yes, I was about to, I was going to mention that actually. I enjoyed that just as much as the books.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:09:59 - 00:10:07
Yeah. Oh dear listeners that are younger, who are what, Gen Xers and Gen Y? Hmm. How would you describe card catalogues?
Ian00:10:07 - 00:10:09
Very long drawer. Very, very long drawer.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:10:09 - 00:10:10
Yeah.
Ian00:10:10 - 00:10:11
And very narrow with index cards.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:10:11 - 00:10:11
Yes.
Ian00:10:11 - 00:10:29
And yeah, you went through through with your fingers like this and looked for, and they would tell you which branch often it was held at. I don't know about you, but ours was shared among one local authority area. Yeah. So you'd find it and be, oh, well, they've got this, get so excited, but you had to do a lot of manual searching to find it.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:10:29 - 00:11:03
You did. And that's how you searched, no computer whatsoever. That was, oh my gosh. I remember the last library, the last school I was doing my PhD that I didn't finish, they had those cards, they were recycling them. So by the computers, they had those cards as scratch paper. And I was like, oh no, it was like card catalog cards. These are so exciting. So I started to take a bunch of them in my backpack to like use them in classes and stuff. 'Cause they're great mini note-taking things. And they were just, they had this meaning that I know my students didn't get. They were just like, oh, it's tiny paper.
Ian00:11:03 - 00:11:30
I remember as well arriving at university and had a great library at university, and it was full of research papers and journals. And I remember they'd just taken delivery of their first CD-ROM drive, which cost about £4,000 or £5,000 at the time, I think, for CD-ROM. And their entire catalog had been put onto a series of CDs. But you had to book time on this one computer. I think it was allocated in 5-minute slots or something.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:11:30 - 00:11:30
What?
Ian00:11:30 - 00:11:40
And in that time, you had to quickly search them. But the feeling of that was amazing. So all of these Probably millions of journals and things are all indexed onto this one disc.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:11:40 - 00:11:51
Do you ever wonder, like, if you were growing up now with the internet and mobile phones and tablets and all this stuff, do you think your love of reading would be as strong?
Ian00:11:51 - 00:11:59
I have wondered about that actually, because I remember, I just wonder about the sort of perseverance aspect.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:11:59 - 00:11:59
Yeah.
Ian00:12:00 - 00:12:32
Because even, you know, now I find myself skipping between things and you've gotta try quite hard to focus. That's why sometimes you use a Kindle instead of iPad to read, because you can't do that as easily. And I do remember that feeling of, yeah, there being very little to do apart from pick up that one book or those several books. And even if you got sort of sick of it, put it down for a few minutes and pick it up again, because there was very little else to do, to be honest. So yeah, I think that did sort of teach me certain things about concentration, focus.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:12:32 - 00:12:42
Me too. Me too. Me too. And one level I think I have gotten into things sooner because I grew up in a small town, so I feel like I would've had access to more stuff sooner.
Ian00:12:42 - 00:12:42
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:12:42 - 00:12:53
But on the other end, I really worry about not my attention span so much, but kind of, but just would I have sat in a corner and read stuff online like I did books?
Ian00:12:53 - 00:12:53
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:12:53 - 00:13:02
Would I have gone off into that world that was just starting in those paper pages and then kind of continued with whatever my brain was doing with it?
Ian00:13:02 - 00:13:24
Well, I remember things like, uh, I would see someone else at school had a library book and I'd think, oh, I want to read that as well, but I'd have to wait for them to check it back in. But that anticipation meant once you did get it, you made sure to read it. And also certain series of stories, you know, and it was, it's almost if you had the freedom just to download them whenever you wanted, then you might dot around between them and—
Stephanie Fuccio:00:13:24 - 00:13:26
That's so true.
Ian00:13:26 - 00:13:28
Not follow things serially in such a way.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:13:28 - 00:13:39
Yeah. Yeah. And not having the physical books around, like I have tons of stuff that I have to, I have to create reminders for things that I have saved digitally that I want to go and remember. Dreams. Like, wait a minute, what? Yeah.
Ian00:13:40 - 00:13:41
So much choice now.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:13:41 - 00:13:57
It is, it is, it is. It's a bit overwhelming. Well, we don't have to consider it because we're not actually going to come back right now, but as different people, but it's something that I think about, like looking at, like when I was teaching freshmen, looking at them and going, what would I be like having grown up with the stuff that you had accessible?
Ian00:13:57 - 00:13:57
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:13:57 - 00:13:58
Yeah.
Ian00:13:58 - 00:13:59
Very much shapes your
Stephanie Fuccio:00:14:00 - 00:14:00
Yeah.
Ian00:14:00 - 00:14:01
Experience of growing up, I think.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:14:01 - 00:14:09
It does. It does. It does. Let's switch over into Chinese. So when did you start learning Chinese for the first time?
Ian00:14:09 - 00:14:50
The first time I ever looked at it at all was during my first ever trip to Hong Kong, which was 2003. And I just found I was suddenly in this place where the writing system was completely different and I just could not help falling in love with that writing system and just being so fascinated by it. I felt, for a start, quite irritated that I couldn't read signs and things. And I was like, what could that possibly mean? You know, and I was guessing. So I went and bought a book, which was actually little cartoons of the history of the characters. And I basically read the first one, then went and got the second and third one in the series, and they only covered the most basic characters.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:14:50 - 00:14:50
Right.
Ian00:14:50 - 00:15:12
Then I went back to the UK, and it was a few years, it was, what, 1995? No, no, 2005. I went and actually bought a textbook, a teach-yourself Chinese book, just from pure fascination. And it was a period over about a few months that I slowly got into it and then realized I really want to start learning this.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:15:12 - 00:15:18
So in 2003 in Hong Kong, the book that you were using, I'm assuming that was in Cantonese?
Ian00:15:18 - 00:15:33
Well, traditional characters, traditional characters as opposed to the simplified ones used here on the mainland. And it was from the Straits Times, which is Singapore, I think, Singapore newspaper.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:15:33 - 00:15:34
Okay.
Ian00:15:34 - 00:15:36
And so, they use traditional characters as well.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:15:36 - 00:15:36
Right, right, right.
Ian00:15:36 - 00:15:45
And it was actually a little cartoon they had in their newspaper every day that introduced a new character to, you know, people living in Hong Kong.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:15:45 - 00:15:45
Oh, okay.
Ian00:15:45 - 00:16:09
Yes. It's in English, I presume. And it's called Fun with Chinese Characters, I believe. And there's 3 books in the series. Yeah, that's kind of what got me in because it was colorful and funny and it was quite an easy way to just look at the— to be honest, a lot of the meanings, derivations were made up, I think, for entertainment, but they helped you to remember them.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:16:09 - 00:16:09
Absolutely.
Ian00:16:09 - 00:16:25
And yeah, after that, once I started getting into the actual Colloquial Chinese textbook, which was my first one, which I actually found was a really good book, I was driving quite long distances to work as well, and I started listening to the the CD, the Compass, the dialogues on there.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:16:25 - 00:16:27
And you're doing that in England or in China?
Ian00:16:27 - 00:16:28
That was when I was in England.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:16:28 - 00:16:28
Okay.
Ian00:16:28 - 00:16:37
And at that point, I had no plan to come and live in China. It was just because I found it such a different language. I think that's the key thing.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:16:37 - 00:16:37
Yeah.
Ian00:16:37 - 00:16:47
Because I'd studied French and German at school, but Chinese was just a whole new world, you know, a very, very different language. And I think that's what just got me interested.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:16:47 - 00:16:52
With French and German, did you get to a level that you would consider fluent in those languages? Not fluent, no.
Ian00:16:52 - 00:17:23
I did them for O-level, which shows my age because that was the exam before the current exams in the UK. So I studied them up to 16 for my national exams at 16. I didn't carry on with them to 18 because I got focused into science and maths, which the school had a lot to do with as well. And you weren't allowed to mix these things in high school. So regrettably, I had to let go of German because that's the one I really enjoyed.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:17:23 - 00:17:23
Yeah.
Ian00:17:23 - 00:17:34
But I'd been studying French for what, 5 years, German for 3 years by the time I took the exams, but I felt much, much more confident with German than I did with French.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:17:34 - 00:17:39
Did you feel the pull with Chinese like you did with German, or was it a different kind of—
Ian00:17:39 - 00:18:06
No, I did it in a very similar way, actually. It was about sort of— I find German very systematic, very logical. Chinese has its own quite strong logic as well, actually, and I felt that same pull, which I never had with French. I felt like French was much more like English, more freeform, messy, if you like. I sort of found that off-putting. Wow. Wow.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:18:06 - 00:18:10
Wow. Okay. So 2005, you were listening to the audio and you were reading the textbook.
Ian00:18:10 - 00:18:11
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:18:11 - 00:18:14
Were you focusing on writing the characters at first or?
Ian00:18:14 - 00:18:30
Not at all. No, not at first. I took a few lessons from a tutor and she got me to start writing a journal and I could write basic stuff. So I started learning then, but writing has never really been a focused because it's a very different skill in Chinese.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:18:30 - 00:18:30
That's the thing.
Ian00:18:31 - 00:18:39
And you can read perfectly well, or you can learn to read perfectly well without having to write the characters. And you need to allocate your time, really. It's also time-consuming.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:18:39 - 00:18:55
It's very time-consuming. And now with the pinyin input, uh, because I thought I was going to focus a little bit on writing because reading and writing are the 2 areas I'm very interested in, but once I learned how to type using the pinyin, I just kind of went, okay, never mind.
Ian00:18:55 - 00:18:56
Exactly.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:18:56 - 00:19:10
I just don't foresee myself handwriting anything in the future, but I do hope that I can, once I get enough vocabulary, be on social media and communicate with people via email and those kinds of things, which I can do with pinyin input so easily.
Ian00:19:10 - 00:19:27
What did happen with me was I got to a kind of plateau with my character learning and reading, and I was finding it very difficult to cram in any more characters. So one thing I thought I'd do was to start learning to write.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:19:27 - 00:19:27
Yeah.
Ian00:19:27 - 00:19:32
Because what I was finding was I couldn't differentiate between so many characters.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:19:32 - 00:19:32
Yeah.
Ian00:19:32 - 00:19:57
So by learning to write, I then started to find I removed that logjam. But then I got to a certain point after a few years where I was practicing writing every day where I thought, I mean, this is so time-consuming. And by then smartphones all started to have the pinyin input. And even Chinese people were saying to me, we're even forgetting how to write a lot of the more complex characters because we don't need to very much.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:19:57 - 00:20:16
And somebody told me yesterday that there used to be a TV show on in China where they used to have like a game show where they would say the word and people had to, Chinese people had to like write it and they were kind of testing them. Do you remember how to write this word? And I don't know, he's gonna send me the information later, but have you ever heard of this show?
Ian00:20:16 - 00:20:17
No, I haven't.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:20:17 - 00:20:21
Yeah. I was like, oh my God, that's the kind of thing I would watch. I'd be like, can I remember? Wait, pause and try to like write it.
Ian00:20:23 - 00:20:25
Yeah, I've not been watching much.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:20:25 - 00:20:36
Do you feel like that would be necessary at some stage of learning the language, that there would need to be an emphasis on writing for a little bit to get past that, the recognition part?
Ian00:20:36 - 00:20:57
It certainly helped for me. It was a sort of scaffolding thing for me to get past that barrier for whatever reason that I reached that barrier. But I know so many people who are very good with the language who can't write at all. So I don't think it's necessary, but just for me it was. It's something that's worth trying, I think.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:20:57 - 00:21:05
Okay. So let's keep going with that chronology. So you're listening to the audio, you're doing the textbook. What was the next stage of your learning?
Ian00:21:05 - 00:21:24
Ah, listening to the audio, doing the textbook. I was working my way through characters by several months before I came to China. I got through the magic 800 or close to 1,000 mark, but that had taken a whole year to get to that point.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:21:24 - 00:21:27
Magic 800. Is that a known list of—
Ian00:21:27 - 00:21:45
No, it's not. The reason is because the book, I got a book which a lot of people don't rate very highly, but I found incredibly useful learning Chinese characters, which dealt with the first 800. And I think that was tied to the old HSK as well. I think it might have been. Yes, it was. It was one of the HSK levels in the old exam.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:21:45 - 00:21:46
I gotcha.
Ian00:21:46 - 00:21:59
So to me, that was a massive milestone. I remember when I first got that book, I looked at the back page and thought, that's what I need to get to. And it was when I came to China, I was at about the 1,000-character mark. That's when I hit this logjam.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:21:59 - 00:22:00
Yeah.
Ian00:22:00 - 00:22:22
And also, they never brought out the second level of the book. I think it didn't sell well enough. I'm guessing that. So I had to then start thinking of how I was going to go beyond that because the scaffolding I'd used to get to that point I couldn't use anymore because it involved making up little stories and, well, I didn't really have the time to do that.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:22:22 - 00:22:23
Right.
Ian00:22:23 - 00:22:48
That's a lie. I did have the time to do it. It was a lot of work. So I bought the flashcards, the Tuttle flashcards. I started buying those, which were quite expensive, but I started using them and I started also using a list of HSK characters, but not all the HSK characters were in the Tuttle cards, so I supplemented them with my own flashcards. So I ended up with these index box after index box full of cards.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:22:48 - 00:22:52
Oh, look right behind you. Those are mine. Oh yeah.
Ian00:22:52 - 00:23:03
And I used my own SRS system as well by putting the, you know, the ones I knew to the back. And every day I sat and gradually over the next few years, I got to the sort of 3,000-ish mark.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:23:03 - 00:23:05
Oh my gosh. I'm so jealous.
Ian00:23:05 - 00:23:09
Um, but some people said, you're doing it all wrong. There's much more efficient ways to do it. But I—
Stephanie Fuccio:00:23:09 - 00:23:10
But if it was working.
Ian00:23:10 - 00:23:35
It did. But with me, that was at the expense of my spoken language because I used to just sit and go through these cards. Eventually I moved on to using software to do it instead, but I got very little practice actually speaking. So I learned to read quite well before I could even really string together a conversation. So very different from a lot of people around me who would be the other way around.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:23:35 - 00:24:07
There is an, I want to say an overemphasis because I'm very skewed on this. I think there's an overemphasis on speaking very, very soon with Chinese. And I think because the writing system, the sound system, and the grammatical structure is different enough that there's so much that I don't think everyone needs to speak at the beginning. I think we need more of an incubation time. And I think that's why there's a huge drop-off in the beginner levels is because people say, I can't do what these people are doing. This obviously isn't for me. But that's my own opinion.
Ian00:24:07 - 00:24:31
I personally found though, I found very, very early on When that textbook I was using started with pinyin, I found that I just couldn't remember the words because you've got no reference point. I remember there were pinyin for welcome. I remember driving somewhere one day and I kept thinking, what's that word for welcome? I just couldn't get a grip on it. So I felt I have to learn the characters so I could visualize the word.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:24:31 - 00:24:31
Yep.
Ian00:24:31 - 00:24:41
And learning the pinyin can become very confusing because of all the homonyms. involved, you know? So I decided very early on I couldn't proceed without the characters.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:24:41 - 00:25:15
Yeah, for me, for sure, for sure. I want to— and listeners, if you know anybody like this, I want to find somebody that learned Chinese before pinyin. I don't know if that's possible anymore because that was quite a— that was what, 1950s, 1960s or something? That's when that was introduced. But I really, really want to find somebody who didn't grow up with the language, who learned it without the pinyin, because I'm very curious if that would be— it would be harder at first, but would it be easier to not take it away? Because that using pinyin and then taking away the pinyin can be a little painful.
Ian00:25:15 - 00:25:44
And the other thing I'd like to add there though is the short time I actually went to a language school, which was about 4 weeks in Beijing. I went there and the teachers there were very adamant that pinyin was not to be used. So we had a bunch of people there who'd been living in China for several years and could speak quite well, but then the teachers were insisting on writing up characters on the board. And when people were saying, I can't read that, they were getting quite annoyed. They were saying, pinyin is artificial, you shouldn't be using it.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:25:44 - 00:25:45
Right.
Ian00:25:45 - 00:26:01
Whereas for people, it was certainly a crutch that they'd been used to, and they were told to go away and write a journal for the next day. And it's like, They couldn't, because foreigners learning as adults is very different from the methods that Chinese children use.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:26:01 - 00:26:05
It is. It is. Well, and they're apparently using pinyin with children too.
Ian00:26:05 - 00:26:05
Yes.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:26:05 - 00:26:06
Yeah.
Ian00:26:06 - 00:26:13
So I think it's, again, that it's used initially and then quite quickly taken away.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:26:13 - 00:26:15
Maybe that's it. Maybe it's just used too long.
Ian00:26:15 - 00:26:16
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:26:16 - 00:26:31
Because I'm doing, this is my HSK year because I'm just, I Jumping straight into graded readers and things with just a basic knowledge was too much. So I'm literally just using HSK 1, 2, and 3 materials to just get me enough vocabulary to use the content I wanna use.
Ian00:26:31 - 00:26:32
Yeah. Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:26:32 - 00:26:43
So I'm, I just finished 2 and I'm working on 3 to take in December. And in HSK 1 and 2, they have the pinyin and the hanzi, except for the transcript, which they have just in the characters.
Ian00:26:43 - 00:26:43
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:26:43 - 00:27:06
For the listening, the transcript listening, but everything including the test for 1 and 2 is pinyin and hànzi. And for one, I do think that's probably helpful, but for HSK 2, you're talking about almost the entire first year of a language. Yes. That's a long time to get used to having both. And as much as I tried to cover it up when I was practicing, it's there. It's so hard.
Ian00:27:06 - 00:27:45
It's such a problem. I mean, there is this very good series of abridged readers of well-known Chinese stories, very well graded, but they put the pinyin in between every line of characters and It is so distracting. And I read an article on this recently where someone was saying, well, our eyes are drawn like magnets to the pinyin because it's a familiar script. Whereas that doesn't happen with Chinese people, apparently. They don't get drawn to the pinyin, they get drawn to the characters. So the publishers, I think, seems like they didn't quite get that, but they did start releasing a plastic grid they could slide over the page.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:27:45 - 00:27:46
I have that in one of my graded resources.
Ian00:27:46 - 00:27:48
The trouble is that to me—
Stephanie Fuccio:00:27:48 - 00:27:49
It's not realistic. It becomes a pain.
Ian00:27:51 - 00:27:51
pain to use.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:27:51 - 00:28:01
It's a massive pain. And if you take notes on stuff that you're reading like I do, you're holding the grid and trying to take notes and it gets, then you're just always off and you're covering the wrong thing and it's just—
Ian00:28:01 - 00:28:07
I even find this is a self-discipline problem. I even find I slide the grid down slightly if I get stuck so I can see the page. Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:28:07 - 00:28:10
And then you see the next word when you just wanted that word. Yeah.
Ian00:28:10 - 00:28:26
And what's great is recently Pleco Dictionary released as an add-on, the same readers, the Puylian characters. And now I can finally read them in electronic form. And I've started really quickly reading those books because the pinyin isn't there as an annoyance.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:28:26 - 00:28:30
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Just backtrack on this again because I love Pleco. The add-in does what again?
Ian00:28:30 - 00:28:40
The add-in, you can actually buy the whole series of graded readers and you can read them in the Pleco Reader. So you can press on any character and it pops up in the dictionary.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:28:40 - 00:28:41
Oh my God.
Ian00:28:41 - 00:28:44
It'll even, you can use text-to-speech as well. So it reads the stories out.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:28:44 - 00:28:46
You've just blown my mind.
Ian00:28:46 - 00:29:02
So you can practice your listening and then check the text or vice versa. And they do that with the readers, that series of readers, and also the Chairman's Bow articles that you can buy packs of those and they're in the reader, which is a very good reader as well.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:29:02 - 00:29:03
That's so good.
Ian00:29:03 - 00:29:05
So that's been a bit of a godsend.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:29:05 - 00:29:28
Oh my God. I'm collecting the resources I want to use after December when I'm done with HSK 3. Because I noticed last year when I was starting to try to read is that a lot of the of lower level materials started at 3. There was very little content for HSK 1 and 2 level, which is definitely where I was. And so I was like, okay, I'm gonna do HSK 3 and then I'm gonna pick my next material.
Ian00:29:28 - 00:29:28
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:29:28 - 00:29:37
Because I'll have all this beginner stuff, which really isn't beginner stuff. But yeah, so no, that's amazing. Yeah. Because I don't want to see the whole line.
Ian00:29:37 - 00:29:38
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:29:38 - 00:29:39
I want to see that one.
Ian00:29:39 - 00:29:52
It's off-putting to the extent that I was giving up because it just, I, it's hard enough plowing through the reading and, you know, can be enough of a battle. Without having a distraction, basically, which is what it was. It was like a voice whispering in your ear all the time.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:29:52 - 00:30:13
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like you, I like the look of the characters. I like what they— what they're— I don't know, mine kind of move around a little bit. They have some fun. They like dance and do different things. Anyway, they're kind of— they're fun. And so, I don't want to break from that. If I'm on a roll with words and I know what I'm reading, I don't want to break from that and go back to the script that I know very well, that's very boring.
Ian00:30:13 - 00:30:30
Yes. I think especially if you're doing extensive reading, you know, if you're deliberately trying to read something quickly for fluency and opinions, it just wrecks that whole process. You know, I don't think it's as bad if you're actually going through doing the intensive, trying to understand most of the stuff.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:30:30 - 00:30:44
Right. Yeah. Like scanning would be definitely hard to do. I'm not at that level where I can scan yet. I really have to sit down. and really read a sentence to know it, but I imagine that would be, yeah, very distracting. What would an equivalent in English be?
Ian00:30:44 - 00:30:49
Putting Chinese characters on it. Right?
Stephanie Fuccio:00:30:49 - 00:31:33
There was, there was a gentleman that I, there was a TED Talk and he had this whole project where he made an inter— 'cause basically pinyin's an interlanguage between, or that bridges people into Chinese from English, right? Or from a Romance language that uses Latin script. And so he actually created one using Chinese characters to bridge Chinese speakers into other languages. And it's a really cool video. And I keep meaning to follow up with this project to see if it worked, because he said that you can actually use it with people from, not just from Chinese, but you can actually use that sound system to bridge a lot of people over into other languages, not just Chinese to English or Chinese to Romance languages, but I haven't followed up with it because I'm a bad person.
Ian00:31:35 - 00:31:38
Is this a similar idea to IPA or?
Stephanie Fuccio:00:31:38 - 00:31:39
Similar.
Ian00:31:39 - 00:31:39
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:31:39 - 00:32:15
Yeah. But apparently right now, because coming from, going from English to Chinese, we have pinyin as the intermediary step, but going from Chinese to English, even though they're familiar with pinyin, it's used very differently than English. Like pinyin's very, I mean, pinyin's, you know, of Chinese. And so it's very syllabic. It's very short. parts to it and English comes largely from French, which has those crazy long misspelled things that you don't say. Yeah. So, so they're like looking at the English going, I don't know how to say this.
Ian00:32:16 - 00:32:17
Yeah. That's right. Right.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:32:17 - 00:32:23
So there apparently there isn't any real intermediary step. I don't know. I don't even know.
Ian00:32:23 - 00:32:43
I know a lot of their books in, in China, a lot of the textbooks in China for English, um, have the IPA. representation in there. So a lot of the students I've dealt with, they know the IPA quite well. Actually, they know it better than many foreign teachers here because we don't use IPA generally. We're aware of it, but we don't fluently use it, I don't think.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:32:43 - 00:33:14
Yeah. When I was teaching full-time, I got in the habit of using it, but if you put it in front of me now, I'd probably struggle with a few of them. But I found that my Japanese students and my Chinese students, like really clung to it because they do have a phonetic understanding of this means this, let's go. Like it's just, it's, yeah. Whereas, yeah, I can't imagine English speakers clinging. Opinion is kind of that, but it doesn't have the tone.
Ian00:33:16 - 00:33:16
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:33:16 - 00:33:19
Opinion drives me crazy. Yeah.
Ian00:33:19 - 00:33:31
Yeah. That's the thing. And I think a lot of people approach opinion thinking that it is meant to be for foreigners, you know what I mean? And it wasn't ever, it was largely invented as a support thing for locals.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:33:31 - 00:33:41
Children use it in China. They teach children Chinese through pinyin first. Is it first or at the same time? I don't know, but they definitely use it with children.
Ian00:33:41 - 00:34:14
Yes. It has lots of peculiarities in the representation of the sounds, which strike us as odd. And if you'd— this is the problem as well, because I started learning on my own and there was no real explanation. There was no decent explanation of the pinyin. I picked up all sorts of bad habits, which have taken years to slowly— I'm still making a lot of them because you touch, you see the representation of the sound, you connect it to your own language. And even between American and British English, there's some very different sounds which without a teacher, you can pick up the wrong way to pronounce a thing.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:34:14 - 00:34:22
Absolutely. Absolutely. And then you get the thing of individual sounds versus a bunch of sounds together.
Ian00:34:22 - 00:34:22
Yes.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:34:22 - 00:34:45
Yeah. And that seriously changes when you're speaking Chinese in China. It's like, whoa, you didn't say about 3 of those sounds in there, which I can kind of see in my head in pinyin. What just happened? Yeah. Oh yeah. The struggles of pinyin. Okay. So where were we? So the flashcards, not the ones that you made, but you said you also bought some flashcards. What were those?
Ian00:34:45 - 00:35:16
I think it's called, I think that the series is called Chinese in a Flash and it's Tuttle Press who actually They also published the book I was talking about where I learned the first 800 characters. I think they're quite easy to get in a lot of the bookstores in China, and they're in a series of 4. And yeah, they contain example sentences, which are actually quite complex sentences, quite detailed, and the traditional and simplified character as well as the translation.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:35:16 - 00:35:20
And was it a time issue in switching from making your own to using those?
Ian00:35:21 - 00:35:47
Yeah, because at that point I still, I wanted to get to the 3,000 level. That series, I think, covers about 2,500. It would've meant making 1,400. Oh, I also wanted the ones that I'd already learned in the first 1,000. So I basically decided I was gonna buy those sets. I think altogether it was about 1,000 yuan to buy the sets. So it was quite an outlay at first, but you know, it—
Stephanie Fuccio:00:35:47 - 00:35:48
But that's a lot.
Ian00:35:48 - 00:35:50
Well, even making the filler ones, the supplemental ones, it used to take a
Stephanie Fuccio:00:35:50 - 00:35:51
lot of time because I
Ian00:35:52 - 00:36:00
have to check which one didn't exist in the set. And, you know, it was, uh, I didn't want to waste that much time. It's time-consuming enough.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:36:00 - 00:36:20
Understood. Understood. I have often looked at different flashcards available. Oh, Fufujou-ru is an area of town I love and hate because I just, I go in there and I think, oh, I could buy all of these and work on this. And I'm like, wait, I've got a study plan for the whole year. Stop, stop. That isn't necessarily the language I need right now, but there
Ian00:36:20 - 00:36:20
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:36:20 - 00:36:28
You know, as opposed to making my own and have it look super goofy. Okay, so we're at the flashcards. What was after that?
Ian00:36:28 - 00:36:37
Well, as I mentioned, shortly after moving to Beijing, I went to a language school for 4 weeks. I was doing 20 hours a week.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:36:37 - 00:36:39
An intensive class. Yeah.
Ian00:36:39 - 00:37:07
And there was quite a lot of homework as well. I signed up for the old HSK at the first level, and I think it was 1 and 2. I sat that, I got through the first time. I think I got a 2. Yeah, I got 2. But then I went for the 2 to 3. I can't remember how it was structured, but it wasn't as straightforward as it is now. And I didn't get through the next one. I kind of gave up on the process at the time and focused just on my learning.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:37:07 - 00:37:07
Yeah.
Ian00:37:07 - 00:37:34
So I went anyway. So I got ahead of myself there. I went to this language school for 4 weeks. To be honest, I had plenty of time to do it. It was quite expensive, but the style of teaching didn't quite gel with me, to be honest. There was a lot of, um, the quality of teaching between different teachers was very variable. Um, teachers were constantly even changing, or, you know, so you never could guarantee you had the same teacher.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:37:34 - 00:37:35
I gotcha.
Ian00:37:35 - 00:38:16
And also there was a lot of just writing on the board and reading out, you know, yeah, around the class, you read the sentence, and I just didn't feel it was value for money, right? So I've been on my own most of the time with this. Um, I carried on with the, uh, learn the characters again, didn't get much much practice at all with speaking for several years. It was only really when I met my current girlfriend, who's Chinese, that I really started being forced to speak. And then my speaking, because I had quite a lot of knowledge, my speaking got to a reasonable level fairly quickly. But at first, we used to talk a lot online because that was easier to communicate because my reading and writing were better.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:38:16 - 00:38:23
Sure, sure, sure. Sure. Is there anything that they did in the classes that you found helpful to bring into your self-study sessions later?
Ian00:38:23 - 00:39:04
Writing. They used to make you write a short piece of something on a topic or a journal as well. And I kept that up for a while, but then sort of dropped away because I'm not, again, I've never reemphasized the writing side. I think the discipline of working through, even though it was quite mechanical, of working through texts and checking the vocab You know, having a read through, doing some follow-up exercises. I think I did bring that in as well. I've never stuck with one series of textbooks for a very long time, but I had a whole shelf full of different ones and I just dipped in and out of them and it all adds up, but in a very, not very efficient way, I don't think.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:39:04 - 00:39:38
No, no. As long as you're progressing, it is. And this is the funny thing, because one of the first people I interviewed for this series, this podcast, Um, he talked about in the app world, in the mobile app world for language learning, it's, well, not just for that, but he was talking about it in that realm. He said stickiness is the word they use for how app companies or people that make apps want you to come back to the app, but they find with language learning apps, people will experiment with an app for a little while and then move on and move on and move on. And stickiness is they want you to keep coming back to the app, but people aren't, they're hopping around a lot.
Ian00:39:38 - 00:39:38
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:39:39 - 00:39:57
And I, you can see from that I have a tiny pile of books, mostly just because I've been doing the HSK stuff, which is that other pile and the pile up there. So my HSK stuff has taken over, but I just bought those within just a few months last year. Yeah. 'Cause I'm like, oh, that could help. That could help. That could help. But is it really a bad thing to use different materials?
Ian00:39:57 - 00:40:05
It always feels sort of undisciplined, but that's probably because of schooling and things where you, you get used to doing things in that sort of linear way.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:40:06 - 00:40:06
Yeah.
Ian00:40:06 - 00:40:27
It probably isn't a bad thing. It's maybe not the most efficient, but then again, I don't know because I'm not a— when it comes to language learning, I don't really do things in a quantitative way or data-driven. So yeah, I just know that I have made sort of steady progress over the years, but I probably could have done a lot more quicker if I'd been more organized.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:40:27 - 00:40:42
I don't know. It's such a marathon going from English to Chinese. It's such a marathon that it's like they're taking time off and doing things slower sometimes and faster sometimes seems like a necessity in a way.
Ian00:40:42 - 00:41:34
I think one of the issues with Chinese as well is because the different disciplines or skills are so separate, the reading, the writing, listening, speaking, that I find that I'm constantly, I'm doing a certain amount in one direction, one skill, and then I'll move back to the other one and I keep topping up the different levels. But the trouble is certain stuff gets left behind as well, but it's more of an intuitive thing. I need to do a bit more listening practice for a while now, and it's more driven by instinct or difficulties in my everyday life that I want to improve upon. And I don't think learning French and German, that wasn't— it was a more integrated study because from the very beginning you could read stuff, even if you might not be able to read it and understand it, but you could still piece together the words. With Chinese, you just can't. You've got to get a certain critical mass before You can start reading stuff.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:41:34 - 00:41:55
That is such an essential part to all this because it really is, no matter which part you're working on, you're kind of neglecting another part of the language. So it's a constant state of guilt, of study guilt or something. Have you made peace with the study guilt or do you constantly just— yeah. Does it chip away at you?
Ian00:41:55 - 00:42:04
It does chip away at me. I also feel guilt that I could be so much more structured and that that would help me. I just, because I'm working
Stephanie Fuccio:00:42:04 - 00:42:05
Yeah.
Ian00:42:05 - 00:42:18
You know, I do the Chinese as a sort of sideline and I never bothered to get an infrastructure in place for learning it. I do it more by the gut thing, but maybe that's not so surprising when you're working as well.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:42:18 - 00:42:29
And, you know, the thing is, even as structured as Chinese is as a language, it's still a language and there's going to be an ebb and flow in what you can comprehend and do and all that kind of stuff on any given day.
Ian00:42:30 - 00:43:47
That's what I was going to say actually, was that I find the Chinese, for example, you've got the logjam of the reading that you need a certain number of characters to be able to even piece together sentences. So to get to the point, be able to read a newspaper is quite a challenge. And that's always what I aimed towards for a long time. I can now read newspapers fairly well, but for a long, long time, you just didn't have that percentage of characters that you knew where you could quite make most sentences work because you'd have a few crucial characters missing, which I don't think quite works the same way in other languages, for example. Also, with listening, I find a very similar thing happens in Chinese because of the number of homophones. I find that a whole sentence, if I don't know the context, it could mean any of dozens of things. And because it takes a while, I think, to get sensitive to the tones, The tones are what makes a difference because if you can spot the tone patterns in there, you've got a clue to what the words are. Now, all of these things are what makes it so different, but also means, yes, you constantly have this topping up of the different skills and you get a logjam in one until you get past the level. Now, that's a very vague way of talking about it, but that's how it feels to me.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:43:47 - 00:44:21
No, that sounds exactly true. That sounds, that sounds very, very, very, very good. Newspapers, funny enough, is one of my first goals because my overall goal of like reading and listening will come later. Listening and speaking, although I'm working on them, are not my main goals right now. And so I thought that newspapers would be kind of like a first step. Now that first step is going to take me about 2 years to get there because of the complexity of the language, but that's my first step. I'd like to move over into social media, but then we've got slang and all kinds of stuff. That's much further down the line.
Ian00:44:21 - 00:44:44
Yeah. Well, with the newspapers, that was always one of my goals, was to be able to pick up or go onto a website, a news website. It took a long time to get there. And despite all of my practice with reading and getting good in reading certain types of things, newspapers remained elusive. And part of the reason is the formal language, which there's a lot of classical Chinese connections in there with written language.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:44:46 - 00:44:50
Is it the words themselves or the historical references?
Ian00:44:50 - 00:45:53
A lot of it's historical references, cultural references, the 4-character idioms, for example, which are used quite a lot in formal newspaper writing. That's still a problem, and I think always will be. But it's also, yes, it's the use of different lexisphoric the written language compared to the spoken language. And a lot of that goes back to classical Chinese origins. There's also just the more advanced language, obviously, that's used in newspapers, but there's also just chunks that appear in newspaper writing which you don't hear or you don't come across in textbooks. And the strange thing is, when I was back in the UK, I took a bit of a break from my Chinese learning, but then I sort of started missing it and I went online and started reading some different sources which were more readily available in the UK, the newspapers, and I suddenly got into reading. I found myself reading for several hours at a time. It was just different kinds of articles available.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:45:53 - 00:45:54
Wait.
Ian00:45:54 - 00:46:08
And suddenly my reading just took off in a way that it hadn't with all the graded practice and all that kind of thing. And that's when I found I could start picking up an article and at least getting the gist of it even more. for the first time.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:46:08 - 00:46:09
Can I ask what you were reading?
Ian00:46:09 - 00:46:48
I was reading the New York Times because it has bilingual editions and you can put the split pane up there and you can get the English and the Chinese next to each other, which was incredibly useful because I would try to read it first in Chinese, then read the English, then go back and fill in the gaps where I'd got it wrong. So that was incredibly useful. Also, I do use the Chairman's Bow, which I found really useful as well. I was reading things like BBC Chinese, BBC News Chinese as well. And some of these things are much harder to access if you're living here.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:46:49 - 00:46:53
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 2 hours at a time.
Ian00:46:55 - 00:46:56
Yeah. On a good day.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:46:56 - 00:46:57
That's, oh my gosh.
Ian00:46:57 - 00:46:58
It's quite tiring.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:46:59 - 00:47:15
I read 15 of the— because I read the transcript before I listen to the listening itself, and those are 15 in HSK 2 and 20 tasks in HSK 3. And that takes me about an hour and I'm brain dead after that.
Ian00:47:15 - 00:47:16
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:47:16 - 00:47:25
And that's not a lot of language. So, wow. 2 hours straight without stopping listening. Yeah.
Ian00:47:25 - 00:47:34
I found that I really, really got in it, but it was also a different variety of material, I think, as well. You know, But when you're in mainland China, no.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:47:34 - 00:47:43
You mentioned you were reading in the Chinese language in texts that weren't necessarily from mainland China. Can you tell us some of the places you were reading in the language?
Ian00:47:43 - 00:49:11
Yes. I came across an article, a long article on the New York Times, which was an American returning to Hong Kong for the first time since the handover after 20 years and looking up an old acquaintance who I think, well, he was an artist, who at the time they couldn't speak together, they couldn't communicate, but they became the best of friends in the bar and used to go out drinking together and scrawl things on beer mats. He talked about his time wandering around Hong Kong looking for this person and talked about the changes that have occurred and what was still the same after 20 years. It was translated into Chinese, but I think what fascinated me was that there was a lot of natural language in there, which I was fascinated to find out in the translations and wouldn't necessarily I have learned them since. But also, I think they'd inserted explanations, cultural notes to explain certain things as well. So that was really fresh. Also, it was around the time of Donald Trump being elected president, and I read a lot of articles, a lot of news articles about the early days of his presidency and the controversial things he was saying. He was managing to upset a lot of people internationally, politically, and culturally at the time. It was interesting to read that from a Chinese speaker's perspective. There was a lot of, again, a lot of cultural explanations involved there and again, terms I wouldn't have necessarily come across otherwise.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:49:11 - 00:49:18
Yeah, that's really useful. And these are all accessible online behind a paywall or are they free usually?
Ian00:49:18 - 00:49:23
I believe New York Times, for example, I think you get a certain number of articles a month.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:49:23 - 00:49:23
Oh, so it's
Ian00:49:25 - 00:49:34
Yes, I think that's true. Things like the BBC Chinese news, that's free, for example. Yeah, those are some of the main ones I use.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:49:34 - 00:49:42
Nice. Let's pick up on the timeline again. So you had the intensive class and then you've been self-studying since that, right?
Ian00:49:42 - 00:49:52
Yes. I had a short spell when I was teaching at a university where I had some free lessons where I joined international students for lessons given by the Chinese English faculty.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:49:52 - 00:49:55
Oh, do I want to ask you about that? How were those classes?
Ian00:49:55 - 00:50:13
Um, I, yeah, I, to be honest, there was only 2 levels available. There was like beginner or, uh, yeah, the next level up. And I did learn stuff from it, but a lot of the stuff was old ground and a lot of it was chanting in a group.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:50:13 - 00:50:15
Oh, okay.
Ian00:50:15 - 00:50:29
And it was going through a textbook, which was extremely rigorously structured to the same in every chapter, which is often the case. And we would sit there chanting the vocabulary first, then you would go around 20 students who all had to read out the dialogue.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:50:29 - 00:50:31
Oh, okay.
Ian00:50:31 - 00:50:54
I just, it didn't suit me. And it was at the end of a long working day anyway, and it was a 2 and a half hour session. So the whole shape of it just didn't really work for me. I was getting drips of useful, refreshing information, refreshers out of it, but it just wasn't enough payback to warrant the investment. Uh, so yes, I've been pretty much on my own since then.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:50:54 - 00:50:57
What have you been using to self-study during that time?
Ian00:50:57 - 00:51:46
For my character learning and words, I, um, actually use Skritter in a bit of an unconventional way where I turn off the writing thing, just use it as an SRS system. Uh, I used to use Anki and I still do sometimes. Um, but I dunno, I think it was because Skritter's got a lot of built-in example sentences, which I became quite familiar with when I was doing the writing. And I go back to that quite regularly and clear my backlog, but not often enough. I use, as I said, I read the Chairman's Bow. I've always been a user of ChinesePod, probably for the last 13 years or something. And that's been still a great resource. There's DuChinese, which I used to practice reading at different levels. There's some different stuff on there, like for example, the high-speed train announcements.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:51:46 - 00:51:46
Yeah.
Ian00:51:46 - 00:51:49
which you become very familiar with if you're traveling on Chinese trains.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:51:49 - 00:51:51
Oh my God, that's really useful.
Ian00:51:51 - 00:51:56
They have those. They have it transcribed and with audio. And I found that quite fascinating because—
Stephanie Fuccio:00:51:56 - 00:51:57
That's so cool.
Ian00:51:57 - 00:52:20
Again, it's actually spoken in very formal Chinese, not everyday colloquial Chinese. So I've always found it quite difficult to follow. So things like that are little gems from your everyday life in China. And it's like, wow, opened my eyes. So there's that. There's a great resource which is new as well, Oh, what's it called? I'll have to look it up.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:52:20 - 00:52:31
Yeah, I'll come back to you. So how do you, do you, uh, like how much time do you spend per day, per week, per month, or do you just do it when you have free time? Like how do you—
Ian00:52:31 - 00:52:36
When I first, I came back from that break in the UK, I was spending a few hours every day.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:52:36 - 00:52:36
Wow.
Ian00:52:36 - 00:52:46
Quite easily. Um, I've now ended a hiatus period, which happens every so often. I just kind of get overloaded and I'm kind of focusing back on my IT interests at the moment as well.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:52:46 - 00:52:47
Sure.
Ian00:52:47 - 00:53:09
I try to tie the two together whenever I can, because I find that's a great way of learning. I've tried developing some apps at times, which even that keeps you, for example, an app to learn traditional characters, if you know simplified, even that itself, if you can combine the two, it keeps you to a certain level where you're still learning new stuff just by inputting the data, for
Stephanie Fuccio:00:53:10 - 00:53:11
Yeah.
Ian00:53:11 - 00:53:30
So, at the moment, my practice is mostly part of my everyday life. I'll pick up a book every so often, well, quite regularly, several times a week, and read through some grammar notes or an article online. But a lot of it's just every day talking to people I know or just listening to other people's conversations.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:53:30 - 00:53:39
Exactly. You're at the point where, and you've been at the point for a while where you're using the language every day. So, it's like you don't need to calculate that because that's just happening. That's just a natural thing.
Ian00:53:40 - 00:53:57
And I read signs everywhere all the time as well, and I make up characters I don't know, which happens every day. So that's part of the immersion thing, I suppose, um, which I'm relying on more at the moment. But I know I can feel it coming back already in the next few weeks. I think I'll be spending more time again on it.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:53:57 - 00:53:58
Oh, okay.
Ian00:53:58 - 00:53:59
It just, it comes in waves like that.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:53:59 - 00:54:21
Yeah. Yeah. Again, I think it's kind of necessary, especially living here in it. I know a lot of people have this dreamy version of immersion. Like once you break through Zen, it's just super easy because it's around you all the time, but it really needs to be comprehensible input. You need to understand what you're seeing and hearing for it to be repetitive and helpful.
Ian00:54:21 - 00:54:32
And also, I mean, in China you have so many different dialects and accents and you'll find that you're trying to listen in, but then you can't even work out
Stephanie Fuccio:00:54:32 - 00:54:41
Let's talk about Shanghaiese, shall we? Can you hear the difference between Chinese and Shanghaiese? Sorry, Punahou and Shanghaiese?
Ian00:54:41 - 00:54:56
Oh, I can definitely hear the difference. And I can even sometimes, even if we're not in Shanghai, I can say to my girlfriend, is that Shanghaiese? And she'll say, oh yeah, that's good. But sometimes it isn't. It's something else.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:54:56 - 00:55:05
How would you describe the difference between the two? Because I still can't hear the difference. parents, but my comprehension of Putonghua is still here and there. Like, I can hear just a few words.
Ian00:55:05 - 00:55:20
That's a very good question. It, to me, I sometimes, this probably isn't even a thing, but I sometimes get it confused between Shanghainese and Korean. Now, that's probably nonsense to somebody who's—
Stephanie Fuccio:00:55:20 - 00:55:23
Korean sounds, you're saying that Shanghainese sounds like Korean?
Ian00:55:23 - 00:55:26
Well, to me it sounds as different from Putonghua
Stephanie Fuccio:00:55:27 - 00:55:27
Right.
Ian00:55:27 - 00:55:41
But I don't know if there's any sense in that whatsoever because I don't know what Korean really sounds like, but I know I've confused the two at times, put it that way. But Shanghainese, I actually think it feels quite harsh compared to Putonghua.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:55:41 - 00:55:42
So is it choppier?
Ian00:55:42 - 00:55:44
I think it is.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:55:44 - 00:56:01
Because I always confuse, I have a hard time. I've lived in Japan, but I haven't lived in Korea. And I constantly, I often will hear something and think it's Japanese or Korean and it's the other one. And I think it's kind of a similar choppiness to the 2 languages. So I wonder if that's—
Ian00:56:01 - 00:56:21
I think it is. I mean, in the same way as for me, Cantonese sounds much more mellifluous, if you like, than Pudonghua. Pudonghua sounds harsher to me than Cantonese, and then Shanghainese sounds harsher to me than Pudonghua. But I don't know if there's any sort of reason behind that or a particular kind of—
Stephanie Fuccio:00:56:21 - 00:56:24
Well, it relates to Which one was the softest among all of them?
Ian00:56:24 - 00:56:28
I find Cantonese sounds the most sort of sing-song to me.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:56:28 - 00:56:29
Okay. Okay.
Ian00:56:29 - 00:56:51
Yeah. I mean, that could be because I grew up being more familiar with Cantonese because a lot of Chinese people living in the UK were Hong Kong. Yeah. Um, so that's, that's what I always knew as Chinese growing up was actually Cantonese and not, not Mandarin. So, um, yeah, it could be entirely subjective based on that.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:56:51 - 00:58:15
Yeah, it could be, but that could also be very, very accurate. Interesting. It's funny because in newspapers, you were talking about reading foreign newspapers in Chinese and having different perspectives. And I watch a lot of YouTube channels about people vlogging about China in China, but they're foreigners, so they've got those foreign eyes and they can see things that sometimes when you grow up in a place, you don't see. And these 2 gentlemen, Serpensa and, um, the other guy that I can't remember the name right now, it's horrible, uh, ADB China is the their, their cha— their YouTube channel name. They went through California and they went to different cities and they went to check out the Chinatowns and they made it very, very clear. They're like, okay, in San Francisco, this is mostly a Cantonese population. In Los Angeles, it's mostly a mainland China population. And I lived in both places and I didn't realize how different those, those 2 cities and, and their Chinese populations were. I just went to Chinatown and was like, I can buy this and this and this here. Awesome. And, you know, those kinds of like, I didn't have that, that ability to make out those, those language differences when I was there. And so, it was really interesting. I was like, oh my God, I've lived in those places and I don't know this. And these guys just travel in, talk to people in China, you know, in, in Mandarin, and they could, they're able to pick up on those, those differences. So, those, the having that foreign perspective sometimes can make it easier to understand. understand languages.
Ian00:58:15 - 00:58:29
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, it's the complexity of China and like a lot of other things, the variety of food, the variety of places, but the languages as well, the dialects or languages.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:58:29 - 00:58:34
It's so hard to describe to people the scale of China.
Ian00:58:34 - 00:58:46
When I first moved down, I first moved to Beijing when I first came to China. When I first moved down to Changsha, which is central South China, I was getting laughed at by taxi drivers because of my northern accent.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:58:46 - 00:58:51
Oh my gosh. They weren't impressed that you were speaking in the language, they were impressed that you were trying to tell them the language.
Ian00:58:51 - 00:58:59
No, really, no. They were like, oh, I want to know where the Beijing accent is. I wasn't even aware that I had a Beijing— I didn't even think I'd got to the point where it was possible for me to have an accent.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:58:59 - 00:59:00
Oh my gosh, that's funny.
Ian00:59:00 - 00:59:14
And, you know, I was saying very simple phrases, but apparently I'd picked that up. But now apparently I have a completely different accent. So, you know, it's quite nice to know that you actually have an accent in a foreign language. That feels like some progress.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:59:14 - 00:59:16
That does. That is, oh my gosh.
Ian00:59:16 - 00:59:20
I always just think I must sound like a small child being open.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:59:20 - 00:59:26
That is hilarious. Well, the, the R sound, people keep talking about the R sound in the Beijing dialect.
Ian00:59:26 - 00:59:27
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:59:27 - 00:59:44
And I know my coursebooks for HSK hit the R sound hard. I know it's there. I just can't fathom what it sounds like without it because I don't have the ability to Converse yet in the real world. Do you— is it really hit over the head obvious when you hear it?
Ian00:59:44 - 00:59:55
When it's spoken in a northern accent, yeah. Yes. But down here in Shanghai or in the south of China, you often hear it pronounced with an R sound.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:59:55 - 00:59:56
You often do or don't?
Ian00:59:56 - 00:59:57
You do.
Stephanie Fuccio:00:59:57 - 00:59:58
You do.
Ian00:59:58 - 01:00:16
Yes. I mean, again, my partner, she says it quite like we say it in England. Um, she doesn't try the, the, that retroflex thing at all. Um, whereas in Beijing, you definitely hear that. It used to be transcribed in the old romanization systems as a J.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:00:16 - 01:00:19
The R sound was transcribed as a J?
Ian01:00:19 - 01:00:24
Because that's, yeah, a lot of, in one of the old, I don't know whether it's Wade-Giles or one of the old systems.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:00:24 - 01:00:24
Yeah.
Ian01:00:24 - 01:00:34
Um, it might, it might be another. Yes, they actually transcribed because that was a better representation, they thought, of the Beijing region.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:00:34 - 01:00:35
Doesn't it sound like an R sound?
Ian01:00:35 - 01:00:36
It's a kind of buzzing R.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:00:36 - 01:00:42
Can you think of a word or phrase that would demonstrate that sound?
Ian01:00:42 - 01:00:44
In Chinese?
Stephanie Fuccio:01:00:44 - 01:00:45
Yeah, in Chinese.
Ian01:00:45 - 01:00:46
Uh, ren.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:00:46 - 01:00:47
Yeah.
Ian01:00:47 - 01:01:01
Uh, person, man. Yeah. That's, uh, if you hear that spoken in the Beijing, uh, with a Beijing accent, then it's, you know, I can see why it would've been heard more like a J. by, um, by foreigners at the time.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:01:01 - 01:01:05
Ah, and how would people down here say that word?
Ian01:01:05 - 01:01:24
Um, I, I don't really know about Shanghai in particular, but I've heard it spoken plenty of times around here with far less of that, uh, that curled tongue thing, you know, more like a rrr. Um, and I, I, you know, my closest experience is my partner. She says it much more like ren, right? Just very much how I say it.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:01:24 - 01:01:34
Ah, I always assumed It was an R sound added to other words. Like it was an unnecessary kind of meaningless sound.
Ian01:01:34 - 01:01:37
We're speaking about different things.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:01:37 - 01:01:38
We are, we are, we are, we are.
Ian01:01:38 - 01:01:39
I've just realized you're talking about—
Stephanie Fuccio:01:01:39 - 01:01:41
But they're both R sounds.
Ian01:01:41 - 01:01:42
Is that sort of it?
Stephanie Fuccio:01:01:42 - 01:01:42
They are.
Ian01:01:42 - 01:01:51
Yes. Sorry. I'm talking about the R sound and you're talking about the sound, the R, which is peculiar to—
Stephanie Fuccio:01:01:51 - 01:01:53
Oh, are you talking about like the RL thing?
Ian01:01:53 - 01:01:54
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:01:54 - 01:02:16
I'm talking about— Ah, okay. Hold on a second. Wait, wait, wait. Okay. So we're talking about 2 different R issues. the Chinese language, one being the— and I don't want to minimize this, but there is a general Northeast Asian RL sound issue when they come over into other languages. I know it specifically in English. It's not that one. We're not talking about that one. What the hell are we talking about?
Ian01:02:16 - 01:02:25
What I'm talking about is the basic R sound in Mandarin, which when they teach you it, you've got to roll your tongue up with the retroflexes.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:02:27 - 01:02:27
Yeah.
Ian01:02:27 - 01:02:42
So it's related to the zh and the, uh, you know, so it's one of those. I can't remember the exact linguistics. Yeah. But yeah, so they teach it like that. Yet down here, you'll hear it's much more like our straight R. Oh, okay. Even that's different between American and British. It is though, isn't it?
Stephanie Fuccio:01:02:42 - 01:02:43
It is.
Ian01:02:43 - 01:02:47
But I would say, you know, if I looked at the pinyin for person, I would just say ren.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:02:47 - 01:02:48
Yeah.
Ian01:02:48 - 01:02:54
Whereas in Beijing or in standard Mandarin spoken, it's much more of a zh, and that's the J I'm talking about.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:02:54 - 01:03:04
That's true in Japanese too. Their R sound is, and I think that's part of the reason why they have a problem saying the R versus why the R and the L are so close.
Ian01:03:04 - 01:03:04
Yes.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:03:04 - 01:03:10
When they learn English is that that sound is, is so, so, so different. Like there were—
Ian01:03:10 - 01:03:11
Japanese and Cantonese, I believe.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:03:11 - 01:03:12
Yeah.
Ian01:03:12 - 01:03:14
Something Mandarin doesn't have the R.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:03:14 - 01:03:37
'Cause there were, funnily enough, there were a lot of names, popular names in Japan that start with, there are not past tense. There are a lot of Japanese names that start with an R. And as a teacher coming into the language for the first time, you're like, I just can't say half these names because that R sound is so hard to do at first. But yeah, it is a much more intense— Okay, so that's one of the R sounds we're talking about. And what is the other one?
Ian01:03:37 - 01:04:14
That's the R, which is the turn, the transforming of quite a lot of word endings into an R sound, which is the rhotacization. We put that in because I didn't want to say it. But it's very much like many places in American English will pronounce the I, father, whereas in many places in the UK, we don't do that anymore. Apparently we used to, but for example, in my local accent, we say father with a schwa sound at the end.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:04:14 - 01:04:15
Yes.
Ian01:04:15 - 01:04:47
So it's a sort of equivalent in some ways of that, but it It does follow rules in the Beijing dialect, and it's actually, a lot of them are considered part of standard Putonghua as well, which is based on the Beijing dialect. But it seems it's quite a strange part of learning because it's very particular. There's plenty of people in China who don't do that. So the, yeah, like xiaohai for child becomes xiaohai, which is what we're often taught in language schools, which is the official version.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:04:47 - 01:04:47
Right.
Ian01:04:47 - 01:04:59
But also some much Much less predictable ones, I suppose, or more unexpected ones like park, Gong Yuan, Gong Yuan.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:04:59 - 01:05:00
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ian01:05:00 - 01:05:17
So there's plenty of destinations in Beijing where you ask the taxi driver, they'll actually correct how you'd expect it to sound into the arwa. Yeah, yeah. And more surprising ones still, like pingzi for bottle, pier, I believe, which really shocked me because I didn't know what the guy was saying at all.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:05:17 - 01:05:25
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh. So it's not an added sound, it's part of the original sound, but it's just not said in most parts.
Ian01:05:25 - 01:05:32
Well, they convert some endings, which in other places, yes. Uh, for example, that's -en becomes -ur.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:05:33 - 01:05:33
Yeah.
Ian01:05:33 - 01:05:39
So yeah, they convert that -en ending into a— I'm not explaining pronunciation.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:05:39 - 01:05:52
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're explaining it probably the best that I've heard so far. Because I did make the rhotic R comparison early on between English and American English and British English, but it feels like more than that now.
Ian01:05:52 - 01:06:05
I think, yes, to me it feels much more of a jump to do that, and I feel strange doing it outside of Beijing, yet it is officially the standard.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:06:05 - 01:06:15
Right. Do people look on news? News is generally in a lot of countries done in the standard language. Is news in China done in standard? Standard in Pudong?
Ian01:06:15 - 01:06:16
Yes, very much so.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:06:16 - 01:06:18
Do they use this R?
Ian01:06:18 - 01:06:42
They do, but it's a more limited scope because I believe there are a lot of the R endings, which there are many more of them in the Beijing dialect, but they use a subset of them. I think things like what I just said, the word for bottle, I think that is— I don't think they would say that on the news. It's very much a local thing and it varies region of Beijing, even, I believe.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:06:42 - 01:06:43
Yeah, of course it does.
Ian01:06:43 - 01:06:50
Um, but I just know to me that, that whole— that's a whole different— yeah, it's quite an energy thing about it.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:06:50 - 01:06:53
So can you go in and out of your Beijing accent now?
Ian01:06:53 - 01:06:54
No, not at all.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:06:54 - 01:06:54
Really?
Ian01:06:54 - 01:07:11
I, uh, the accent apparently I have now— I, I don't know this myself, I've been told by, um, native speakers— is quite similar to my girlfriend's accent because she's not a native Mandarin speaker. So apparently mine's more of a southern variant.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:07:11 - 01:07:14
Yeah, a southern variant, but not Cantonese.
Ian01:07:14 - 01:07:33
Not Cantonese, no. But it's based on the, you know, a lot of the artificial consonant sounds blend together in the southern dialects, which I first noticed going to Changsha. Changsha. And so apparently I've got a few of those now, so I'm much more non-standard than I used to be.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:07:33 - 01:07:41
Oh my gosh. Do you find yourself kind of easy to listening-wise to slip in and out and understand what people are saying, even if they're different?
Ian01:07:41 - 01:07:46
No, no, no. I mean, my listening is still weaker than it should be.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:07:46 - 01:07:55
It's hard. The accent differences, I can't tell what people are saying, but I can hear the different accents and there are so many and they're so distinct.
Ian01:07:55 - 01:08:26
Yeah. I mean, I find, as I said earlier, I found listening to Chinese, it's so difficult because of the homonyms and the tones anyway, but then when you start getting different pronunciations of the leading consonants, for example, or they blend together. I've so often mistaken entirely what someone's saying because they're not differentiating between those consonants. So yeah, it's a real challenge for me. I mean, I think apart from writing, it's my lowest skill is listening.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:08:26 - 01:08:39
Oh, I can barely write. If we take out the pinyin input, I can barely write. And I still think the tones are lower, not the tones, but the sounds of the language and all these things are even lower for me. It's just, it's so hard to hear.
Ian01:08:40 - 01:08:40
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:08:40 - 01:09:02
Even just like most of my transactions right now are at the coffee shop counter and in taxis, to be honest with you. That's how small my exchange is, how much I can handle. And taxi drivers are from like most cities in the world, they're from all over that country or, you know, other, but they're usually like international or internal migrants or what have you. Right. So they've got like a variety of accents.
Ian01:09:02 - 01:09:03
Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:09:03 - 01:09:29
And when we first moved here, It's not giving away too much because there's tons of apartment buildings here, but we're really close to Panyulu, and I thought that's a really easy word to say, so I'm going to use Hongqiaolu, which is, which generally is understood no matter how bad my tones are, and Panyulu because that's not, there's not a lot of other street names that are confused with that, and I thought there's the intersection, I'm very close to there, that's what I'm going to use.
Ian01:09:29 - 01:09:29
Yes.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:09:29 - 01:09:30
Yeah.
Ian01:09:30 - 01:09:30
No.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:09:31 - 01:09:38
Um, depending on the taxi driver, about every other taxi driver would want me to say or confirm that I lived on Fanyulu.
Ian01:09:38 - 01:09:40
Right, right. Yes.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:09:40 - 01:09:57
And I'm like, what? And part of me wanted to stop using it because I just needed to get home. And the other part of me wanted to start asking them where they were from and then kind of make a little mental list in my head to see if that was a dialectical difference in some region in China.
Ian01:09:57 - 01:10:17
I think many, um, people, expats living in China or who've whether they've studied Chinese or not, will have the same frustration about the difficulty of being understood at times. And, you know, I just, just the last few days, 2 days running, I've taken a taxi back, uh, to where I live.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:10:17 - 01:10:17
Yeah.
Ian01:10:17 - 01:10:18
I've said exactly the same thing.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:10:18 - 01:10:19
Yeah.
Ian01:10:19 - 01:10:29
To the last night, the taxi driver was absolutely spot on. He just got it straight away. He didn't have to say, yeah, ask me to repeat. And then the guy the night before, I just could not communicate.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:10:29 - 01:10:29
Yeah.
Ian01:10:29 - 01:10:30
At all.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:10:30 - 01:10:31
Yeah, yeah.
Ian01:10:31 - 01:10:37
Until I showed him my phone, and then he went, ah, and he said to me pretty much what I'd been saying.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:10:37 - 01:10:38
Yeah.
Ian01:10:38 - 01:10:44
So he can't, and so yesterday when I got in the taxi, I was dreading it because I thought, oh, we're going to go through this again. Yeah, he understood me first time.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:10:44 - 01:10:44
Yeah.
Ian01:10:44 - 01:10:45
And the same happened again this morning.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:10:45 - 01:10:46
Yeah, yeah.
Ian01:10:46 - 01:11:05
So it can be very much like that. And even a colleague who is pretty much fluent gave me a bit of advice. He said, when you're given an address, always start off with district. So you're narrowing down the context. He says he has to do that. Yeah, he's one of the most fluent people I've heard, as far as I'm concerned.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:11:05 - 01:11:10
But I'm in Shek Kuan Wah, that's a huge district. Does that narrow stuff down?
Ian01:11:10 - 01:11:14
Well, he says it almost directs the thing. It's kind of—
Stephanie Fuccio:01:11:14 - 01:11:15
Oh, because that's how the addresses are.
Ian01:11:15 - 01:11:16
Yeah, yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:11:16 - 01:11:20
Oh my gosh. So I would say Shek Kuan Wah and then Hong Chow Lo Pan.
Ian01:11:20 - 01:11:21
Yeah, yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:11:21 - 01:11:22
Oh my God.
Ian01:11:22 - 01:11:27
You could even possibly narrow it down further by naming a metro station or something first and then adding the
Stephanie Fuccio:01:11:27 - 01:11:27
street name. Oh yeah.
Ian01:11:29 - 01:11:41
It just, again, it cuts down on that search space of, uh, between all the, the homophony and the tones problems. It narrows it down a bit more. I think anything helps, to be honest.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:11:41 - 01:12:00
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've started to take pictures of the street signs of places I go often, like near work, UEA, which I cannot say even when I'm not focusing on the tones. I just can't. Taxi drivers do not understand it. I don't understand what I'm saying. So I've just taken a picture of the street sign and I'll say one, I'll say the one street and then I'll show them that one.
Ian01:12:00 - 01:12:00
Yes.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:12:00 - 01:12:09
Yeah. And then we seem to be okay. But, but they, but I hear them say it when they're reading it and it's different. It's literally different for every taxi driver.
Ian01:12:09 - 01:12:20
I also think some taxi drivers, I mean, they also admitted as well, it's, uh, don't know the streets as well as you might expect. A lot of them live very quite a long way out of town.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:12:20 - 01:12:20
Sure.
Ian01:12:20 - 01:12:26
So they don't get the familiarity with all. True. It's a huge city. I mean, it's true. So is Beijing just in terms of the geographical area.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:12:26 - 01:12:26
Yeah.
Ian01:12:26 - 01:12:30
Um, the, the massive, there's probably areas they might not know very well at all.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:12:31 - 01:12:31
I'm going to try that.
Ian01:12:32 - 01:12:40
And some of them have moved between cities and may not have that knowledge. So you can never be sure which factor it is that's causing them to miscomprehend.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:12:40 - 01:13:22
Yeah, no, it's so true. It's so true. The first, my goal of last year, and it's quickly changing, was to find out what's missing in the beginning learning Chinese mobile app world and create one. And I thought, oh, I thought I had it down. I was like, oh, we're going to, I'm going to take take location names that, that people would often go to when they first get here and, um, and, and teach the language bit by bit so they get used to the, the script and the sounds and all this stuff. And I'm going to teach it by location names. I'm like, that's too many street names. There's too many. Okay, metro stops. Too many. What about just central Shanghai metro stops? Okay. And the more I dug into the words, the more I realized how historically—
Ian01:13:22 - 01:13:23
Oh yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:13:23 - 01:13:36
Significant they were, how the characters weren't used very much in regular Chinese. And I'm like, okay, that would not help them at all. They'd learn all this stuff and barely be able to use it anywhere else.
Ian01:13:36 - 01:13:43
And some of it's local usage as well. You get characters for geographical features which aren't necessarily used very much.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:13:43 - 01:13:44
Exactly. Yeah.
Ian01:13:44 - 01:13:59
I mean, there's one in Shanghai which is used a lot, which is the pang with the 3 dots. And I think it means like creek or something. Yeah. It's like a little creek or river. And that's probably quite common here. I never saw that in Beijing. I don't, it's certainly not very common
Stephanie Fuccio:01:13:59 - 01:14:12
in Beijing, I don't think. Yeah. One thing I've noticed on Street Sense for, um, is we tend to use lu like 99% of the time in Shanghai. And even just like in Nanjing or in Suzhou, they also have, what is it?
Ian01:14:12 - 01:14:14
Jie? Jie. Yeah. Beijing has also got a lot of jie.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:14:14 - 01:14:17
And there's another one. Yeah. Yeah.
Ian01:14:17 - 01:14:17
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:14:17 - 01:14:20
Like they have a lot more, I guess the equivalent to street, to road, to all that.
Ian01:14:20 - 01:14:28
I think they often in, certainly in Beijing, they often translate it as avenue. It tends to be a wider boulevard kind of idea.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:14:28 - 01:14:33
Sure, sure, sure. But in Shanghai, I so rarely see anything other than lu.
Ian01:14:33 - 01:14:36
And here we also have the nong as well.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:14:36 - 01:14:37
What's that?
Ian01:14:37 - 01:14:39
The lane in the addresses.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:14:39 - 01:14:40
Oh, okay.
Ian01:14:40 - 01:14:43
It's based on the old layout of traditional Shanghai.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:14:43 - 01:14:48
I don't go to those places, so I haven't really been exposed to that.
Ian01:14:48 - 01:14:59
Yeah, well, the address where I live at the minute, it's a modern estate, but it's still the blocks are, the estate has a lane number. And it's what used to be there before they built the estate. And what—
Stephanie Fuccio:01:14:59 - 01:15:01
Is that used for building number too?
Ian01:15:01 - 01:15:05
Well, you tend to have building, yeah, room number, building number.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:15:05 - 01:15:06
Is it anywhere in this?
Ian01:15:06 - 01:15:08
Yes, this one.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:15:08 - 01:15:10
Isn't that how?
Ian01:15:10 - 01:15:11
No, that's how.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:15:11 - 01:15:14
Oh wait, after the 1?
Ian01:15:14 - 01:15:16
After the 411.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:15:16 - 01:15:18
Oh, I didn't realize.
Ian01:15:18 - 01:15:22
Oh, sorry. I think it's long. It's one of these.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:15:22 - 01:15:22
No way.
Ian01:15:22 - 01:15:27
It's actually long, sorry. It's a character with a couple of pronunciations.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:15:27 - 01:15:30
Oh, okay. No, no, no. I don't know what that is.
Ian01:15:30 - 01:15:31
Okay.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:15:31 - 01:15:31
Okay.
Ian01:15:31 - 01:15:33
Yeah, it means lane.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:15:33 - 01:15:34
No way.
Ian01:15:34 - 01:16:00
I've read one account which said, I've been reading a book about old Shanghai, about an expat in Shanghai. And it claims in that book that the long is actually a transliteration of lane. Oh, because a lot of Shanghainese has got English terms built in, approximations. And because that is also known, that character.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:16:00 - 01:16:01
Yeah.
Ian01:16:01 - 01:16:02
So apparently that—
Stephanie Fuccio:01:16:02 - 01:16:09
I didn't even know that. We were just looking at my address, which I'm clearly not going to read online. But, um, but yeah, I didn't know what that meant.
Ian01:16:09 - 01:16:09
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:16:09 - 01:16:13
Um, I just have a version of it so I can copy it over and buy things online.
Ian01:16:13 - 01:16:25
But I didn't know. So you didn't even know the address, even though everything, so much of Shanghai is now modern, uh, car blocks and estates. It's still the address system based on the old lanes and—
Stephanie Fuccio:01:16:25 - 01:16:31
Wow. Yeah, because we're in a complex, but we're not technically in a lane, like lane house lanes.
Ian01:16:31 - 01:16:34
That's a lane house. Yeah, it comes from that.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:16:34 - 01:16:39
Yeah, yeah, but we're in an apartment complex. Yeah, so they're still using that for that. Yes. Oh my God, there's so many nuances.
Ian01:16:39 - 01:16:43
And like Beijing has its own addressing system as well, which is totally different.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:16:43 - 01:16:46
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. It's a wonder.
Ian01:16:46 - 01:16:49
No wonder the taxi drivers get confused sometimes.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:16:49 - 01:17:27
Yeah. And I was trying to, I was going around the town when a friend of mine who used to live in Beijing was here and we were going, we were taking DDs and talking to taxi drivers and stuff. And I was giving intersections because I feel like that has been the, what it's understood, the most effective way to get them to go, just go, go to that thing, that area. And then I can direct you left, right, and all that kind of kind of stuff. And she— they must not do that in Beijing because she was like, no, you have to give them the address, you have to give them the number. And I'm like, that's never worked for me in Shanghai. Yeah, like I give numbers and they look at me like, and? Even if I show it to them, they're like, I don't care, what's the intersection? Kind of thing. Absolutely.
Ian01:17:27 - 01:17:46
Yeah, Beijing is much more of a grid system. Oh, but despite that, yes, you don't— you often don't give the intersection. They have this sort of block system. I don't know what it's called formally, but the postal Western, you have a whole area of several blocks which has a name, which I think probably relates to the old sort of village name.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:17:46 - 01:17:48
Oh my God.
Ian01:17:48 - 01:18:08
And then you'll have numbers within that, which are kind of things like square or rectangular areas. So you can have a number of one of these sets of blocks, but you can't necessarily predict where that number's going to be within it. You just know the general area. And the amount of times I got lost in Beijing because of that. But you need to kind of have a
Stephanie Fuccio:01:18:08 - 01:18:09
Yeah, yeah.
Ian01:18:09 - 01:18:11
Map of where these various things are.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:18:11 - 01:18:15
And did you know this going in, or did you learn this by default when you were there?
Ian01:18:15 - 01:18:32
No, no, by moving. At first, I couldn't understand what our address was, and then it gradually started to understand. I think a lot of the names in Beijing are based on the old families that lived in those areas or something like that, or functional trades that were carried out there.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:18:32 - 01:18:35
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ian01:18:35 - 01:18:41
Quite disorientating. Even things like addresses work in very different ways.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:18:41 - 01:18:48
Yeah. And those really are those functional moments where you just want to get that task done. And that task oftentimes is just getting home.
Ian01:18:48 - 01:18:51
Yes, it is. Yeah, absolutely.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:18:51 - 01:18:58
Oh my gosh. There's 2 more things I want to touch upon briefly before we finish. Um, I know that you're reading a book on Chinese script.
Ian01:18:59 - 01:18:59
Yes.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:18:59 - 01:19:05
Can you kind of talk about how you got into that? and what you— I don't know.
Ian01:19:05 - 01:19:43
Well, one thing that has always frustrated me was that no matter how much my reading developed and improved, I still had no idea what handwritten Chinese was saying. And I was always quite baffled how I just put— we're talking about cursive script, basically. Chinese people will print characters, but very rarely. It's very rare to actually print them out from what I've seen. So for example, people I know would leave a note, and a handwritten note, and I would pick it up and I wouldn't— I'd be able to recognize maybe a few of the characters, but often I was just baffled. Sometimes I couldn't even tell who'd left it.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:19:43 - 01:19:45
Right.
Ian01:19:45 - 01:20:17
So I was determined to try and improve this, but there's a complete dearth of information about it. But there was, there's a book, Learning Chinese Script, I think it's called, and it was published in the '50s, I believe, and it went out of print. And when I was back in the UK, I managed to get hold of a copy of it, and I've been working through it, and now the differences are so apparent. Because they're almost— certain parts of characters are almost written in a shorthand, which you'd have to know first that that's what it's trying to represent.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:20:17 - 01:20:18
Right.
Ian01:20:18 - 01:20:28
So I'm working through it and it's very effective actually, but it's no wonder that I've never been able to pick that up, read it from people's writing.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:20:28 - 01:20:43
Are there any examples that can be described? The downfalls of an audio medium. Like a common word, they would have to abbreviate the word for I because there's so many freaking strokes in that. Do they abbreviate that?
Ian01:20:43 - 01:20:50
They do. Yeah, I can't really describe how it's abbreviated, but it's easier to write. It's quicker to write. Okay.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:20:50 - 01:20:51
Are there less strokes in it?
Ian01:20:51 - 01:21:08
Yes, they tend to reduce the strokes. And put it this way, a lot of the simplified characters that were introduced in the '50s and '60s, People are always complaining about simplified characters, saying they lost the beauty and that's arbitrary. Many of them weren't arbitrary. They were the way that people wrote in cursive.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:21:08 - 01:21:08
Yeah.
Ian01:21:08 - 01:21:35
So they were familiar to many people anyway, but they didn't necessarily have a strong relationship or any relationship to the existing part of that character. So yeah, some of them are quite familiar and you realize why, you know, but for example, you may have And this is just a very vague example. You may have 2 lines that cross, which are 2 separate strokes. People will do it as a loop instead, a self-crossing loop.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:21:35 - 01:21:36
Right, right, right.
Ian01:21:36 - 01:21:40
Because it means you don't have to take the pen off the paper and it's continuous.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:21:40 - 01:21:40
Yeah.
Ian01:21:40 - 01:21:54
And, you know, we do similar things with our writing, I suppose, but I think it works in a very different way. Some things will be simplified right down from quite intricate parts squiggle, quite literally. That's the only way to describe it.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:21:54 - 01:21:56
Wow.
Ian01:21:56 - 01:22:39
You know, you'll have something like just, it looks like a slight zigzag and it actually represents 4 or 5 strokes or part of a character. So yeah, I remember one time, one of the few times I ever went to get my hair cut, it was in rural Hunan Province with a friend. I went in, my friend went off shopping, they cut my hair, and at the end, And the guy kept— he was trying to say something, but in a local dialect. I couldn't understand what he was saying. Disappeared in the back of the shop for ages, came out with a notepad and scribbled something in cursive script. Oh, I was like, I can't read that at all. Eventually my friend came out and I said, can you help? He's trying to tell me something. And eventually she talked to him and said, he's saying he's finished.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:22:39 - 01:22:46
Oh my God. Isn't there a hand gesture for that? Oh my God.
Ian01:22:46 - 01:22:51
I couldn't understand his dialect. I couldn't understand his cursive. Yeah, that's all he was trying to say was, I finished, you can get up now and pay.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:22:51 - 01:22:56
I love how he thought the written version was going to be easier than the spoken one.
Ian01:22:56 - 01:23:01
Absolutely. That's quite a lot actually. People tracing a pattern in the air with their finger, which is very common.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:23:01 - 01:23:05
And for each other, if you grow up with it, that's fine. But oh my God.
Ian01:23:05 - 01:23:12
Yes, to assume that you can understand Chinese writing before you— in my case, that's actually true. Sitting up with cursive.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:23:12 - 01:23:15
But not with the cursive. That's a whole other skill set.
Ian01:23:15 - 01:23:17
It's a different skill again, yeah, unfortunately, yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:23:17 - 01:23:20
So do you feel like you can read the script more now that you've been—
Ian01:23:20 - 01:23:33
More, but I'm halfway through the book and the book only covers 250 characters, but it covers a lot of components that are common. And there's a certain logic to the simplification or the cursification.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:23:33 - 01:23:40
I wonder if there's a— there must be an equivalent for English writing.
Ian01:23:40 - 01:23:57
Yeah, I mean, put it this way, my dad, you know, he learned like sort of copperplate handwriting in school in Israel. to me, his writing is very, very hard to read. And for example, my nephew and niece can't understand their granddad's writing because that was how they were taught in school. And it's changed so much. And I suppose that uses a similar sort of coding.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:23:57 - 01:24:37
Yeah. Yeah. I remember learning script when we moved from New York to Pennsylvania. In New York, we hadn't started cursive, which is the fancier version, right? And in Pennsylvania, they did. So when I moved in, they had already they were already in the process of learning it. And like on day 1, I was supposed to be doing the writing practice with everybody. And I was like, I've never seen this before. I don't even know. And I was a very shy girl. So I was just like, I'll just sit here and draw circles. 'Cause I'm like, if it looks like I'm writing, then I should be fine. And my teacher's like, what are you doing? And I'm like, I don't know what this— 'cause it was, it looked like such a different creature to me. So yeah. So it just, interesting.
Ian01:24:37 - 01:24:40
I can't write cursive anymore. I was always terrible at handwriting, but
Stephanie Fuccio:01:24:40 - 01:24:41
I've realized that now I can only
Ian01:24:43 - 01:24:43
It's amazing.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:24:43 - 01:25:03
I can't, because of that experience and because of the, so much the amount of practice we did in elementary school, I think I could, but it would take me a while to remember some of them. Like even just the letter F, 'cause my last name starts with F. It's something like, is it something like that? Oh my God. I'm not even, no, that's T, that's F or something. Right.
Ian01:25:03 - 01:25:05
I don't know.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:25:05 - 01:25:09
Like it was so intricate and I was like, dude, look, it's 3 lines.
Ian01:25:09 - 01:25:10
Why are we doing this?
Stephanie Fuccio:01:25:10 - 01:25:21
It's so ridiculous. But it was, it was, you know, a few years after that, I think is when they stopped teaching it and everybody just went to script or went to print. Just stopped teaching it? I think so. Oh, wow.
Ian01:25:21 - 01:25:22
I didn't know that.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:25:22 - 01:25:24
Right. I'm pretty sure they stopped.
Ian01:25:24 - 01:25:30
We actually used to have handwriting lessons and we had to use a fountain pen.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:25:30 - 01:25:30
Yeah. Okay.
Ian01:25:30 - 01:25:37
We didn't have that. I remember the teacher shouted because I was so messy with my handwriting.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:25:37 - 01:25:38
I actually had remedial lessons for my handwriting.
Ian01:25:38 - 01:25:46
Oh yeah. And I was such a messy writer that using a fountain pen, I remember one time the teacher shouting at me, pointing upwards, there was ink on the ceiling.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:25:46 - 01:25:48
No.
Ian01:25:48 - 01:25:50
I don't know what I was doing, but, um, I think—
Stephanie Fuccio:01:25:50 - 01:25:53
You're probably thinking, oh, why did I write that? Okay.
Ian01:25:53 - 01:25:58
But for me, I mean, I used to come out of those lessons just covered in my forehead, my hair would have ink covered in it.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:25:58 - 01:26:10
To this day, I don't think I've ever used a fountain pen. No, I've used kind of fancy pens that look like they would be, but they They have ink inside of them if you don't dip them in. I've always been curious about that.
Ian01:26:10 - 01:26:23
Well, the theory was at the time that using such an instrument would actually force you to write beautiful flowing script. And for me it was exactly the opposite. It just looked like a bird had walked all over them.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:26:23 - 01:26:43
I appreciate, especially with Chinese calligraphy, I appreciate that there is an art form attached to the language. That's a really neat version of it. But when you're talking about communication and learning and those kinds of things, I think when we get stuck in the tradition of it, when we're trying to get something done, I think that can be counterproductive sometimes.
Ian01:26:43 - 01:26:52
But I guess back in the '70s, we're still in the era of, um, of having to write letters and a lot of jobs involve letter writing. Exactly. And they had to, they had to look neat and formal.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:26:52 - 01:26:53
Exactly. Yeah.
Ian01:26:53 - 01:26:55
You know, that's just not an issue anymore.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:26:55 - 01:27:23
Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't use computers on a regular basis until, what, university? I think Definitely not in the classrooms. We didn't have laptops in the classroom. People couldn't afford laptops at that time. They were still super expensive and they just weren't like, I remember in elementary school we had one class where we, they were kind of introducing us to computers and we went into the computer lab that was new and fancy and all that. And we played some game where we moved something up and down.
Ian01:27:23 - 01:27:26
Mm-hmm. Moved something up and down.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:27:26 - 01:27:42
Yeah, it was, it was a game, I think, but it was such a rudimentary Every game that I was like, this is— is anybody having fun? Like, what are we doing? We're using the cursor. We've got an entire keyboard and we're using the cursor. What are we doing? It was very bizarre.
Ian01:27:42 - 01:28:15
One of my first jobs, I had a clerical job where I had to write to customers. And literally, if you wanted anything typed, the letter typed, you had to send off to a typing pool and wait 3 days for it to come back. So we were actually handwriting customer accounts even in tables and sending them out, and that was in the early '90s. So, uh, I always felt quite embarrassed sending out these things because my writing was awful, um, and I would draw up these tables that were so messy. Um, but that was only in the '90s, you know. So yeah, handwriting was still important then, I suppose.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:28:15 - 01:28:25
Yeah, it was. And there are still job applications where you have to fill them out, but they don't require— they've never required script, actually. Print has been the norm
Ian01:28:25 - 01:28:28
They often say print in black ink or something.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:28:28 - 01:28:43
Yeah. Yeah. And they'll even have examples of the crisp print that you're supposed to be using so they can read it. And I'm like, wait, so, okay, so for function, we're going to use the readable stuff. And then, yeah, it's interesting how fast things have changed.
Ian01:28:43 - 01:29:09
It is. And when you look at Chinese and the way that people use the writing system, even since I've been here, um, you know, that because everyone's using their mobile devices and computers to enter in. And I remember going to Carrefour in the first few days and buying something and had to take it back. And I remember she couldn't find one of the characters in our address on the system. So she ended up just typing out in pen and ink. And that still happens sometimes.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:29:10 - 01:29:10
Yeah.
Ian01:29:10 - 01:29:23
Because it's a rare character. But I remember the way she was using the computer. It was all like dropdown menus and it was all ding, ding, ding, tab, key, tab, key, tab. Whereas now people are so fluent with it. And touchscreens also, some people use strokes.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:29:23 - 01:29:23
Yeah.
Ian01:29:23 - 01:29:24
I often do that in Pleco because I've
Stephanie Fuccio:01:29:26 - 01:29:40
find if I have the word in front of me, I find it easier to— I, I always say draw instead of write, but I find it easier to, to use that because I kind of— the stroke orders seem kind of logical to me. So I can, as long as I get those right, because Pleco is a bitch about that.
Ian01:29:40 - 01:29:41
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:29:41 - 01:29:56
They actually are strict about stroke order, which I find sort of one of the things I'm not fond about with Pleco, one of the rare things that I don't like. But I find I can draw it kind of easier and then find it below as opposed to try to remember what it's called, like the name of the word or whatever.
Ian01:29:56 - 01:30:10
That's right. Yeah, you're right. It's worth learning the stroke order, even if just for these systems, like recognition systems like that. I know some people say it's not important, but trouble is these things do tend to work on stroke order.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:30:10 - 01:30:20
They do. Now, what would be better is if Pleco didn't care about the stroke order, but then supposedly you can, people can tell the difference when you're handwriting them if they look different.
Ian01:30:20 - 01:30:21
Probably. Yeah. Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:30:21 - 01:30:52
I don't know if that's going to stick around much longer. Honestly, it's— I don't know how. I actually want to at some point ask some folks that. It'd be fun to like go into— actually, one of my viewers from the YouTube channel was telling me, oh, you should go to the parks and you should like ask, have people write it 2 different ways and ask them if they can tell the difference. And I'm like, when I get to that level of speaking, that sounds like a really good thing to do. But right now I'll just be like pointing, going, ah, ah, ah, and I won't be able to convey it. But it would be kind of a fun thing. Like, can you really tell the difference if it's written the right way?
Ian01:30:52 - 01:31:09
Yeah. I think if you— I wonder if that comes from calligraphy, where you would, if you're using a calligraphy brush, you can tell where the stroke starts and ends. But then again, that's part of the craft as well. But I wonder if that's a misconception because of that.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:31:09 - 01:31:10
Yeah.
Ian01:31:10 - 01:31:35
I did have a teacher at one of the places, the school I went to, where she was trying to tell me off for not using correct stroke order, and I was, because I was always very picky about things. Like, I've trained, I'd really tried to drill myself in doing that. And she was insisting I'd written a certain character one way and that I had, I'd literally just written it. So I knew, you know, but I think she was trying to make a point, but you don't. So, I mean, it was a bit of a shootout.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:31:35 - 01:31:36
Yeah.
Ian01:31:36 - 01:31:36
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:31:36 - 01:32:07
And I think sometimes people chop it, like I do all my flashcards in, um, in pencil just so I, 'cause I know no matter how much I watch how it's drawn, written, I know I'm going to get some things wrong and I'll want to go back and erase and redo it later. And if it's just one little part of it, I do go and erase one little part and do it and do that part over. And I've had people tell me you have to write Chinese in ink because that will, that changes the look of the character enough. And I just, I don't know.
Ian01:32:07 - 01:32:22
I find when I'm writing Chinese characters with ink pencil, the pencil is continuously I've never got the pressure. Yeah, I've never, my mind, because my mind's messy anyway. I just find I'm scoring into the paper, you know, and that's terrible.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:32:22 - 01:32:59
See, that's funny. It's interesting you said that because I went on a stationery run when we were in London last year, this year, and I bought tons of pencils that had erasers on them because I find way too many pencils here don't have erasers on them. And I like to have the all-in-one thing, but when I came back and was using them to, to write my flashcards, I did find that they were, they were snapping easier. And I'm like, what? That's not happening with the ones I bought in China. And I'd be writing with the Chinese ones and going, these are working fine, but the eraser's not there. And I was like, where's that middle ground? So I wonder if they're, cuz it was, they were both 0.5 or 0.7. Like those were the only 2.
Ian01:32:59 - 01:33:00
Yeah.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:33:00 - 01:33:02
Ones that I used. So they weren't a different thickness.
Ian01:33:02 - 01:33:06
I'm just saying that the material
Stephanie Fuccio:01:33:06 - 01:33:10
Interesting. Why would we need more? Is it because the strokes are longer then?
Ian01:33:10 - 01:33:25
Isn't there more variable pressure people use in their character? I would, I would just assume, but I don't know, 'cause I personally, I don't, but I just, yeah, I'm guessing in, um, when we write English, we use a consistent pressure.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:33:25 - 01:33:26
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Ian01:33:26 - 01:33:31
I imagine characters, it would be very, certainly with calligraphy.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:33:31 - 01:33:31
Yeah.
Ian01:33:31 - 01:33:32
You do use different pressure.
Stephanie Fuccio:01:33:32 - 01:33:59
Oh my gosh. That's so, if anybody is in the business of making mechanical mechanical pencils. Please let me know. I'd like to interview you about this process. Sorry, I like it. I like throwing those in. The final thing I want to ask you about is coding. You've done a fair bit, uh, which is an understatement, of computer coding. Do you make any connections to Chinese language and coding, the learning of, the usage of?
Ian01:33:59 - 01:34:49
You know, I, well, In a certain way, I don't know if this is— I don't know necessarily what you're asking, but in one aspect, I can see a connection in the— I think what I've identified in my life is I really enjoy learning systems of things, a brand new system, like the writing system of Chinese, even the grammar system. And even when I was younger, I remember getting my mother to buy me getting me to buy me a shorthand book because she learned shorthand as a secretary. And she said, why on earth do you want to learn shorthand? It's just because it was a system. I think coding's a bit like that. It's a set of rules. There's a certain consistency and logic to it all. I find Chinese is more like that than certain other languages, I would say.