SPEAKER_01

Welcome to the Changing Scripts podcast. I have been documenting my experience learning simplified Mandarin Chinese on a YouTube channel for the past year and a half. Offline, I've been having conversations with anybody that would discuss language with me. And I want to get some of those conversations on this podcast. There are some really interesting viewpoints about Chinese language, about learning the Chinese language, about language learning in general that I really, really, really wanted to capture and share with you. My main focus on this podcast is going to be twofold. I want to capture both our perspective. One is other people going through what I'm going through, probably further along the line of learning the Chinese language. So I'm going to interview people who are either in the process of learning or in the process of using the language. Don't worry, the interviews are going to be in English because I have that on linguistic adaptation myself. I'm going to interview Chinese people on their experiences, learning languages. We'll talk about methods, we'll talk about in and outside of the classroom, we'll talk about usage. Inevitably, we'll talk about pronunciation, reading, writing, whatever the people that I'm interviewing are most interested in about their language learning experiences or about the languages that we're talking about. So there's a whole lot of content that we're talking about here. So these podcasts are going to get a long. All of my information are in the show notes, and I welcome your feedback and ideas. And if you are learning the Chinese language or come from the Chinese language and have learned other languages, I'd like to interview you. Contact me and we'll hash that out. It is my extreme pleasure to welcome Eric Olander to this episode of Changing Script. How did this all happen? That's what I ask myself every time I went back to this audiophile to edit. I am an avid listener of Eric and Hobus and Staten's China in Africa podcast. If you've heard me on any other podcast talking about China, I inevitably will recommend this podcast to you. It is about politics, not language, so I'm just going to briefly mention that that's how I came to know of Eric and his connection to China. After I started doing the podcast on one episode, he said something and referenced to the Chinese language. And it sounded like he had a deep understanding of the language, and my ears perked up, and I made a note to send him an invitation to join us on this podcast to geek out about how he learned the language. And oh my goodness. The information that I found out from that first invite all the way through this first conversation. Because I think we're gonna have more. And so the information that I found out through this entire process, I'm so in awe of the longevity of his language learning and his language usage. And both of those didn't necessarily start at different times, because as you'll hear, and Eric will tell you himself, is he has quite a controversial way that he learned the language. And so his language learning and usage happened much sooner and concurrently, which is not always the case for most folks. He also brings in a lot of the cultural aspects and the socio-political aspects, and all of that makes for a really interesting conversation. So I think you're really going to enjoy this viewpoint of Mandarin Chinese, how it was learned, how it exists in the world today, and how one person will not stop learning. And that's not just me, that's him. That is so him. And thank you so much, Eric, for taking the time to do this. He is a very busy professional, and I really appreciate the time that went into just thinking out about the language. Thank you so much. Here we go. You know, I normally ask a lot of questions about kind of the beginning stages of language learning, but then I actually listened to a podcast that you did with Steve Stein in 2017, and I realized the depth of your Chinese language abilities and figured we'd kind of skip over some of the beginning stuff. Yeah. Well, the only real thing I want to ask about the early years is when did you first start studying and what attracted you to China slash or the Chinese language? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

There's that, then there's some tips on how to study. Um I have a very controversial view on how to study.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, cool.

SPEAKER_03

Uh so I can put that in. And then what I've and then what I really want to talk about is how the role of speaking Chinese is now changing a lot.

unknown

Yes. And it didn't used to be as important, and now it's super important.

SPEAKER_03

So so that is uh, you know, and I've just it just in the past year I've seen it change. And I think that's a really neat thing to motivate some people.

SPEAKER_01

Yes, please. Okay, cool. So let's start at the beginning. How did you first get attracted to learning the Chinese language? Uh sorry, I should say Mandarin Chinese, not just not Chinese. Yeah, anyway, yes.

SPEAKER_03

Sure. Uh I went to high school in the east of the United States at a boarding school. And they this was back in 1985, long before China was actually open. It was still a very much a closed country. It was not developed, it was not the economic power that that any that it is today. It's unrecognizable to what it is today. And when I got admitted to this school, they sent a little card in the mail and they said we were encouraging our new freshmen to take what they called at that time strategic languages: Russian, Japanese, and Chinese. Now, at that time, Japanese was a very big language because you know Japan was coming in, and there was all this fear of Japan buying up Rockefeller Plaza, and the Japanese were taking over, and there was a lot of anxiety in the United States about the Japanese, but it was also quite in vogue to study Japanese, so that made a lot of sense. Obviously, this was still during the Cold War, so it made sense to study Russian. And Chinese didn't really make a whole lot of sense. But I grew up in California in the San Francisco Bay Area, where there are a lot of Chinese people. So it wasn't something that was as exotic to me as it would be from someone, say, Kansas, uh, Oklahoma, Louisiana, where there just aren't as many Chinese people or Asian immigrants.

unknown

So I did it. And I thought, you know, what the heck?

SPEAKER_03

I wanted to do Spanish, but I was persuaded by my mother and some of her friends and some older people to say, go ahead and try it. Uh, okay. I'll do it for one year. And they said, if you don't like it, you can go back and study Spanish. Growing up in California, Spanish is what you do, right?

SPEAKER_01

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03

So I did it, and I have to say, it was not love at first sight. It was an acquired taste. It took uh several years. But you know, when you're in school, I didn't want to, after one or two years of doing this thing, start over again with Spanish. We had a three-year language requirement. Uh-huh. So if I started over as a junior, I'd have to be with the freshman in freshman Spanish, and that was not appealing to me at all. So I said, ah, forget it. Let me just power through. And then it started to build. And this is one of the things that I talk to people about when they want to learn Chinese, is it requires an inordinate amount of patience. We're talking patience on a level that a superhuman level of patience. So those first three or four years of high school Chinese back in the 80s didn't really connect for me. It connected for me after high school. When I graduated, I wasn't ready to go to college right away, so I took a gap year and I went to Taiwan. At that time was a preferable place to study Chinese, and that's when it all clicked. Oh, just that we made the connection between studying the language in a textbook and then going out on the street and using it.

SPEAKER_01

Oh my gosh. Okay, I lived in Taiwan for a little while teaching. Uh just out of curiosity, was it Tainan or Taipei?

SPEAKER_03

No, I went to Taipei. You went to Taipei, okay. Right, right, right. Okay.

SPEAKER_01

So you were in Taiwan for a year.

SPEAKER_03

That's right. 1989 was when I got to Taiwan.

unknown

And that was still when Taiwan was very much, it was nowhere near what it is today.

SPEAKER_03

Much more modern, very, very hypermodern society, but you know, the only democracy in the Chinese world.

unknown

And back then this was still kind of the hangover of authoritarian rule and was still very much there.

SPEAKER_03

When we had when you go to a movie, you had to stand up and there was a picture of Chiang A Shek, and you had to put your hand over your heart. It was that kind of thing. That's laughable. But back then that was very, very common. Not many foreigners that were there, a couple missionaries from the Mormon church. It was still very, very exotic. Uh, but Taiwan's teaching methods I thought were far better than they were in the mainland. In the mainland back then, and even to some extent today, but back then definitely it was Comrade Wang and Comrade Li are going into a struggle session. It was like, I don't need to listen to learn that. And in Taiwan, it was much more how to mail an envelope, how to rent an apartment, how to take the bus, you know, very, very practical Chinese. So that's why at those days a lot of people went to Taiwan to study.

SPEAKER_01

I was in Taiwan in 2003 and 2004, and there were a lot of foreigners uh going to study Chinese at that point there.

SPEAKER_03

So it definitely the Taiwan government, to its discredit, has discouraged young people from coming there to study.

unknown

And what they've done is they've made it much more difficult for visas, they've made it much more difficult for people to stay afterwards.

SPEAKER_03

And I think it's a stupid, dumb idea what the what Taiwan, what the Taiwanese government has done, because they are turning away people who say, you know what, I can't stay in Taiwan, guess where I'm gonna go?

unknown

Going up to Shanghai, going up to Beijing, and they're losing some great talent.

SPEAKER_03

And I think that's really that's really frustrating for me because again, you know, at some point I'm gonna talk about my controversial study methods in Chinese, and Taiwan really plays an important part in that as well.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I I am curious to ask you, because you mentioned you studied for three or four years before going to Taiwan, but it was somewhere in Taiwan that it clicked for you and that you started to like it. Was it those teaching methods, or was it just being in that culture?

SPEAKER_03

So, you know, this is particularly speaking, you and I are both we both live in mainland China, and this is a passionate issue for for people, whether you come from Taiwan or you come from China, but for us foreigners, I started with the the this traditional Chinese characters in Zhuing Fuhan, which is the phonetic system.

unknown

And my teachers were all from Taiwan.

SPEAKER_03

And I cannot recommend enough that when you are starting out in Chinese, that you do not do simplified characters with pinyin. It is really, and this is what's so provocative because people, particularly Chinese people, get extraordinarily emotional about this. When I was living in Los Angeles and I was running one of the largest Chinese TV stations in the in the world, but particularly in the US, um it w uh this was an issue of immigrant parents that almost came into fisticuffs and blows in schools where they were teaching. That the mainland parents did not want them to learn traditional characters, and the Taiwan parents did not want them to learn pinyin.

unknown

And it was it was crazy.

SPEAKER_03

But for us as foreigners learning the language, when you study a traditional character, you have a much better understanding of the etymology of that character, of how it came about to be. I mean, take the character gu. In simplified character, it looks like the arrow, but in the traditional character, you've got the human radical on the left, you've got all the details on the right, you know, the box and all whatnot. And there's a story behind that, and it makes it much easier to understand the characters when you understand the origins of where it comes from. That's point number one. And it's not difficult at all to go from traditional characters to simplified characters.

SPEAKER_01

Right.

SPEAKER_03

It is impossible to go from simplified to traditional. So you're closing off that opportunity because in Hong Kong, in Taiwan, in some parts of the United States, and other parts of the Chinese-speaking world, they still use traditional characters, and your ability to speak that and understand that speaker, I mean, to understand it, is is is is critical, I think, in some parts of the world. But more importantly, on pronunciation. Let's take the character zen for people. If you come about, and I hear newbies who only start with pinyin, and the pinion is R-E-N, second tone up. And so the natural thing for a Westerner or an American or a Brit is to go Ren because that's the sound, R-E-N. Ren, right? But there is no sound like that.

unknown

It's actually z and zen. And so the pinion is not as accurate as the phonetic system.

SPEAKER_03

The phonetic actually has z and second tone up. And they have a phonetic z, and it's this little vibration of the tongue that actually does not exist in when you say it in Ren. So my point is that there's an accuracy that comes with the phonetic system that you just can't get with pinyin. And when you're starting out, building that accuracy is so important. So I am not partisan to whether it's from Taiwan or whether it's from the mainland, forget the politics. We as foreigners, this isn't our struggle. Our struggle is to figure out how to speak this darn language that is so difficult to master. And to read the characters that are an accurate phonetic system to me was a much easier way of perfecting my pronunciation that later on became much more helpful.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. Now that system that you mentioned, is that the bopo mofo, is that the same thing? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have had people recommend that yes.

SPEAKER_03

They are they are the building blocks of the of the of the phonetic system of how you pronounce it. And it is it was a lifesaver for me. And it allowed me to again be able to perfect my pronunciation much faster than some of my peers who studied only on the mainland and used pinyin only. Now I transitioned over to pinyin. I don't use the phonetic system anymore, and I only use simplified characters. So in all my emails and all my typing and everything. So it it's again, this is a foundational system as opposed to something that you will necessarily do for the rest of your your Chinese studying life.

SPEAKER_01

Right, right, right, right, right. So did when you were studying in Hong Kong, did you you obviously learned Cantonese when you were there? Is that correct?

SPEAKER_03

No, when I I did my master's degree in Hong Kong, that was all in English. Oh, I studied in Taiwan under I studied in Chinese language in Taiwan, but I did uh graduate degree in Hong Kong, and that was only in English. So I lived in Hong Kong for a total of five years, all you know, pieced together, all together, and never really learned um Cantonese.

unknown

It was just too intimidating for me.

SPEAKER_03

Nine tones, the range of the tones, and I decided that it would be better for me to focus exclusively on Mandarin because that was hard enough. Right, right, right. The idea of separ of it would just be all jumbled up in my head, saying Nehal, Niao. I mean, all of that would just be so confusing. So I don't recommend people unless to do that, unless they are incredibly talented in languages and have really good ways of compartmentalizing those different languages. But studying two Chinese dialects can be very tough.

SPEAKER_01

Part of what because I I started in Taiwan and now I've I've lived on and off in in mainland China and I keep watching the news and the things about Hong Kong and specifically the language issues with mainland and Hong Kong, and I really wonder what's going to happen with Cantonese. Do you have any opinion on if because uh apparently the news, the tea the evening news is now in May in Kuronghua in Hong Kong already.

SPEAKER_03

Like some of the news. Yeah. There is a strong and and some of it because Hong Kong is a still a very much a pluralistic community. So there is still a sizable international community there, which is why they still have English language programs. Obviously, the native-born population in Hong Kong is Cantonese, and then there's a growing Mandarin population. So the fact that they have Mandarin news doesn't necessarily mean that uh the communists want to take over all of Hong Kong and change. Of course, that's what they want to do. We know that. It's very clear and upfront about it. There's no secret to it. In uh about 25-28 years, it's going to happen officially. It will happen much sooner than that, uh, unofficially. Um the fact is that Hong Kong is is going to be a part of China where Mandarin is going to be far more prominent than it was in the past. That is very threatening to a lot of people. That doesn't mean that Cantonese will go away. It is regardless of what happens politically in Hong Kong, uh, Hong Kong is still very much part of the of that that that Pearl River Delta area, which is uh which is Cantonese first. And I don't see that changing. Uh but then again, when you go to cities like Shenzhen, the business language is increasingly Mandarin.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

It's not Cantonese. And Hong Kong has resisted that, whereas a business language is a combination of Cantonese and English. But now that's starting to change a lot. I am one of those people who believes that the more that Hong Kong integrates with the mainland, the better off it will be in the long run because we know how the story ends in Hong Kong.

SPEAKER_01

Right.

SPEAKER_03

There is no escaping that. We know how the story ends. So whether it ends peacefully in the sense of in, you know, after the 50 years of the Joint Declaration and the fact that one country, two systems, that does expire, on the day that that officially expires, Hong Kong becomes a normal part of China. Right. That will again happen probably before much sooner than that. It's underway right now, as they're establishing something called the Greater Bay Area. And part of the Greater Bay Area is going to be this fusion of culture and people and economics and technology and innovation and everything between Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong, and even some Macau in there as well.

unknown

So the language will be part of that.

SPEAKER_03

Uh, if you want to speak Chinese, you have to speak Mandarin with the elites in on the mainland. It was shocking in my in my graduate program at Hong Kong University how few of my Hong Kong classmates spoke Mandarin well. And it really speaks to the fact that a lot of people in Hong Kong are not preparing well for the inevitability of what's happening.

SPEAKER_01

Right.

SPEAKER_03

Mandar levels still among native-born Chinese are appallingly bad.

SPEAKER_01

Right, right, right. So were you saying that Cantonese and Mandarin are going to exist side by side rather peacefully?

SPEAKER_03

Um, they exist side by side. Mandarin and local dialects throughout China exist side by side. Um, depending on who you are and what what you need the language for. So people who who are at lower ends of the economic ladder oftentimes don't need to be bilingual and will speak in the local dialect. Those who are speaking across provincial borders and national borders and have more education oftentimes will speak uh multiple languages and multiple dialects, including Mandarin. So um I think that Hong Kong will reflect the diversity that exists within China where people speak multiple dialects, and just as if you're in Guangzhou, you can speak Cantonese and Mandarin, same will be in Hong Kong. Sure, sure. And with a little more English, probably. That will be the different is there'll be a little bit more English rather than Hong K than Chinese Mandarin and Cantonese kind of competing.

SPEAKER_01

I see, I see, I see. I think we skipped a lot though. We went from 1989 in Taiwan to to your time in Hong Kong.

unknown

We did.

SPEAKER_03

So one of the defining features of my kind of Chinese linguistic adventure is the fact that I've never stopped. Not for the longest I've I've stopped in 32 years of studying Chinese is about three months, one time, one summer. Wow. And I since then I hadn't stopped for 33 for 32 years.

unknown

Now I haven't lived in China for most of those much of the most of that time. Right.

SPEAKER_03

So even though I was living in Atlanta, Georgia, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, Kinshasa, uh, Saigon, all these different cities around the world where I was working in media and journalism and public affairs and doing things like that, I continued to study Chinese twice a week, sometimes three times a week, never stopped. And and that was the key thing because I always knew that I was going to use it at some point.

unknown

It was also just a personal hobby and a passion project, but there was also this sense that I've put so much time into this already, 10 years, 15 years at that time. I don't want to quit now because then I would lose everything. So when people come to me and say, I want to learn Chinese, what should I do?

SPEAKER_03

I say, you have to really kind of stare yourself cold into the mirror. Ask yourself, are you willing to commit the rest of your life to do this?

unknown

And never stop. You can't take, like, you know, six months off. No. Because it's just it is shocking how fast it just evaporates from your brain. It just goes away, it dissipates so fast.

SPEAKER_03

You can go from HSK 3 back down to HSK 1 in the space of six weeks, seven weeks of not studying. It's really alarming how fast that happens. So, so that was the that was the secret. So, from from those early years, I just kept doing it all along. No matter where I went, I I found a tutor. Now, back in those old days, I would have to, I actually did tutors one-to-one, face to face with another human being. And now, today, for the past nine years, my tutors have all been online in Skype. And so that's been something that's very helpful for me. You know what they say with the gym that the best gym is the one that's closest to you because you don't have an excuse to get out of going.

SPEAKER_01

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03

Well, the fact is for me, it was always the you know the convenience of it. When you have a tutor that's face-to-face, where you actually have to drive there, you park, you go, you spend an hour, then you drive back, it could be like a three-hour commitment sometimes to study Chinese on a week. Sure, sure. Or on a weekend. And that was that's tiring. You did it, but it was tiring.

SPEAKER_02

So when the opportunity came as the technology evolved to get online and do it, um, I I jumped at it. I don't necessarily recommend it for everybody because, and particularly at a very, very early stage beginner level, there is an advantage about being in a class and getting that collective communal support that you're not alone because in those dark moments where you just don't. feel like you're progressing and you're not moving forward with this language, having that support is really, really important.

SPEAKER_03

But as you become more advanced, HSK three, HSK four, HSK five and above, then going onto Skype and finding a tutor and really fine-tuning your uh your Chinese studies, then that's a better way of doing it.

SPEAKER_01

Sure. Well after the first few years with your tutors, I imagine you were quite a bit above textbooks. Like how what do you use with the tutors to practice or to study or what have you?

SPEAKER_03

So uh this is very funny you asked that because you and I had not talked about this uh before before our conversation today. So I have a rather unconventional method of studying Chinese today. Okay. I really urge other people to do but no one else has ever followed me down this path. So either that makes me really crazy or really in bold, I don't know which one. Okay. Um in the beginning I I followed the textbooks. I got to UC Berkeley and I started taking Chinese there and I didn't like the textbooks that they had because they pushed us back into mainland textbooks. Now back then this is the early 90s there was this textbook called Practical Chinese Reader it's a green book and surprisingly 25 years later believe it or not it's still in existence today.

unknown

Oh my gosh. It is and it was such a terrible textbook back then.

SPEAKER_03

And so it is shocking. But nonetheless it had this very very strong communist kind of tone to it. It was again Comrade Wong Comrade Li you know going together to the you know celebrate the proletarian revolution you know and it was just like okay that's fine for some people that just isn't the language that I wanted to learn.

unknown

Right. So I got annoyed with the the way that they that they was the language is being taught.

SPEAKER_03

Right. I also want to talk about bad Chinese teachers so let's let's come back to that. Yep because 99% of people quit and a large reason of it is because bad Chinese teachers.

SPEAKER_01

Yep.

SPEAKER_03

But anyway so I said you know what this is stupid.

unknown

I don't want to do this and this is not what I want.

SPEAKER_03

So I went to the TA the teacher's assistant and I said do you want to make a little bit of extra money? She was like of course so I said can you you know tutor me twice a week andor three times a week the same amount that I would study in class but just tutor me after class what I wanted to do. And I started studying news and newspapers and things like that more practical language. Sure. And that's when I I that was the last classes I took was at UC Berkeley freshman year. And after that I've been with private tutors my whole my whole time. Sure. What I do now and what I've been doing for the past eight years now in studying Chinese is I use Wei Walk. Mm-hmm and so what I do is I uh and you can go find me I am Tabi Zalawai big nose foreigner on Weibo and uh for people who've been around China you'll know that that Chinese people love Western noses and when I was young I don't have a particularly large nose I have a normal American nose but I got so many compliments of my nose. So I just thought let me use that so my handle is weibo.com slash Davidzilawai and uh and I just post updates about my life.

unknown

That's you know like what a lot of people do on social media.

SPEAKER_01

Right.

SPEAKER_03

But the reason why it's such a great teaching tool is because with my teacher twice a week I am able I practice grammar writing sentences we discuss what I'm gonna write beforehand so I get vocabulary but also learn about the language and the culture and the rhythm of Chinese social media which today is an inescapable part of life just as it is everywhere else around the world and so I've built a following of about 1200 followers. Oh my gosh which is not huge really I mean it's but at the end of the day it I have 1200 Chinese followers so I'm not what they call a big V in China but and then you know and what I'm able to do is share my my culture and my experiences it's a completely apolitical it's just about my life it's just about my family and our life in Shanghai our life in Paris our life in Saigon and so if you go to that you'll see you know completely innocent in that sense my other social media are much more political about Chinese policy in Africa and things like that. This has none of that and this is and every week we post five or six pictures and then I end up responding to about 15 to 20 comments. So it's a great way that I get to learn the language beyond what I would normally do in everyday textbooks or or conversational types of discussions like that.

SPEAKER_01

Oh my goodness that's wonderful. And you've got the motivation of there being somebody on the other end so you're having like a a non-real-time conversation via social media with these people.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah and it's again it's going back to that the tradition that I picked up in Taiwan of really using practical Chinese, Chinese that you can use with people as opposed to academic or textbook Chinese which I don't feel is always as relevant. I see what my wife was studying HSK3 when she's doing some of the language and the vocabulary that she's learning and still so much of it I find just not practical or relevant.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And that's kind of my frustration if you're enjoying this conversation about the Chinese language and would like to participate if you're studying the Chinese language or if you come from the Chinese language and have learned other languages. Either perspective is greatly actually both perspectives are greatly appreciated on this channel. Let's have a conversation let's type that sucker and let's get it into this podcast. Contact me and let's etch out the details on how to get you and your valuable language learning experience onto this podcast. All of my information is in the show notes. Also all over social media except Facebook I am Steph Puccio S T E P H F U C C I O that includes Gmail for my email, Twitter, Instagram Tumblr and LinkedIn. So I look forward to hearing from you.

SPEAKER_03

So going back to why do most people quit studying Chinese I'm one of the few Westerners that I know that's kept going with it.

unknown

Most of my classmates one maybe two with you know from high school and college have all quit and most people quit and why is this now it's hard and we Americans in particular are not accustomed to these kinds of long-term challenges we're now we've been trained from very early on to have immediate gratification and Chinese does not afford that. No it just there's no shortcut that you can take there is no Rosetta Stone that you can take no course no online there is no shortcut.

SPEAKER_03

No it is brute force memorization that is that is it character after character after character there are online tools and apps and things like that that make it easier sure but at the end of the day you are memorizing characters and there's just no way around it because that's the only way this language can be learned. Yep you can speak on a sure on a basic conversational you want to get survival Chinese you can you can do it all sorts of different ways if you want to you know order Jinbing on the corner in Shanghai, fine. That's not what I'm talking about. But if you want to get to a professional level of Chinese where you can hold a business meeting you're not gonna do it with any shortcuts.

SPEAKER_01

No.

SPEAKER_03

The problem is though I find that in particular in places like the US and Europe that Chinese teachers are not well trained on how to teach Westerners. So they bring a methodology that is perfected in teaching Chinese kids how to study. Yep. They bring it over to Westerners. Yep and it doesn't work we're not conditioned to do that kind of learning and the strictness and the the the the the testing all the time and that to me is really one of the big shortcomings and one of the big opportunities out there is for language academies to come up who are trained in teaching Western children and western adults in how according to their learning methods. And so that's to me one of the biggest frustrations. I have yet to see that I think there's a very big opportunity in doing it just like there's VIP English where the guy's made a billion dollars I don't know how much money he's teaching English there is a big opportunity to teach Chinese better because for the most part the Chinese teachers that are out there today cannot teach it very well. Leads to a lot of people getting frustrated and quitting.

SPEAKER_01

It does and rather quickly I'd say within the first six months if not shorter amount of time people start they're very enthusiastic they get their tutor they sign up for their classes and they experience those classes and they stop. And I am no different I that's what happened to me the first three times I tried to do this. And this time I'm actually self-study well self-studying with other people's materials but I'm not in a classroom for that very reason because I just could not find someone to treat me as an adult and for me it was more of uh it was it wasn't the strictness so much as it was they were teaching people learning their first language they were teaching children who needed to learn the physicality of holding a a pen and they were teaching people who were making their first real sounds into their first sentence and as adults we don't need as much scaffolding for that in that way. We need other stuff.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah so it was so whether it's their teaching like children or whether it's their teaching like Chinese or whether it's their teaching they're just disconnected with the way that we have grown up learning.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

And and so and I just it annoys me to no end because that is such a missed opportunity and the Chinese government is spending so much money with Confucius institutes and language education programs around the world but they're missing the key thing which is understanding the culture.

SPEAKER_02

And when I mean understanding the culture, understanding our culture.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah my child who's nine years old is learning he goes to school in Shanghai but he's studying an American method and his learning kind of methodology is completely different than that of a Chinese child or an other or other Asian children for that matter because Korean Vietnamese Japanese are much more similar to the Chinese method.

SPEAKER_04

Right.

SPEAKER_03

But the European methods and the American methods in particular are are very very different and I find very very few Chinese teachers understand that.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

And and that's unfortunate and it's really it's really unfortunate because it's really stymied the growth. I would have thought that 30 years into China's opening that the streets of Shanghai in Beijing would be covered with foreigner speaking Chinese by now.

SPEAKER_01

Right.

SPEAKER_03

And it is still quite rare. Yeah there's a lot more than there was 20 years ago no doubt. 20 years ago when I was in Beijing there was nobody it was just freakish when no foreigner spoke Chinese.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_03

And today there are more people don't freak out in cities like Shanghai that you speak Chinese. So they're used to seeing it a little bit but there's nowhere near enough and what's kind of depressing and sad right now is that programs in the US in particular are shutting.

SPEAKER_01

They are so Stanford and Berkeley are cutting back their programs why lack of interest lack of interest isn't that incredible and I uh yeah it drives me not shutting the programs but cutting back their programs but still it is lack of interest. The last thing Americans need is less language learning I mean well it's a fucking hard language to learn.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah it is there's no two ways about it. It is but I will say now so there's been this discussion in the kind of Chinese learning community and it started in part with a by a podcast by Jeremy Goldkorn and Kaiser Guo who run the very very popular Sub China group and then also the Seneca podcast.

unknown

And a couple years ago they said something which I thought was super interesting where they said that if you want to study Chinese do it for the right reasons.

SPEAKER_03

Because if you study Chinese you're not going to get rich and make a lot of money because you can speak Chinese and I think they're absolutely a hundred percent right if you think you're gonna study Chinese and I hear this in wealthy communities in New York in San Francisco and Los Angeles where you they have their three year olds already having menutors and you think why well it's the language of the future so they're gonna be rich if they study Chinese because they'll get more job opportunities you know up until recently I I I thought that was a complete joke. That was ridiculous. Because if and and I think in this point Jeremy Goldkorn and Kaiser Guo were absolutely right in saying if you want to get rich in China become a venture capitalist do bioengineering become a you know a certain kind of trade lawyer you know very very high level specialized skills those will still pay very very big salaries. So invest your time in those professional skills rather than in studying Chinese. What I have noticed though over the past year just in the past year is that something has changed here in China and that life for foreigners is getting much much more difficult. Yep or should I say life for some foreigners is getting much much more difficult. Life for me is not getting more difficult. I'm having a blast but I've noticed that a lot of my colleagues in in the office that I work at who don't speak Chinese they're being shut out of meetings they're not being included in emails more and more meetings now are being held only in Chinese and I work at a big international company sure where it used to be that English was the standard. Right and now it's just because I can speak Chinese I get to go to those meetings whereas my colleagues my other Western colleagues who can't oh wow uh they they get shut out. Sure. And my HR director she came up to me and she said you know she said if you don't speak Chinese now it's gonna be much much more difficult to survive in China and to get a job. And so now I've seen this change a little bit that if you want to live and work in China particularly at a high level which is what I mean a high level is is you know in a corporate capacity.

SPEAKER_02

Sure.

SPEAKER_03

In a very senior level I I think now we're at the stage where Jeremy and Kaiser should probably reevaluate that because for only for for non highly specialized people I don't have a degree in engineering for example in five years to be here without speaking the language. And that's a change. That is something that is very very different and it's much much more hostile for foreigners who don't speak the language.

SPEAKER_01

Right. Right. And it on on a lot of levels it makes sense. It is the main language here.

SPEAKER_03

I mean how let's just be honest here how many times would we have a meeting in a corporate office in the United States where if one guy didn't speak English we'd switch the meeting into Spanish or into Chinese something else. Exactly. We wouldn't tolerate that we totally wouldn't tolerate that no and or should they tolerate it China's at a point now where uh they don't need our technical expertise the way they did where they had to make that compromise 15 20 years ago.

unknown

Yep.

SPEAKER_02

Today they don't need that so therefore they're really just speaking in English to to be polite in some respects and that politeness is now wearing thin.

SPEAKER_03

But that being said you know that if you apply for a visa they're also grading you on your Chinese level. Sure. Yep you know and so it's not just even on the corporate level but they're evaluating you on the visa level. So if you don't speak Chinese well you may not even have the chance to be here because the government is evaluating that as well. Right. So that is it's a different game now that we're playing uh than just even five six years ago but in the past year in particular I have seen a really noticeable change. And for people like me it's exciting and and you know I get since you share my excitement I love the fact that you know the more meetings are being held in Chinese and that I get to be a part of this.

SPEAKER_01

Right.

SPEAKER_03

Because that is I mean I feel like a fly on the wall what a privilege for me to be a part of this other culture and to be able to see inside things that most other foreigners can't see. And Chinese culture is so complex.

SPEAKER_02

Yep.

SPEAKER_03

I mean I've been going back and forth now and studying this language and culture for 33 years and I feel like I barely have peeled back two or three layers of the onion.

unknown

And that is something that is remarkable.

SPEAKER_03

And so I have another 30 40 years of studying this that I think at some point I will eventually figure it out but never trusted us and really understand the Chinese culture.

SPEAKER_01

Right. See it amazes me that you're saying you know 32 years in you're still studying twice a week I figured I assumed that after a certain point there would be just using the language not so much conscious studying and analyzing and things but my experience no not in my no I know other people who are far more smart far more talented and intelligent than I am and they No no no that's not what I'm saying at all without doing it.

SPEAKER_03

I am not one of those people I have to keep studying and even if I live in China which I do I still take my lessons because I find that my work language is quite a narrow range of vocabulary.

SPEAKER_02

Sure.

SPEAKER_03

And so if I want to broaden that out besides what I use in my day-to-day work I have to to do that in with a tutor because I don't want to burden my colleagues with teaching me Chinese and saying how do you say this and how do you say that and that's just that's not what it's supposed to be. The language is not is supposed to be fun to engage and interact with people and not necessarily kind of say you know be my my impromptu tutor. So I still I still use my tutors twice a week in fact my class tomorrow at 6 a.m every day on every other every Wednesday and Friday on Skype and I do it before work. I get it out of the day out of the way it's like a like going to the gym and it's done.

SPEAKER_01

So I recommend other people to do that too. Sure I didn't mean that like it was a discouraged thing I I actually think it's quite quite a relief and it's inspiring that it it it confirms how challenging and how much of a of a marathon this experience is but also take into account that when you're studying the language that is only one part of this the linguistic is is one part of it.

SPEAKER_03

Right the much more complex part is the culture and the history and how it all intersects with the politics the economics the day-to-day life and all of this kind of comes together and so by studying twice a week you're you're keeping your pulse your finger on the pulse of the culture as well oh yeah yeah you're asking you're a tutor that you can ask why do they do this and why do they do that and what is this and what is that and and again you will hear just like the United States is such a large and varied diverse culture there is no single answer on anything. Right and that's really important to understand as well that just because your Chinese teacher says well this is the way it is and you can ask somebody else and they'll say well this is the way it is and it's completely different on the same topic. Oh yeah and understand the nuances between those two.

SPEAKER_01

Both may be right both may be wrong who knows totally but this is such a complex culture for that in that sense and to me that's what makes it really so fascinating to be a part of oh yeah yeah yeah and as you're quote unquote learning the language the language and the culture is changing over the years you know so there's there's new stuff that's happening that to yeah it's just I should say it's changing much more now much faster now in the past ten years with with the internet and social media than it was in the previous you know twenty or thirty years and then you know hundreds of years before that.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_03

Because the culture is now both online and offline. Right. And in the old days we only had to worry about the offline culture. Today we also have to worry about the online culture which is something that is totally distinct. Right. And the online cultures vary dramatically from Weibo to We sing to Doying to all the different social media platforms and the way that people communicate with one another. I about 20 years ago I made a little bit of extra money when I was in grad school doing Chinese cultural kind of courses for American companies operating in southern China in Guangdong and they would say you know and there was this this basic kind of way we communicate with each other Americans in particular are very efficient with our language we'll write an email top line Joe this is what I need you to do thank you Bob and Chinese find that to be very very direct very abrasive and the Chinese will write these very very long emails same with Koreans and Vietnamese and then they will bury their request in you know paragraph four and so you're teaching the Americans to look for paragraph four to find the key kind of ask. Right because it's a much more kind of indirect type of communicative culture. And so just understanding that and then again this devolves in social media in email in you know short messaging and all these different kinds of platforms the way we actually communicate and use the language is changing so much based on the technology and how we actually communicate how you communicate on WeChat obviously not just with text but also with short voice messages as well the shorthand you use for that. So there's there's all these neat ways that it's evolving and so for linguists this is a paradise.

SPEAKER_01

It is it is it is and I was going to ask you about Weibo my goodness the that is social media is a goal of mine in the distant future because of I'm anticipating slang and all kinds of synonyms and just different things that don't mean what they mean in quote unquote real life. How was it to switch over to that version of the language when you started using Weibo I I will be honest with you despite my best efforts I have not been able to do that.

SPEAKER_03

And that that language that shorthand language that coded language some of it coded for political reasons some of it coded for uh evading parental screening language sort of it you know for all sorts of different reasons but it is a complex very sophisticated extremely exciting use of language that I do not fully understand. So I think that is so I won't pretend to do to to be there. I use a very straightforward conversational uh type of language which is just very direct. Gotcha. So it's one of my my linguistic goals is to be able to to to learn that the other linguistic goal that I have with Chinese in particular is to become much better with my tongue. So when you hear a that's just a phrase or sayings in the church the Chinese have sayings for absolutely everything. And some of them are are kind of phrases or sayings use these two or four three or four character type of uh of kind of short phrases that either are rooted in history so there's a story behind it or it's rooted in linguistic efficiency. So they'll come just compact down a phrase into three or four characters and it's Shorthand and really elegant, well-spoken Chinese is done with a heavy use of these, what they call chung yu.

unknown

And that is something that I haven't been able to do well. I can memorize the characters, but I don't know the exact right moment to use them.

SPEAKER_03

And that's the key. So one part is the actual language.

unknown

Right.

SPEAKER_03

And then you have to pair that with the perfect timing of when to apply that language.

SPEAKER_01

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_03

And boy, when you can do that well. And there are some foreigners, like guys like Dashan, who he's the, you know, the god of gods of foreigners study Chinese because he started so long ago. A lot of foreigners make fun of him. I have always admired him. And but he is an example of how a foreigner can can get to that last level, which I haven't got to. There's a guy on Weibo and social media called Jared. He is amazing as well, a young Canadian guy. Didn't know Canadians were so good with the language. They've done very, very well. And and both of those guys are are just perfect in how they apply these and these kind of phrases to the right situation.

unknown

I'm not there yet.

SPEAKER_03

That's where I hope to be another 10 to 15 years, and that's what drives me.

SPEAKER_01

Wow, 10 to 15 years, yeah. No, Dashan actually is is also now in the HSK3 vocabulary list. He's it's the supplemental list, but his name is actually in the because they have a whole section for prop for formal like proper names at the end of the required vocabulary, and he's there. He's so there. He's won their heart. He's a legend. Oh yeah. Yeah, he's he's won their hearts with that skill.

SPEAKER_03

Students who are not familiar with him, I really recommend. I mean, his later stuff today is not as interesting. You know, he's moved back to Canada, he's he does a little bit here and there, and he dabbles and he's on Weibo and does stuff.

unknown

But his early stuff, which was Travel in Chinese, was his show, which was a genius program.

SPEAKER_02

Right.

SPEAKER_03

Where they did these scenarios and then he broke down the scenarios. And the wonderful thing about Chinese is that even though that's 30 years old or 20 years old, however old it was, it's from the 90s, and it was really one of the first media programs of teaching Chinese.

unknown

And it was so compelling because it's being done by a Westerner.

SPEAKER_04

Right.

SPEAKER_03

And so his pronunciation and he understood what we were going to struggle with and what we weren't going to struggle with, but was just excellent. So I really recommend a lot of them are available on YouTube. Go look it up. Uh Dashan, I don't know his Western name.

SPEAKER_01

Shao Shan.

SPEAKER_03

The show is called Travel in Chinese, produced by CCTV. And it's about 15 minutes long each episode. But it's just I I just found it a really nice tool. And I still remember some of the skits and scenarios to this day after all.

SPEAKER_01

Um, not at all uh uh equivalent to that, I'm sure, educationally, but the comedy troupe Mama Hoohoo.

SPEAKER_02

It's amazing too.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, they I I was going to to s like use some of their videos to study, but I'm not at the point where I can hear the difference between Shanghai's and Pudong Kwa, and I wasn't sure if I was going to be studying the wrong thing, like if I was gonna confuse the two. So I and I think they switched between the two every now and then. I think. I don't know. So but I don't know.

SPEAKER_03

I've never heard them speak Shanghainese, but it wouldn't surprise me.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, yeah. So for now I'm just I'm just giggling at their their videos. But um, but I I imagine it was kind of like that, maybe that effect when Dashan first came on the scene. It was kind of like, oh, these guys can do that. It is possible. We need to see ourselves speaking such an incredibly difficult language.

SPEAKER_03

And there's a whole generation of Westerners now that have grown up in China. So my son, he's nine years old, he's going to school here, he's studying every day. And I've seen these children, some between nine and fifteen and sixteen years old, that's big an amazing Mandarin.

SPEAKER_01

Right.

SPEAKER_03

And so that is exciting as well. And they are fluent in both the culture and the language. So while I'm dead while I'm sometimes pessimistic about adults and some of the college students in the West who are learning, there's also this other generation of Westerners who are children of expats like myself, who are going to school here. And even if they're going to international schools, they're still studying every day, which I think is a national requirement that they have to do. There are some other schools like Yao Chang International School, YCIS in Shanghai, that teach their whole primary in bilingual. So if they teach math in English, they teach another section of math in Chinese. And these kids come out of that program speaking beautiful Mandarin. So there is this new generation, and it is gonna get more competitive, and I guarantee you, as I said earlier, if you don't speak Chinese, getting a job here is going to be super hard.

unknown

It really is. Super, super hard. I mean, there's no, and again, there's no shortcuts. But if you're on the fence about learning Chinese, but you know you want to live in China or engage the Chinese abroad, sure, you're gonna have to speak the language. Yeah. And and that's just there's there is no shortcut.

SPEAKER_03

So, you know, find the little the paper with all those boxes, writing them over and over again. And that is going to be your life for 10 years doing that. And again, people think that, you know, they've got an iPad, they can do something different. Uh-uh.

SPEAKER_02

I don't believe that.

SPEAKER_03

I'm very old school on that. I see the little kids today, the Chinese kids, what are they doing? They're writing the character over and over and over again. And that's how little kids learn it. Yep. So us Westerners are not smarter than that.

SPEAKER_01

No, definitely, definitely not. But I do have to admit I have a lot more questions.

SPEAKER_03

Well, we can we can pick it up anytime, but you can tell that this is a subject that is near and dear to us. The point of actually expressing some of the more negative the stronger negative opinions is not to discourage anybody. It's actually just to set you up with the right expectations when you approach this language.

SPEAKER_04

Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03

By the way, this is no different than studying Russian and studying Arabic. Uh these are complex, difficult languages that have very, very deep cultural roots that also take years and decades to understand.

SPEAKER_02

Yes.

SPEAKER_03

So I would I would really equate this to Arabic in many respects. That you can spend a lifetime studying the language, but you can't necessarily understand the culture, and the culture drives the politics.

SPEAKER_02

Sure.

SPEAKER_03

And that's something interesting as well. In this day and age, watching the politics is equally fascinating.

SPEAKER_01

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Eric. This is been awesome.

SPEAKER_03

Truly my pleasure.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you. You too, you too. I'm so excited at how passionate you are about all of this and your history with the language and the culture and fantastic. It's just so fantastic.

SPEAKER_03

It's a lot of fun. My wife doesn't let me talk about it with her anymore. She's just fed up with it. So any opportunity I have to talk to somebody about it, she's like, great, go for it.

SPEAKER_01

Why do you think I started this? My husband is not at all interested in this, and my friends are like, Yeah, yeah, that's nice. Oh, you can read that, you can write that, that's cool.

SPEAKER_03

Thanks again for asking me to come on the show. I really appreciate it again.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Changing Scripts Podcast. Again, this is a sister project with my own language learning vlogging on YouTube, also called Changing Scripts. So come on over and take a peek at that. Again, if you are learning the Chinese language or if you're coming from the Chinese language learning another language, I'd love to interview you for this podcast. Please feel free to contact me in any social media way that you see fit. Go ahead and contact me, and we will uh hash out how to get you on the sound creation. No no changing the script podcast. A lot more is coming your way soon.

SPEAKER_00

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