From Texas to China: How Learning Mandarin Differently Changed His Expat Life: S2E7

Nine Years Ago Joshua Ogden-Davis left graduate school in Texas, moved to China and taught himself Chinese. He is now a Mandarin Chinese Translator, does audio and video production in multiple languages, and is a Puppeteer. In this Changing Scripts podcast episode we dig into Josh’s fuller language story, including this switch from English to Mandarin Chinese as well as his experiences with Spanish, German and English from his beforetime.​

Original publication: May 22, 2019

More: https://linktr.ee/stephfuccio

Transcript

SPEAKER_08 0:00

What I'm talking about basically is is this central space that is emergent. It's not Chinese, it's not English, it's sort of a combination of the two and something very different. Like we'd have a meeting and someone was like, oh no, cover la khan duo, ra holding the thing, and then we're negabuma align isha raho circle back bah. Like, what the hell did you just say? I said like covered a lot today. Okay. Um you need to go align with that department and then we'll circle back to it. So like these super business jargon words often don't make the switch to Chinese. Because in Chinese they're not jargon.

SPEAKER_03 0:24

Welcome to the Changing Scripts Podcast, where we describe our language learning stories with the focus right now on Mandarin Chinese. My name is Stephanie, and I was an English language instructor for about 15 years, mostly in Asia. Also, I was learning how to read Mandarin Chinese through the HSK Chinese language test materials all of last year. I've been on a bit of a break from my own language learning, but I've added the language learning material back to my daybag, so I think I could be starting studying again any day now. In fact, this podcast is part of the Changing Scripts PodTube experience, which is part podcast that you're listening to right now, part YouTube channel, and the YouTube channel is where I share my own slow but steady language learning progress.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

So if you'd like to know more about what I'm going to be doing or what I have done with the language, any challenges, questions, frustrations, and all that good stuff, come on over to the Changing Scripts YouTube channel.

SPEAKER_03 1:16

You can find the link in the show notes below, or you can just type in Changing Scripts with an S on YouTube, and boom, there we are. In the Changing Scripts podcast, we chat with people that grew up using Mandarin Chinese as well as people like myself who learned it as an adult. In this particular episode, Joshua Ogden Davis left graduate school in Texas, moved to China, and taught himself Chinese. He is now a Mandarin Chinese translator, does audio and video production in multiple languages, and is a puppeteer. In this Chaining Scripts podcast episode, we dig into Josh's fuller language learning story, including the switch from English to Mandarin Chinese, as well as his experiences with Spanish, German, and English from his before time. We learned that although Josh was good at and liked learning aspects of grammatical knowledge growing up, it wasn't until he actually was able to simultaneously learn and immediately use Mandarin Chinese that he understood the importance of motivation, activation, and fluency over accuracy. Josh shares his hilarious Chinese language experience from taxi rides, where he was asked some pretty intimate details and his own experience on a local Chinese dating show. He admits that he spends most of his time in the space in between English and Chinese languages and ponders if that could be something called Third Culture Language T C L. If you have any questions or comments while you're listening to this, feel free to contact me on any social media. My handle's the same everywhere.

SPEAKER_02 2:48

Steph Fuccio, S-T-E-P-H-F-U-C-C-I-O.

SPEAKER_03 2:51

That is also my Gmail address, so you can email me if you prefer to do that. Now, let's meet Josh and get some more details about the language learning experiences. Thank you so much for joining us on Changing Scripts today, Josh. Can you give our listeners a little bit of an overview of your language story?

SPEAKER_08 3:08

So happy to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm from Texas. I I don't sound like I'm from Texas unless I get angry, and that happens very rarely. So um I came to China in 2010 after dropping out of graduate school. What what? And uh I uh learned Spanish in school when I was a kid, like everyone in Texas does, and learned it incredibly poorly, and can speak no Spanish to you at this time. After I came to China nine years ago, I started learning Chinese because I thought, you know, how much of a waste of space am I if I don't even give it a shot when I come here. And I am pretty much self-taught in Chinese, and after nine years I'm now a translator. I've translated a book, I've written a bilingual book, I do bilingual podcasts, I do a lot of translation work as uh for for marketing, mostly for luxury cars.

SPEAKER_03 3:54

Okay, so if I understand it correctly, the languages at your disposal at varying levels are English, Spanish, question mark, and Chinese.

SPEAKER_08 4:02

That's pretty much all I have. That one sentence.

SPEAKER_03 4:04

But you can understand some.

SPEAKER_08 4:05

A little bit, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 4:06

Yeah. Okay, so we'll say those are those are the three. Well, let's start at your first language. What was your first language? English. Alright. I assume. And um I like diving into the brains of our former selves. So forgive me for these questions. But what do you remember about learning English?

SPEAKER_08 4:24

Oh, that's that's very interesting.

SPEAKER_03 4:27

I don't I didn't pay him to say that.

SPEAKER_08 4:30

I don't remember learning. I don't th I don't know if anyone ever remembers learning at the very early stages where you're still trying to figure out what are these sound shapes people make with their mouths, and then they get sandwiches from other people because they made the right mouth sounds. I don't remember that stage of of language learning. I do remember feeling in grade school like I really enjoyed writing, partially because I was very easily distractable, I had a very active imagination, and I liked being able to put my imagination somewhere on a page. I have atrocious handwriting. That's uh language class from my I think my earliest memories of language class is me hating writing with my hands because uh it never got better. My handwriting is still like it like a child. I played Dungeons and Dragons sometimes, and as part of the game, I'm usually a dungeon master, I have to write sometimes I write things as like you find a note on the sidewalk that says this, here's the note, and I gave it to one player, and they had to decide whether or not to share it with other people. And one of the times one of the players said, Um, so I found a note on the sidewalk, and I think it was written by an insane person because the handwriting is incredibly childish, but they use big words, and I was like, Oh, that was not part of the game.

SPEAKER_04 5:40

That's just my failures as an adult human.

SPEAKER_08 5:43

So I also at the time when I was first learning grammar, I thought it was interesting the way that you could sort of break language down into sort of almost a quasi-mathematical concept, which I'm sure something people talk about on your podcast all the time.

SPEAKER_03 5:54

No.

SPEAKER_08 5:55

No?

SPEAKER_03 5:55

No, I wish they would though.

SPEAKER_08 5:57

Oh well, I'm here. Hi. Nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_03 5:59

Hi.

SPEAKER_08 6:00

Um I I found that interesting, but not intriguing because I was still being graded on it and I wanted to be sitting under a tree or fishing and not doing that.

SPEAKER_03 6:11

Did you have to label like different parts of speech as a kid in school?

SPEAKER_08 6:14

I think so, yeah. And I did find that intriguing, and I did find that I was good at that. I it was uh that sort of systematic analysis, I'm sure there's a better word for it than that, was intriguing to me. And it was sort of felt like opening a secret door because language is something that we use all the time for everything, but we never think about it. Even now, Chinese people, I'm skipping ahead several years, Chinese people insist to me that Chinese has no grammar. And that's because I don't think they're taught grammar. Like when they have English class, they're taught this is English grammar, this is the parts of speech, this is how they fit together. But they're not taught Chinese that way.

SPEAKER_03 6:47

Yeah. And I can see both sides of that. I I don't think that I think you're right that there is Chinese grammar, but it is significantly different than English.

SPEAKER_08 6:55

Yeah. It's significantly less complex.

SPEAKER_03 6:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 6:58

But it's still there.

SPEAKER_03 6:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 6:59

Otherwise, you know, I eat the sandwich and the sandwich eats me. Yeah. Are indistinguishable. But they're very different. At the very at the very base level, there are there are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and some of them like so you can verb some nouns, you can't verb other nouns. Word order is important, you gotta put the la in the right place. There is Chinese grammar, but people insist on me that there's not, because unless someone sits you down in a room, sometimes with 20 or 30 of your peers when you're kids, and tells you, hey, this is grammar, this is what all these things are, and this is how they work together, and there's a right way and a wrong way. Unless someone tells you that, you would never think about it.

SPEAKER_03 7:33

Yeah. No, that's true. And I've met a lot of English teachers, like English teachers abroad at different age levels from different countries who've had varying experiences learning grammar and English in their first language growing up. Like I grew up in the 70s in the US, and we for sure labeled and underlined and circled and highlighted, and we had grammar tests.

SPEAKER_07 7:54

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:54

And my husband's just what, eight years younger than me, and he didn't do any of that. Like we went out of fashion of doing that, apparently, in the US after that. Or it was just a different state, because we have state-by-state education systems, which drives me nuts. But uh, there are a lot of Brits that I met, British people, nationals. It's okay, Brits is not a slur, right? Yeah, I know. That I've met who never studied grammar formally and learned it as they were teaching English overseas and were like, oh, what's that verb tense or what that what's that thing called? Like they'd see something in the gra in the book that they're supposed to teach that day and have to go into a reference manual just the examples. They knew how to use things.

SPEAKER_08 8:28

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 8:28

But didn't formally learn it.

SPEAKER_08 8:30

I do that. Because there there are some like the basics, oh, that's a noun, got it. Adjective modifies the noun, oh adverb modifies the adjective, got it, even though I don't know how to pronounce modifies. But there are certain uh slightly more esoteric concepts that I constantly have to Google. Because I know I know what it is, I know how to use it, um, but I don't know how to I don't know the right name to put on it. So I do that. And I'm sure that someone told me that in in grammar class at some point.

SPEAKER_03 8:54

Yeah. And it just Oh, causative passive. I spent a good two or three hours studying what it was when I was teaching Kuala Lumpur. And yeah, and then finally went, Oh, I I actually use this, I know this, it does.

SPEAKER_08 9:07

So passive voices like um uh was hit and causative would be hits, he hits, right? Is that what we're talking about?

SPEAKER_03 9:14

And I I have to bring everything to its most common kind of base form for me to understand it and then teach it to folks. And so it turned out to be the I called it the rich person's form, where it's like I had my hair done. I had my car washed.

SPEAKER_08 9:29

Uh because someone else did it too. I didn't have to do it. So fast enough.

SPEAKER_03 9:32

So like a rich person would have lots of these things done. Uh huh. Whereas if you washed your car, you'd be like, I wash my car today. You're outside with a lot of that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_08 9:39

Oh, I never thought about it that way. Because I um when I was in graduate school and when I was teaching writing to undergraduates, one of the big things was do not ever, under any circumstance, ever use passive voice in academic writing. So unless unless like very specific circumstances. So to me, I guess I kind of was prejudiced against the passive voice.

SPEAKER_07 9:56

Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 9:56

So to me, it was like good writing.

SPEAKER_07 9:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 9:59

Almost like a prestige dialect of writing is one that eschews passive voice as much as possible. So to look at it from a societal standpoint where only the privileged have the opportunity to use it as much is uh interesting.

SPEAKER_03 10:13

It's kind of funny, right? Yeah. But it's a specific part of passive voice.

SPEAKER_08 10:16

Right.

SPEAKER_03 10:16

Like you would also use pa like regular regular passive. When you when you when this the action's more important than the um than the person, like the the purse was stolen. Right. Or or when you don't know. So it'd be like, or the cake was eaten. Right. When you don't know who did it. When you don't know who or when it just wasn't that important, or when you didn't want to call someone out because you don't want them to lose face, you would use it, right? But yeah, but the causative passive was really funny to me. Because I was just like, man, I do use this, but not a whole lot, because I was a broke English teacher, and I was like, Yeah, I had my hair done. No, I cut my hair, no, I had my nails done, no, I had my car washed, no car, still taking the subway. Like let's go back in time. So you liked writing. I did like writing. But you're you didn't like your handwriting. What did you like about writing and what did you write as a kid?

SPEAKER_08 11:04

The thing that I really remember, the thing that really sticks out, and I to to this day I consider this to be my crowning achievement of my high school years, is in sophomore English. I burned out early. In sophomore English class, I wrote a parody of The Raven called The Rappa. Where I just took, I just copied and pasted Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven into a WordPerfect document. We're probably on WordPress 1.0 at that time, um, running out of DOS or something. Um that's probably factually incorrect. And I tried to change it as little as possible. Uh try to change as few words, and if I have to change the structure, change the structure as little as possible, to change it to being about a guy who moved to the ghetto and a rapper barges into his apartment and is apparently hiding from the police or something. And then I remember it being really fun at the beginning because the arcs could line up in in a good way. But then we get to the end of the raven where the surrealism sort of takes over and it fades to to blurriness of insanity. Um well, it was an incredibly concise way of saying nothing. Um it became really impossible to do because it works when it's a raven who's a metaphor for death. It does not work if there's an actual um rap artist sitting in your house sort of like into the future. Um so that that was that was a bit of a challenge, but I really did enjoy doing that, and that's um my English teacher sent it out to the class because I I my English teacher went to my church and so hey small town, Texas. And so I I I had let her see, and she thought it was great, and she chaired it with the class, blah, blah, blah. I enjoyed uh creating something unexpected and creating new experiences. Because we'd all everyone had read The Raven, everyone was kind of bored with it, because that's what that's what you do when you're a kid in school, you're bored with what your teacher tells you to write, tells you to read. That that that's the status quo. And so I was able to take that and sort of create an unexpected experience out of that. And I really, really enjoyed doing that. I think writing was the easiest way for me to do that. I uh was not good at um improvising, even though I have like a music degree. I do not improvise well in music. I was not good at improvising conversations, I was not good at uh finding things to talk about. I would not, I think, have been able to create that sort of unexpected experience for people if I had to do it on the fly. But when I was writing, I could think about it and find something cool and put it there, almost like a sculpture, and then make the thing, and then it existed as outside of me. And people would think I'm like, oh cool, like you're you you you did this thing, it's really cool. But I was like, Yeah, you didn't see the hours where I did it bad. Yeah. You only saw the the one I let you see, which is the one time I did it good.

SPEAKER_03 13:39

I love that about writing so much. Yeah. Yeah, no, I was probably the shyest, the most soft spoken, the most self-conscious human being until my mid-20s, probably.

SPEAKER_08 13:53

Yeah, we line up very well there.

SPEAKER_03 13:55

What's that?

SPEAKER_08 13:55

We line up very well in personal experience.

SPEAKER_03 13:58

And it was only after I moved thousands of miles away from everything that created me as a person. Yeah, that I yeah, sound familiar? That I was like, oh, okay. And even then I still wrote a lot more than I talked. Yeah. I was still much more of an observer and a creator and an editor of my ideas for that reason. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 14:15

I've found that every very meaningful uh and deep friendship that I've had to date, um, there has been some period, extended period in that friendship where we corresponded over email.

SPEAKER_03 14:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 14:28

Um, and I I had a I had a girlfriend in college who just after I met her, I went on a trip and I had written lots of long, long, long, long blogs on that trip. And she had read them, and that kind of sparked her interest in me, and I was already interested in her, and uh then after the course of our relationship, close to the point where our relationship had run its course, she asked me, Do you think which one do you think is the closer to the real you, the one who writes or the one who talks? Like, do you think your spoken communication is more genuine or your written communication is more genuine? And that was right? Like I'm looking at your Facebook expression. I know. I think that that question occurred to her because she felt that there was a huge difference between what I write and what I say.

SPEAKER_03 15:09

Of course there is.

SPEAKER_08 15:10

Right.

SPEAKER_03 15:11

Oh my god, do people think they're supposed to be the same?

SPEAKER_08 15:13

I think that I don't know, maybe she did. I mean, this this was years and years and years ago for me. But um I think that what that really drove home for me is oh wow, I r must really present very differently. Yeah. Because everyone writes different than they talk, but if it's become difficult for this person who knows me so well to piece these two things together, it feels like it's coming from two completely different places, then maybe I really am approaching writing in a very different way than I'm approaching speaking. Yeah. And eat that was back when that was uh early twenties for me. So that was before I really feel like I became um uh as socially competent. Is that uh is that too self-effacing? It's similar to what you said. Before I felt like I really became able to walk into a room and sort of express myself and meet people and and not have that sort of social geekiness. Geekiness is not a bad thing. Having not have the social awkwardness sort of preventing me from interacting uh in an improvisatory way with other human beings.

SPEAKER_03 16:12

I'm impressed you got there. I'm still working on it.

SPEAKER_08 16:16

I'm gonna give you a teaser. Learning a second language helped.

SPEAKER_03 16:19

Oh, okay, good. Well, I know I'm fine one-on-one now. Like I used to be more awkward one-on-one than in a group. Oh wow. Especially because I used to use a lot of liquid courage when I was in my 20s and early 30s, also known as alcohol. And then I would just I'd be able to talk to anyone, anywhere, any group, any small group, big group. But you know, fine. One-on-one, I learned I'm cool, I'm good, I can do that. But groups, small groups, especially, like small dinner groups, mm-mm. I'm total shit. Total, complete shit. I just I part of it is I like to listen more than speak when it comes to that.

SPEAKER_07 16:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:54

And then I realized that that might seem timid. And I'm like, oh no, I'm not timid, I'm just curious.

SPEAKER_08 17:00

I know what I would say. I don't know what you would say. I'm much more interested in knowing what you would say.

SPEAKER_03 17:03

Exactly, exactly. So I'm I'm kind of working on the small group experience now. There's there's never there's never a there.

SPEAKER_08 17:11

Yeah. This is this is this is this is sort of a tangent, but it's connected. And I've mentioned Dungeons and Dragons. That's one of the reasons I started doing it last year, and that's one of the reasons why. Because it's a it's a game that forces you to sit in a small group and interact in an intense way for hours. Yeah, yeah. And you have to be very sensitive to the way other people react. You sort of sense what they want, what they're trying to do. And if especially if you're the game master, if you're the one controlling the game, you have to s be very conscious of what all your players think, what they know, what they remember, what they forgot, what they want, what would make them happy, what would make them unhappy, what would make them have fun, what would make them not have fun.

SPEAKER_03 17:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 17:44

And it's it's like a crash course for uh interacting in that way.

SPEAKER_03 17:48

If there's a task, I'm good. But just social situations where you just go and you're just supposed to talk to people, total and complete shit. 100%. That is the one area that I get nervous in.

SPEAKER_08 18:00

Here's the secret.

SPEAKER_03 18:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 18:01

There's never not a task.

SPEAKER_03 18:03

What?

SPEAKER_08 18:04

If you're in a serious, I'm serious. If you're in a small group, even in a social situation, the task is to have a good time. The task is to meet people. There's always a task. There's never there's never not a task. And it sounds cheap.

SPEAKER_07 18:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 18:17

It sounds like I've commercialized the entire social experience, but there's there's really not though, right? Yeah. Because there always is something that people want out of that experience. Otherwise, it wouldn't be there. There's always something that uh people want to happen and something they don't want to happen.

SPEAKER_07 18:33

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 18:33

They want to enjoy talking to people, they don't want to feel awkward. Yeah. So there's always a task, there's always a goal that you can find. Even if there's no external goal where someone says your small group has five minutes to discover the answer to this riddle.

SPEAKER_06 18:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 18:47

There's the riddle is always how do we enjoy talking to talking to each other?

SPEAKER_03 18:52

Too big. Let's go back. Let's go back. So, okay, you wrote a lot. Did you read a lot as a kid?

SPEAKER_08 18:59

I did, and I got out of it recently. Uh by recently, I mean pretty much after I moved to China. Uh re very recently, as in 2019, we are now on the third month of this year. Uh fourth month. Unbelievable, yeah. Yeah. I have I've read twelve novels so far this year.

SPEAKER_07 19:15

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_08 19:16

Um so I really I got back in a big way. But when I was a kid, I would read for fun.

SPEAKER_03 19:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 19:20

Um a lot.

SPEAKER_03 19:22

Do you remember your first library experience?

SPEAKER_08 19:26

I don't remember my first library experience. I remember a library experience where I I'd read His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. I read a lot of Philip Pullman books. I read uh Lion the Witch in the Wardrobe, of course. I'd read a lot of like young, uh young readers' fantasy books. And I remember one time I was in a library, we used to go relatively frequently, and I saw a fantasy book that looked cool. I didn't know anything about it, and so I just sort of plucked it off the shelf, and it was real big. Mom seemed sort of skeptical that I would have chosen that book, but I was like, oh whatever. And that was the first time I learned that all not all fantasy books are written for young readers. It was it was it? I don't even remember.

SPEAKER_03 20:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 20:03

Um I guess I thought the picture on the cover looked cool.

SPEAKER_07 20:05

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 20:05

But it was there was l lots of big words, and it was the author doesn't hold your hand and walk walk you through things in a realist way. There was a lot more disconnected stuff where maybe maybe you'd figure it out halfway through the book, and then in the beginning of the book would make sense.

SPEAKER_06 20:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 20:17

It was I mean, I that's I think the only library experience from my younger years that really sticks out to me. Because I don't think I that I got a lot of books from the library. Our family was uh was well off enough that and my parents were well educated enough that they valued reading and education in a big way and they were willing to spend money that they had on that.

SPEAKER_03 20:40

Did you spend more time in a bookstore than a library?

SPEAKER_08 20:42

Yeah. One of my parents' rules was that one of the things they will always buy is books. They're not always gonna buy you clothes, they're always gonna buy you little chocolates, but if there's a book that you want to read, they will purchase it for you. That that was that was the one purchasing rule that we had when we were kids.

SPEAKER_03 20:58

What languages were going on around you? You said you're from Texas. I imagine Spanish was around you. What are they doing? Spanish was around.

SPEAKER_08 21:04

Sorry?

SPEAKER_03 21:04

What other languages were around you growing up?

SPEAKER_08 21:06

Ooh, I think that was probably it. I remember we had a a family physician, uh Dr. Dr. Sooty, we called him. I think his name was Naiphon Sudavorisek, but that sounds like a medicine, so maybe my brain maybe my brain is sort of imprinting medicine names on the medicine that he gave you. It could have been, but we called him Dr. Sudy.

SPEAKER_06 21:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 21:27

I think he was oh, this is super embarrassing. I think he was Vietnamese. And so he was uh uh the guy who would speak broken English. He was my my my broken English experience when I was a kid.

SPEAKER_03 21:41

How old were you?

SPEAKER_08 21:42

Uh oh from as young as I can remember. Yeah. He was a family physician. There's a thing, there's a really easy thing that happens, and I see expats uh or immigrants uh in China doing this to Chinese people all the time, and I see Chinese people doing this to foreigners all the time. If someone speaks your language in a broken way, the reflex is Is to judge them as you would judge someone who was born where you were born. So if I uh the reflex if you hear someone speaking in broken English is and I think most people can flip the switch on their brain to know this is not true, but your first reflex is this person's an idiot, otherwise they could speak well. But because Dr. Sooty was a doctor, that assumption was right out from the beginning. I never thought about that before, but ever ever since I was a kid, I never really thought that not speaking English well was a bad thing. And I'm from the deep south. There's so there's a lot of people who do feel that way. People say, Oh, you're in America, speak English. Like no.

SPEAKER_03 22:33

I've known English teachers who treated stu very intelligent students, even professional adult students, kind of condescending. No, I'm being too nice, condescendingly because they assumed that their language level was their intelligence level.

SPEAKER_07 22:46

Right.

SPEAKER_03 22:46

And I actually pulled, not that I had any sort of management authority over them or anything, but I pulled a number of people aside over the years who was like, look, this person is a person first, and they're speaking to you in their second language. And a lot of these teachers were monolingual English speakers. And I was like, how about you have a conversation in their language and see how intelligent you sound? And and I did it in a nicer way than that, but it bugged me that people were judging their second or sometimes third and fourth language of this person.

SPEAKER_07 23:14

Right, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 23:15

Yeah. And yeah, because it's not an indication of their intelligence at all. It's an indication of their language level.

SPEAKER_08 23:22

I sincerely doubt that anyone who spent a considerable amount of time earnestly trying to learn a language would judge someone for speaking your language poorly.

SPEAKER_03 23:34

Because it gives you that flexibility and that uh sympathy when you come across someone who's who where you were to navigate and to communicate with them, you have to speak in a language that either is uncomfortable for you or for them, and then you're like, you know, you're a decent person to them instead of an idiot. I get on a soapbox about some of this stuff.

SPEAKER_08 23:54

No, I I think so I think soapboxes are good for podcasting. Because um people who believe in you are like, yeah, like and subscribe, this person's awesome. And the people who don't agree with you are like, I'm still gonna comment on this because That's true. I suppose this thing is bad press.

SPEAKER_03 24:07

I suppose. I don't know if that's true in the language learning community. I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know if those people are listening. If you are, please do start a fight with me. I want to hear what you have to say. Let's fight. Let's fight, bring it on. Is there anything else language related from your childhood that sticks out to you?

SPEAKER_08 24:25

I don't think so. My dad never left the USA once in his life. He passed away about four or five years ago. Wow, I really shouldn't know specifically how many years that ago that was. Let's say five years ago.

SPEAKER_05 24:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 24:36

That's uh my mom lived all over because my my grandfather, my grandfather, on my mom's side, was a geophysicist for Shell, so he was all over the world looking for oil. Yeah. So she had been to lots of different countries since she was a kid. So my mom and my dad are kind of uh on opposite sides of the spectrum in terms of exposure to to other languages. But we I grew up in a small town, Marshall, Texas, uh 25,000 people. We had like one Chinese foreign exchange student who never talked to anybody because no one ever talked to him.

SPEAKER_06 25:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 25:06

And I it never occurred to me to try to go up and strike up a conversation with this kid. He was just a kid I saw around sometimes. There were some people who spoke Spanish at home, and so their English was not that good.

SPEAKER_03 25:17

Did your mom speak multiple languages?

SPEAKER_08 25:19

She did not. She used to she learned a little bit of Spanish and she loves to tell the story of um she was at a party in Mexico one time and uh someone offered her some some canapes, if you will.

SPEAKER_07 25:32

Some oh, okay.

SPEAKER_08 25:34

And she wanted to say in Spanish, and I totally understand this, if she'd have said, Oh no, thank you, in English, that would have been fine. Everyone would know what she's talking about. But she wanted she wanted to go that extra mile and she wanted to say, I'm not hungry. And in in Spanish, that's I don't have hunger. No tengo hambre.

SPEAKER_07 25:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 25:51

But she said no tengo hombre, which means I don't have a man. Sorry I told that story, Mom. Oh, I can't share this link with you. Uh I think the guy got it. I don't remember how she said the guy reacted, but I don't she didn't marry that guy anyway, so I don't know. Maybe that's how they met. Maybe they've been lying to me the whole time.

SPEAKER_03 26:10

I went to So much is coming up.

SPEAKER_08 26:12

Yeah. I went to Austria when I was in college. I went there for a month for like a summer study abroad sort of thing. And we had a German class every morning, which I really enjoyed getting into the grammar of it because I felt able to see, see, see, see, see, see, see people who have the same interests like to look to their capability in that interest as a virtue. I really think I liked learning German there because I was better at it than a lot of the other people. Now I don't speak any German now, so it clearly didn't stick. But when we would talk about grammar and like this is how a German sentence sticks together, which I don't remember any of at this point. But as I recall, German grammar can be very complex. You can have phrases that don't resolve until you've had several interstitial phrases in the middle of it. But I was able to sort of click onto that and hatch onto that and make that happen. And so I really enjoyed that. I remember once I I went to the opera and I I'd studied all day to try to get my pronunciation really good on asking where are the student tickets. And so I walk up to this woman and and who's has a name tag and I ask her where are the student tickets, and she seemed elated because I'm clearly a tourist, yeah, but I'm clearly making an effort. And apparently, in every other country except for America, when someone in France, when someone makes an effort to speak your language, that's exciting to you, and you feel you feel good about that. Americans in French not so good about that. And so she very happily chattered away in German, telling me where the student tickets were, and I had no idea. I just shrugged, and then she said in very good English, oh, they're just over there, and blah blah blah.

SPEAKER_06 27:48

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 27:49

Oh yeah, and also when I was in Austria, I was walking down the street, and this guy stops me and tries to hand me a flyer and talks to me in German. I didn't get any of it. And so I said, I'm just sorry, I don't speak German. In German. I said, I'm sorry, I don't speak German. And he replied in pretty good English, that wasn't German, that was Bavarian.

SPEAKER_04 28:04

It's like, oh, there is some deep water here that I don't understand.

SPEAKER_08 28:09

Yeah. So I think that was the first time that I really sort of And that's something you come across, oh goodness, uh in China all the time. Different regional dialects, uh the way they connect with regional identity. That was kind of my first taste of that.

SPEAKER_03 28:22

Yeah. It's funny because in the beginning you didn't mention German as one of your languages.

SPEAKER_08 28:26

Well, I don't speak any German anymore. Yeah. I had I learned German for that one month.

SPEAKER_03 28:30

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_08 28:31

And I don't speak any German anymore.

SPEAKER_03 28:32

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you I barely did then? Can you go yeah? I took it for two years in high school and I barely I can read some of it because you know, l language. Some words look similar, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 28:42

Yeah, some some particles, some articles look the same.

SPEAKER_03 28:45

But I didn't know what cases were in high school. Apparently, I I don't think she explicitly taught that. I it was so boring. Honestly, it was such a boring, boring, boring, boring time. Starting language learning uh for teenagers in the US is just insane. Could you could you pick a crazier time to start something really difficult? I mean, teenagers have so much going on.

SPEAKER_08 29:10

I honestly believe that if they are in a good environment for it, they can learn it. But being in high school, yeah where it the the that 45 for us it was 45 minutes that you have that Spanish class. That's the only time all day that you're gonna be involved in Spanish at all, you're not gonna get anything from that.

SPEAKER_03 29:31

Nope.

SPEAKER_08 29:32

Nothing that's gonna last anyway.

SPEAKER_03 29:33

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, a good environment, you can probably learn it at any stage.

SPEAKER_08 29:37

I think if I'd stayed in Austria for a year, I'd speak passable basic German.

SPEAKER_03 29:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 29:42

I probably would have picked it up faster than I picked up Chinese.

SPEAKER_03 29:45

Yeah. Well, there's a lot more layers. Speaking of which, let's switch to that.

unknown 29:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 29:51

Layers.

SPEAKER_01 29:52

Like an ogre or an onion. What if you could transform your next game night into an unforgettable language learning experience? Hi, my name is Matthew Boyle, founder of Language Card Games and friend of Stephanie Fuccio and Changing Scripts. I'm here today with a special offer. During the month of May, you can apply the coupon code Changing Scripts when you check out at languagecardgames.com to save on any of our games. Since 2016, we have been providing innovative products to language gamers, and now we call you to join us at the table. Learning languages is a big deal, and we want to give you a hand. That's why we've created games for everyone, suitable for beginning and expert language learners, young and old. What's more, we provide free shipping to any location worldwide. So if you're looking for something to take your study sessions, classes, or game nights to the next level, this is it. Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode of Changing Scripts. Enjoy the rest of the show, and later stop by to see us at languagecardgames.com. How gamers learn languages.

SPEAKER_03 31:16

And I for the listeners, I met Josh what, a couple of months ago? A couple months ago, yeah. Yeah, and we met in person a few weeks ago. Sorry, I met him on WeChat, which is the basically the Facebook of Chinese.

SPEAKER_08 31:29

I saw you from across the room at a podcasting court.

SPEAKER_03 31:31

There we go, yeah. And we almost met that day, but I had to go because I always overplann things. And uh and then we met in person a couple of weeks ago, and he started to talk about learning Chinese for a second, and I actually stopped him, which I never do, because I like this stuff, and I was like, no, save it for the podcast. So dun dun dun.

SPEAKER_08 31:50

Oh no, the time has come.

SPEAKER_03 31:52

The time has come.

SPEAKER_08 31:52

The time has come.

SPEAKER_03 31:53

Before you go into depth on any of it, can you give us the brief overview of your learning strategy?

SPEAKER_08 32:01

I wish I had a learning strategy. There's the overview of it. I probably would have made it a lot simpler. So the overall process was when I first got here, I I dropped out of graduate school before I came here. And so I this is it was the first part of my life that I could remember where I was not going to classes regularly and learning something. And so I had this compulsion, I had this uh vestigial compulsion where like if I'm not uh learning something, my life is meaningless and I am a piece of trash and jump from a bridge, please. That was that was uh that was that was the neurosis that I that I carried with me.

SPEAKER_07 32:36

So much right now, but yeah, keep going.

SPEAKER_08 32:39

So I I I had this like you gotta learn Chinese, you gotta learn Chinese. And I I like to say that I'm self-taught, but at the beginning I absolutely was not. If I counted up all the Chinese lessons that I took, and never in a class, I never took a Chinese class.

SPEAKER_06 32:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 32:52

Um, but I I did have uh at one point my company gave me someone who was supposed to teach me Chinese at one point. A couple points I found friends who I hired to kind of teach me Chinese, but I don't think I had more than three lessons with the same person.

SPEAKER_06 33:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 33:04

And I don't think I had more than 12 or 13 lessons overall. But those lessons were crucial for getting the very, very basics of Chinese, the fundamental conceptual differences in terms of what are the tones, what do they sound like, what's that whole deal, because that's uh I want to see use a lot of profanity. That's just a whole can of worms. That comes the cheesy voice. Okay. Yeah. Um, and and this this is something that people try to talk me down from, but I insist that learning how to write the characters is crucial. But there's a stroke order to the characters. Yes. And that to me, it's not just about the sort of um uh elitist, oh, you wrote that character correctly, but you wrote it in the wrong order, so you're a pleb.

SPEAKER_03 33:52

Have you seen somebody's writing where it was written in the wrong order and it stopped you from understanding what it was?

SPEAKER_08 33:59

I don't think I have. But what a Chinese person writes, when an actually literate person uses a pen or a pencil to write something, if you don't know the stroke order, it is illegible if they write quickly. Because just uh like the English version of cursive, cursive is just print written quickly. Yeah. Because you don't waste time picking up your pen. Yeah, you're make you're making a face. I wanna give the listeners she gave a very skeptical the jaw was three inches to the left of the face, the eyes were squinted.

SPEAKER_03 34:27

There's a lot more to the script I was taught in elementary school, and we actually had to like handwriting classes. East Coast. Um and so yeah, there was a lot more to it than than just writing it quickly for what the script I learned when I was a child. Yeah. So that was my face.

SPEAKER_08 34:46

I I think I think uh and I'm not a hist a language historian, so I might be off in this, but I I think that the difference between script and print is that print is the the platonic ideal of what each character, what each letter is. Oh god.

SPEAKER_07 34:59

We went.

SPEAKER_08 35:00

And script script is um what happens when you write it quickly. And of course other conventions were developed around script and then suddenly there was a right way and a wrong way. But generally speaking, if you want to write quickly, you cannot be picking up the pen after every letter.

SPEAKER_07 35:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 35:15

It's more fluid if you do it that way. So uh have you ever seen a Chinese person's handwriting and been completely unable to understand what it says?

SPEAKER_03 35:22

Um it this is not distinct just to handwriting for me. There's still a lot of characters I don't know.

SPEAKER_08 35:28

Well, right.

SPEAKER_03 35:29

Uh yeah, but no, there there have been actually last week there was a sign downstairs in my apartment building. Uh we're in the living room right now, which is why I'm saying that. Um, listeners. So it's a nice living room. Thank you. It's very it's highly inaccurate, I've been told.

SPEAKER_08 35:43

It's very inaccurate, but it's it looks quite nice, which is I mean, what's more important?

SPEAKER_03 35:47

So downstairs last week there was a sign that was written, it almost looked like in marker, but it was a very quickly written poster that somebody wrote about something annoying that somebody else in the building did. And I I took a picture and sent it to a friend and was like, I normally don't like asking this, but what the hell does it say? Because there was it was a very weird situation with a dead animal next to it, all kinds of weird stuff. Yeah, it was very strange. It was very, very strange. He sent me the the characters and the the opinion and then described what it said. And I recognized the characters and obviously the pinion, but I could not recognize a lot of them in the script. It was so thick, and some of them bled together, and it was obviously it was written very, very, very quickly.

SPEAKER_08 36:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 36:27

Yeah. But just yeah, it was a weird situation.

SPEAKER_08 36:29

If you write the reason why Chinese people can understand the handwriting, like I I can understand I'm I'm a translator now, so I understand a lot of characters, not all of them. It's important to note, as a translator, I keep a dictionary next to me all the time. Yeah, yeah. So don't feel bad if you have to look at your dictionary. Hi, I'm a professional translator, I have Plico on my phone, I use it all the time. The stroke order is crucial for two reasons. Jumping way back to when I started talking about this in the first place. One is Chinese people can only read other people's handwriting because they know the stroke order. So they know that if you write quickly, these two strokes are going to blend together, and then that's gonna look like blah blah blah blah blah blah.

SPEAKER_03 37:00

So that determines what gets what goes missing in script, apparently.

SPEAKER_08 37:04

Yeah, what goes missing and what gets changed in what way.

SPEAKER_03 37:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 37:06

And for me, stroke order is absolutely crucial for learning the language because it allows me to hold the character in my mind. It adds another I I I this is this might be a a personal w oddity, almost said weirdity, but that's not a word. A personal oddity in that if there it is now. It's in a podcast, so it has to be true. If there if there are multiple layers of information to a thing, it's easier for me to remember. For example, if if there's just a picture of something, I'm about to remember it. If there's a picture and a sound, there's more information for me to grab onto. A picture, a sound, and a smell.

SPEAKER_06 37:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 37:39

It gets the more rich it is, the more easy it is, which is actually the word easier, to grab onto this. For someone who has not learned Chinese, every character looks like a unique set of impenetrable scribbles. But when you learn Chinese for a while, you understand that there are a lot of building blocks that go into characters. First, there's the different, like sometimes a character could be one character be could be a combination of different characters stuck together in a specific order. There are specific parts of characters that get reused in other characters. There are some characters that when they become a part of another character, they get changed in a certain way to become part of a different character. And that's a whole shit ton of random ass, whatever. I'm giving you all your profanity right now. If you don't speak Chinese and you're listening to me say this, you're s you're thinking, oh, that sounds impossible and weird and and like way too much. And it kind of is, but for me, learning how to write the characters and writing them over and over and over again and getting the correct stroke order allowed me to sort of form them in my mind and hang on to them better. I I'm of the opinion that nothing is hard. It's just some things take longer than others. And if you can spend the time doing it, then you can get it. And adding the stroke order, learning the characters, gave me a structure that allowed me to keep trying to write characters. I'm way off topic, by the way. You asked me what my what my process was.

SPEAKER_03 39:00

You're not at all. There's you're talking about Mandarin Chinese. That is the point.

SPEAKER_08 39:03

My process basically was I had a few lessons where they taught me the basics of pronunciation, the basics of the stroke order and how characters are basically put together. Yeah, yeah. And then I bought a stack of textbooks starting from beginner to intermediate.

SPEAKER_03 39:16

What kind of textbooks?

SPEAKER_08 39:17

Oh, geez, whatever I could find.

SPEAKER_03 39:19

Were they HSK or non-HSK?

SPEAKER_08 39:21

Uh at the time, I did not know what HSK was.

SPEAKER_03 39:24

Fair enough.

SPEAKER_08 39:24

I have not taken the HSK.

SPEAKER_03 39:26

And where were were you in Hangzhou at this point?

SPEAKER_08 39:28

No, I was in Guangzhou.

SPEAKER_03 39:29

You're Guangzhou. Oh, okay, okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 39:31

Here's the rundown.

SPEAKER_03 39:32

Also known as Canton.

SPEAKER_08 39:33

Yeah. Sorry. Old Canton.

SPEAKER_03 39:34

Some of the listeners, a lot of the listeners are actually in the US. So that would be southern China. Sorry.

SPEAKER_08 39:38

Great. Helena, that's how I introduce Opium Wars, you know, that's that's that area.

SPEAKER_03 39:42

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_08 39:44

Uh I So in 2010, January 10th, 2010, that's my brother's birthday. My gift to him was I'm leaving.

SPEAKER_07 39:51

Bye.

SPEAKER_08 39:52

They don't have to deal with me anymore. Um it was unintentional. That was not the birthday present. I lived there for two and a half years. Yeah. So in the summer of 2012, I moved to Haiko, which is the capital of Hainan Island.

SPEAKER_07 40:03

Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_08 40:05

Which is China's Hawaii, they say. So when I was in Guangzhou, I was teaching English. I was a stereotypical uh looked-down-upon English teacher with no real relevant teaching experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, no education degree whatsoever.

SPEAKER_03 40:19

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 40:19

And I'm sure your listeners are by now familiar with the way that most foreigners could have looked down on uh uh unqualified foreign teachers.

SPEAKER_03 40:27

Um I'm not sure it's just the foreigners that look down on the unqualified teachers.

SPEAKER_08 40:31

Oh, you're absolutely right. Some locals will look down on them and still be willing to pay lots of money to have them teach their kids because at least they're interacting with some native English.

SPEAKER_06 40:38

Yep.

SPEAKER_08 40:38

Hopefully. So I did that for the first two and a half years, and that was the time where I was really looking at books and copying characters for hours. I would go teach my classes, sometimes six classes a day back to back.

SPEAKER_03 40:48

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_08 40:49

And then uh uh sit in my office until uh just doing the Chinese stuff and writing characters over and over again until the last subway train. And I'd rush out and grab the last subway train and go home. But that was only in fits and spurts. Uh so before the interview started, before we turn on the mics, you were talking about how you'd you study you like a fiend for a while, but you haven't really recently. And I and I asked you, are you recording? Because if so, I'm gonna go into this.

SPEAKER_07 41:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 41:12

Um I could not maintain that level of intensity for more than a few weeks to a couple months. But when I got on that train, it was very productive. And when I got off that train, I could still use what I had learned in my everyday life, and I could still learn a couple characters here, a couple characters there. Oh, this person used to profanity, now I know that one. And after two and a half years of doing that, I finally was able to trick someone into thinking I spoke Chinese well enough to take a Chinese job in Haiko. That was a crazy job.

SPEAKER_03 41:41

Can we stop for one second? Because you've I was making faces. I apologize for my faces, but I was throwing it.

SPEAKER_08 41:46

I love them. I wish that this was this are a YouTube video.

SPEAKER_03 41:49

Yeah, well, there there is actually, now that you say that, there is an accompanying this is a pod tube, it's part podcast, part YouTube. But usually, unfortunately, the videos are just me.

SPEAKER_04 41:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:58

Yeah. And my pontifications about the difficulties of learning language in general, Mandarin Chinese specifically. I do plugs whenever I can. I just do.

SPEAKER_08 42:05

Yeah, yeah, you gotta do it. If you don't, who will?

SPEAKER_03 42:08

Yeah. Oh, thanks.

SPEAKER_08 42:11

That's not what I meant.

SPEAKER_03 42:13

I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Anyway, so while you were talking about the characters, the characters are what brought me in this time, starting two years ago. I actually, to go back even further, moved to the first place that really, really, other than just Chinatowns, used the language in a big, big way, and that was Taiwan in 2003. The traditional characters, the teaching methods, me hiring my neighbor as a tutor, and her just giving me pages of text with just with tons of sentences, I with no building blocks. It was just so overwhelming. Like I've tried two or three times before this to do it. But this time, when we came back, I just left a PhD program. So it's like our our lives, our language lives are kind of aligning, right? Just left a PhD program. Wonderful experience, but not where I wanted to go long term. And it's like a seven-year commitment. So I'm like, ah, no, but I needed something to do. I needed a project. So learning Mandarin again seemed to work, and the characters, instead of taunting me, were like calling me in. And I'm like, what is happening right now? What the hell? I need a project. Let's go. And so writing them, I found, okay, to be fair, tracing them on an app was really meditative for me. What?

SPEAKER_08 43:19

What app were you using?

SPEAKER_03 43:20

Oh, um, I don't, I no longer there's entire videos. That's fine.

SPEAKER_08 43:24

This is this is a whole this is a whole other can of worms that I didn't know about.

SPEAKER_03 43:27

But I'll I'll put it down in the show notes and I'll send it to you. I'll probably find it.

SPEAKER_08 43:31

I used a similar app where you would treat you would trace it with your finger. And sometimes they would give you the template, sometimes they wouldn't.

SPEAKER_03 43:35

And it was a game. Like it would have like points if you traced it l like quick enough. You'd get you'd you'd basically die if you didn't do it like long enough.

SPEAKER_08 43:42

I am in support of gamification.

SPEAKER_03 43:44

Yeah, no me too. And it was very, very meditative. Like I would do it in between stuff when I was on the metro and all this kind of stuff. And I it I've stopped doing it since then, but I really like that part of it. Yeah. And I think the layers, although it was annoying at first to have the layer the layers of The sound, also known as the pinion, which is also like in you know, in the Roman alphabet, and then the characters, and then the meaning, and then the like and then adding on the grammatical stuff later. Like having those layers was really annoying initially because I've only tried to learn uh Romance languages before this. However, having those layers I think is one of the things that has even though I can't speak for shit right now, my vocabulary is much bigger in Chinese than it's ever been in any other attempt at a second language. And I think the visualness of the characters is uh you you just made me realize like five minutes ago is the thing that probably did that because there's the texture of it, yeah, of the different parts of it that was really hard to learn that is not leaving. Even though I've been MIA language learning for over a month now, I still can read the characters that I can read. And I can still hear some things as I'm walking around and I hear people say things. They haven't left. And I think it's that the depth and the complexity of the language that is probably what's doing it.

SPEAKER_08 45:04

Yeah, because it's so multi-sensory in a way.

SPEAKER_03 45:06

Yeah, and it's so different from English. Like the stuff I learned in Spanish and German. Wait, German's not a romance language, is it?

SPEAKER_08 45:12

No, it's not. I don't even think English technically is.

SPEAKER_03 45:16

I don't think English is either. I think it's Germany. But I feel like I didn't learn the English, it just kinda kinda kinda happened. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, anyway, any of the previous languages were too similar to English, and I think that interfered for me. Whereas Chinese feels so intensely different and has so many layers that I think that's why it's kind of sticking a little bit.

SPEAKER_05 45:35

That's fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 45:36

Well, you're the one that just said that. I just reiterated it and said, yes, me too. That entire giant thing I just went into was basically me saying, I had that experience.

SPEAKER_08 45:45

It's funny because I haven't thought about it that way. I haven't thought about oh, Chinese is so different, and that's why it sticks for me. I it's difficult for me to compare my Chinese learning language learning experience to my Spanish language learning experience because I was not in a Spanish environment, whereas I am in a Chinese environment now. Um and that has really, really for me shaped uh how it all went down and how I was able to do it and what my motivations were and what my reward system was.

SPEAKER_03 46:12

When like from when you started learning Chinese to when you could understand what was happening around you to any degree, how long do you think that took?

SPEAKER_08 46:22

Oh heavens. I mean, to any degree, probably about a year.

SPEAKER_03 46:27

Thank you. Because a lot of people say just go in the environment and you'll learn stuff. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is not true for Mandarin Chinese, I don't think.

SPEAKER_08 46:34

Anecdotally, yeah. There are people whose brains can do that. Oh, anecdotally, but I don't think it's necessarily linguistic. I think there are people who are very sensitive to tone, very sensitive to manners of expression and body language. I've had friends who can't speak Chinese for shit inform me on what seminar else meant. And this is especially when I was in Guangzhou, I had just started learning, and I could kind of understand a lot of times in taxis. Taxis have played such an important part in my language learning experience.

SPEAKER_03 47:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 47:00

There would be times where I would be talking to the driver, and I would be thinking about, you know, putting words together, making sentences, and he would talk back to me. He's almost always a male taxi driver, and I would be trying to parse what he was saying, and I would miss information that my friend who could not, by his own words, could not learn Chinese. Yeah. He would inform me about what the taxi driver is trying to tell me because he was tuned into how people communicate. So I think when you're talking about a very, very, very basic level of communication, I think a lot of people can tune into that in sort of an a-inguistic or a linguistic is not entirely correct, but not a not a or sort of an a-lexical way that is still somewhat linguistic. But for me, it took me about a year before I was really like, okay, I can express things and I can sort of understand what other people are are throwing at me. Um, but I've been going through different levels of that up and up and up and up and ever since then. Like my second year, I went up another level. And then when I went to Haiko, they had me doing telemarketing, which was two Chinese people, which was just gives you a frame of mind, it gives you a frame of reference for how dumb these people really were running this company. But I'm not, I mean, if they were smart, they wouldn't have hired me.

SPEAKER_03 48:10

Well, they might have wanted you for the foreign factor.

SPEAKER_08 48:12

They did, but the thing was they were never smart enough to make that happen. Okay, it was a wedding company, and they were trying to do a destination wedding location on Hainan, so it's like China's Hawaii. And there was no that had never really taken off, which is weird because it really should have. I think the market was just dominated by the hotels, and so there were no independent companies who were able to do that.

SPEAKER_06 48:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 48:30

And their idea was we're gonna pull in not only Chinese people, but we're gonna pull in Russians, we're gonna pull in people from this hemisphere who want a tropical wedding.

SPEAKER_06 48:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 48:37

And so they hired a foreigner. I don't speak Russian. These are not intelligent people, is what I'm telling you. Um, and so they had they had me in the office and they didn't know what to do with me. And so they were starting, they were trying to do this conference. I I don't mean this, I don't mean to say that Chinese people are bad at business. This isn't isn't a racist sort of thing. But like when people talk about Silicon Valley, they talk about ways that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are bad at things and the misconceptions they have. Oh, yeah. There's a whole other set of misconceptions that Chinese entrepreneurs have. So I'm not saying that Chinese people are bad at business, and I'm not saying all Chinese people have these misconceptions. I I mean when Chinese people are bad at business, this is generally how they are bad at business, and that's a whole other topic to have. But I was the guy in the back saying, you know, you realize this conference isn't gonna happen, right? You realize this doesn't have a chance. Okay, no, no, that's fine. But they still had us calling people um all over China business owners to try to get them to come to this conference, and I had nothing else to do. So they would give me a list of people, names, and phone numbers, I'll be calling them in Chinese and asking them I I can I can I couldn't even order a sandwich with no cheese at this point. And I'm I'm trying to invite people to uh to come to this conference. Um, and that was a whole other level of language learning experience for me. And I I was there for about a year before they realized, oh, this guy isn't helping us at all. And they uh they had to hire some consultants to sort of turn their business around, and like item number one was why are you paying this guy? Yeah, get him out of here. Um but I'd been on a Chinese TV show, a Chinese dating show, at that point. And a company in Beijing had seen me on the show and they sent me an email saying, Oh, well, we need someone who can speak English and Chinese. My my Chinese went got a lot better. Like uh you teach a baby to swim by throwing it in the water, then they can just do it, a sink or swim sort of thing.

SPEAKER_06 50:12

Yep.

SPEAKER_08 50:12

Haiko, that stupid company where I was a Chinese telemarketer, was definitely my sink or swim moment for Chinese, where I just I just had to do it. There was no excuse. I couldn't, like when I was in Guangzhou, I could be like, oh, I don't want to speak Chinese today, I'm just gonna hang out with my foreign friends. And Haiko, I didn't really have any foreign friends. I made a couple eventually.

SPEAKER_03 50:27

Uh did you make any notes as you were talking to people and kind of learning the language by by you know, sinking or swimming? Did you make any notes or did you record anything and listen to it later? Like, did you do any of that stuff?

SPEAKER_08 50:38

I didn't listen to it later. I recorded uh I think starting in Guangzhou, I started recording all my taxi rides.

SPEAKER_03 50:46

See, I've been thinking about doing that.

SPEAKER_08 50:47

Oh, I have hours and hours and hours and hours of taxes over the last, I think, six or seven years of taxi recordings. Because, right? Because they all ask the same questions. Um, and I tell Chinese people, like, oh, you know, taxi drivers frequently ask me about the size of my penis, and they don't believe me. So I start Oh yeah. Much more in Guangzhou than since I moved north.

SPEAKER_03 51:06

Do they ask each other that question?

SPEAKER_08 51:08

Fuck if I know. Okay. Apparently not, because and this is this is like as a foreigner in China, you exist in a sort of extra space. Sure, sure, sure, yeah. Where people don't necessarily feel as bound by their because Chinese people often think of their own culture as being very restrictive.

SPEAKER_06 51:22

Yes.

SPEAKER_08 51:22

But we are not part of that. So if they feel restricted in any way, they feel uh many people feel less so when talking to us.

SPEAKER_03 51:28

When I first moved to Taiwan in 2003, every single female I met that was teenager and older with Sex in the City, the TV show, was very popular. And they would start out by talking about sex in the city and then ask me about my sex life. No matter if I met them five minutes before or a few months before. Yeah. Well, obviously I'm talking about meeting them. So anyway, no matter how how much time into the conversation it was, and I was like, whoa, okay, look, I'm a very open person and I'm all about culturally sharing stuff. But I know if I share anything about my sex life, you're never going to reciprocate. Oh, right, okay. And you might know someone I know, and it's just like what and I know the the conservative view, and as soon as I tell you something, you're gonna judge me. And I'm like, this is just slippery as all hell.

SPEAKER_07 52:10

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 52:10

I'm just like, wow, but yeah, it's the same kind of thing. I can ask a foreigner this. No, you can, but should you?

SPEAKER_08 52:16

Yeah. And they had there's oh use the word open, which is something that comes up a lot.

SPEAKER_03 52:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 52:21

Because Chinese people tell me, Oh, foreigners are so open, or oh, or is is it really as open in America as they say, or is oh, in China we're not very open. And that's not a word that we use in that way. So the fact that you even use the word open, I think was kind of like half code switching. Because you know that I've been in China for a while. Yeah, I wouldn't use that word in the States to mean that.

SPEAKER_03 52:39

Yeah. Oh my gosh, would I? I don't even know at this point because yeah. I can't I can't know.

SPEAKER_08 52:45

I often joke about how I speak four languages. Yeah. People ask uh a common question is when I speak Chinese to someone to a Chinese person is, oh, how many languages do you speak? I always say four. I speak in Chinese, I say I speak Enguin, Jongwen, Jong Shi Yuan, Ying Shiongwen. I speak English, Chinese, Chinese style English, and English-style Chinese.

SPEAKER_03 53:02

So oh my god. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 53:06

Yeah. So that using open in that way is definitely Chinese style English.

SPEAKER_03 53:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 53:11

That's a word that exists here.

SPEAKER_03 53:12

It so is. It's so is. Well, I taught I taught Chinese teenagers last time when we were in Nanjing eight years ago, and now I don't teach anymore, but I am testing about that age group, and I do find that a lot of their Chinese English comes into my usage. It's part of the cringe factor in editing, is I realize that it's seeped in, and I'm like, no, it is a job being evil. You were learning, um you were learning on the job.

SPEAKER_07 53:41

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 53:41

Ironically, they fired you after you got competent at doing the job, it sounds like well, I never got competent at doing the job.

SPEAKER_08 53:49

Linguistically got competent. Right. They never came up with a good job for me to do. But the one thing they did for me was they the boss, in an effort to promote the new company, she encouraged me to sign up for a dating show, uh, which I refused, refused, refused. And finally, at one point, we were off on a business trip looking for uh good locations, and she asked me, and just to stop the conversation, I said, sure, I'll think about it when I get back, maybe I'll sign up. And so she pulls out her cell phone and calls her assistant, who's back in Haiko, and says, you know, find the photocopy of that guy's passport and go on the website and sign him up. He agreed to do it. So they signed me up and then uh they called me up for an interview, and then eventually I ended up going on the show. After the show, a company in Beijing, a surprisingly reputable BTL marketing company, calls me up and says, uh, hey, we're looking for someone who doesn't mind getting on stage and speaking in English and Chinese and can can present themselves well and has a good sense of humor. We have some foreign clients that uh we want to up our game with, so how about a job interview? And at the time I thought, oh come on, what kind of company? Recruits from dating shows. That's obscene, that's absurd. Free trip to Beijing, so I went to Beijing and uh good company, and so I worked there for a year, and then I got uh poached by one of their competitors. I stayed there for three years. And that was the time when I really, really, really upped my Chinese game. So when I got to Beijing, I could still do a very limited amount of stuff, but after I got there, it was life in the fast lane because I was the only foreigner in the company. I was the only foreigner in either company when I started working for them. And a couple people could speak English, but not very well.

SPEAKER_06 55:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 55:16

And so fortunately at the first company, I didn't have a lot of responsibilities. They just kind of wanted me to interface with one client and only sometimes. So aside from that, I was doing they hired you to work with only one client? But is that there was only one client that had foreigners on their side interfacing with the agencies. Every other brand, I don't even know if I can talk about specific brand names, but yeah, uh every other brand had a largely Chinese marketing team. Only this one brand was uh still hiring foreigners for uh positions that interface with agencies, yeah. Um, but not for every project. So I was only needed part-time for that. And so I spent most of my time either translating stuff for other departments or um just looking at my goddamn inbox and trying to figure out what the emails meant. Like you get an email from HR that's like, you know, 17 paragraphs, and if it that if I'm in an American company and and HR sends me like when I was in in graduate school and then the graduate student department would send me an email, it's like this this semester's regulations or whatever, I wouldn't read that. What cause because why? Yeah. I might skim it. But you get those in Chinese, and for me, that's like as this month's textbook has just arrived on inbox. Let's learn all this stuff. And that real that's really when it hit me. Um, because my Chinese learning had a spike when I first got here. Um, and then it sort of leveled off. And I had another spike when I got to Haiko and it leveled off, and then I got a huge sustained spike when I went to Beijing, and that's when it really hit me. Necessity is the mother of learning languages. When I was in Guangzhou, my necessity was I felt like a rubbish human being if I wasn't learning something. I dropped out of graduate school, I had uh no prospects for myself. This is something I can latch on to to to to base my self-worth on my my progress in this one thing. And that was my that was my the fuel I was burning to literally work through the midnight hours to learn a little bit of Chinese there. When I got to Haiko, it was a stink or swim sort of thing, uh, where you know if I didn't want to get fired and be you know unemployed. When I got to Beijing, it was it was a similar thing. But when I was not in the crunch times, it was very, very, very, very, very almost impossibly hard for me to open up a Chinese textbook and and learn something. Yeah. Which is what I kind of wanted to talk about um before we even started the interview, which is um the times when I cannot force myself to open a Chinese textbook are the times when I feel like I speak enough Chinese to do what I am faced with.

SPEAKER_03 57:34

Well, if you're able to use it, why would you study it?

SPEAKER_08 57:38

Because then you can do more stuff with it. I I I I can make more money now in more different ways than I could five years ago.

SPEAKER_07 57:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 57:49

For a lot of reasons, and uh prime among them is that my Chinese is a lot better.

SPEAKER_07 57:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 57:54

If my Chinese were better than it is now, I could be making even more money.

SPEAKER_03 57:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 57:58

But I'm making enough money. There's no necessity there. That's the trick. It's because if I had tripped into a job where I needed to know more Chinese to execute the duties that were presented to me uh immediately, I would have more motivation to do it. I have Chinese textbooks in my house right now that I have not read through.

SPEAKER_03 58:20

What textbooks?

SPEAKER_08 58:21

I don't remember the name, to be honest. It's textbooks I bought years ago.

SPEAKER_03 58:24

What kind are they like reading based? Is there are there actually still grammatical exercises at the level that you're at or listening? Both, yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_08 58:31

Uh uh but I haven't looked at them in so long, I'm not sure that I would here's the thing about language learning. Sorry, no. Uh yes. But I think that you there are there's a way to use them that is beneficial. I don't force myself to do every single line in a textbook, and I think if if someone forced me to do that, I would be wasting a lot of time. But language learning is not like a C level. It's not like when your language learning goes up, then everything is uniformly better. There are probably language points and grammatical points in those textbooks that I am not consciously aware of, and that if someone spoke to me using them, I would understand them, but I would never produce that language. And my Chinese would be better if I could produce that language. But because I've sort of learned in a self-taught, tacked on sort of way based on the necessity. I mean, there are points in my life where I could talk about event marketing in Chinese and I couldn't talk about politics in Chinese. I could talk about event marketing in Chinese and I could not talk about event marketing in English. And that happened to me very embarrassingly, but very humorously, in a couple client meetings where I'd like sign encounter. I I was I was describing the map of a venue that we that we laid out, and I said we're gonna put the sign encounter here, but I could not think of the English word for sign encounter. Right. Which is Chen Taotai in Chinese, because we only only only only only ever talked about that in Chinese. Right. Um and so in the in the meeting with the client sitting there, I was like, and this is the This thing. It was sort of some sort of performative streak clicked on in me. And so I said in like a stage whisper in Chinese, Chindao Tai's a machua, which is how do you say sign encounter in Chinese? And all the Chinese people in the room just started laughing, and then the the foreigners looking at each other like, what's going on here? And then uh one of the clients uh said sign encounter. Yes, thank you, sign encounter.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:14

Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's let's go back a bit. Because you mentioned going on a Chinese dating show and then we completely glossed over that.

SPEAKER_08 1:00:21

I was hoping you would.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:22

Well no, of course not. Talk about necessity. I mean, a lot of people learn Mandarin Chinese because they get into relationships with locals and whatnot. So however far deep into this box that you've opened. Um did you go on the show?

SPEAKER_08 1:00:42

I went on the show, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:43

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 1:00:43

Um, and that's how the it's it's Fei Chang Wural, which is the most popular dating show. It's fallen off in popular popularity recently, popularity recently, but it is the quintessential Chinese dating show.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:54

What does that mean? What can you describe the setup of the show?

SPEAKER_08 1:00:57

Yeah, so there's uh twelve or sixteen or eighteen or twenty-something women up on a stage with a pedestal.

SPEAKER_07 1:01:04

Um that's a lot.

SPEAKER_08 1:01:06

It's a lot, yeah. And they each have a a button. And if they hit the button, it means I've lost interest in this man. The men come on one by one.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:14

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 1:01:15

And they kind of have to introduce themselves, and then there's three short videos that they shoot about your life. They come to where you live and they shoot a short video about you.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 1:01:23

Um so you you walk on, you introduce yourself, they show a video, the women ask questions based on the video, they show another video, they ask questions based on that, they show a third video, they ask questions based on that.

SPEAKER_07 1:01:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 1:01:34

And at any point during this process, if a woman loses interest in you, they hit the they hit the the button and the and their pedestal turns red. And if you get all the way through the entire process with one or more women still interested in you and have not having not turned off their light, then you can choose one of them and you get like a vacation for two. No, actually, here's the trick. This is what I learned. You get two vacations to the same place that don't have to be used at the same time.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:58

What?

SPEAKER_08 1:01:59

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:01

Oh, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_08 1:02:02

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:03

So how did it go?

SPEAKER_08 1:02:06

There's actually two buttons on the pedestal. One of them turns the light off, and one of them uh is called bao dung. It means like I'm I'm locking it, I'm 100% for this guy. Um so all the women but one turn their light off. And one of them even said, um, like as soon as I walked on the stage, she turned off her light. And the host asked, Can I ask why you turned off your light? And she said, Oh, I just don't really think I could date a foreigner. And I think when I tell that story to Americans, yeah, a lot of them were like, Oh, what the fuck? But for me, like I was used to it by then. It's like, yeah, of course, that's how it's how it's how it is. A lot of people are like that. It's not it's not even a big deal. But one woman, the one who didn't turn off her light, had given the hundred percent light. So it's kind of a weird thing. But I I felt that she was quite strange. And the thing was, yeah, the prize trip that you would get was to the island of Hainan. Yeah, literally like a 45-minute drive from my apartment.

SPEAKER_07 1:02:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:02:58

So I felt no connection to that. Yeah. And afterwards I bidooed myself, which is Googling yourself in China. I bideoed myself to see what people were saying about me. And there were lots of comments on my name in Chinese, but none of them were about me. They're all about that woman who apparently just goes all in for every foreigner who goes on the stage.

SPEAKER_07 1:03:14

Oh wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:03:16

Yeah. Wow. So I'm glad I didn't go with her just for a five star like a four-day five-star hotel thing. Right. But 45 minutes from my house, because that's bizarre.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:26

Yeah, two separate vacations. And again, feel free to not answer any of this. Have you ever dated local?

SPEAKER_08 1:03:31

Oh, yes. When you talked about how a lot of people learned Chinese because they were in relationships, I have not had that experience at all. I'll start with someone else's experience. I have a friend who is married to a Chinese woman, and he came to China around the same time that I did. His wife speaks very good English. Yeah. And I'm pretty sure the reason he can't speak Chinese is because he is married to a bilingual woman. So he does not have the necessity of learning Chinese. When I first got here, I entered into a very uh ill-advised relationship with a woman whose English was okay, but there's so much hidden behind linguistic and cultural barriers. If at that point I didn't speak any Mandarin, I had never lived in China before. I was there for just a couple weeks before we got into this mess. Um so I was not literate in the ways that these not not only not literate in the differences, I was not literate in the ways the differences present themselves and the fact that there were differences in many different ways. I get that, yeah. And so it was sort of sort of a short-lived relationship that like as soon as I uh got the tools to sort of see clearly what kind of relationship I was in and who I was in a relationship with, I think both of us started to feel like, oh, we fucked that up. We misjudged that joke. We looked before we leaked, but we didn't know what we were looking at. And I don't think that that really improved my language skills at all.

SPEAKER_07 1:04:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:04:48

I I don't think that any of the relationships I've been in since I've been here have improved my language skills considerably.

SPEAKER_07 1:04:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:04:53

When I say that to Chinese people, a common reply that I get back is, oh, but like when you get into a fight or something and you're sort of shooting from the hip and like you're in that heightened state of emotion, that's when the language sort of fits together and comes out.

SPEAKER_07 1:05:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:05:07

Which is true.

SPEAKER_07 1:05:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:05:10

But are you gonna be like, hey, I'm gonna date you. Why? So we can fight and I can get real good at Chinese.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:16

That's not That's not a good selling point.

SPEAKER_08 1:05:19

That doesn't make a lot of sense. I should I should say that oftentimes people tell me that I should date a Chinese woman to learn more Chinese.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:25

Um but if I were that advice given to men often, right? It's very common in men. Let's be honest. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:05:31

Um and uh yeah, isn't it weird how that works one way?

SPEAKER_03 1:05:35

I have met l uh foreign women who also date locally, but it's like such a small percentage compared to the foreign men that date locally, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:05:43

Right. Yeah, just to just that I meant specifically like that advice only goes one way. I've never heard, and it could be that I've I've not interacted with it very much, but I very rarely hear foreign women being told to date Chinese men so that they can learn Chinese. But it's something that is told to foreign men a lot.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:58

Yeah, I've never heard that actually. Even on my YouTube channel, like I have some locals writing in in Chinese that I have to Google translate sometimes to understand. But they're writing in there and they've never ever said, Oh, you should date like oh, but I am married, so that could be why.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:12

That could be why.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:12

Yeah, that definitely could be why.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:14

Get a foreign Xiao San.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:15

I don't get it. It didn't happen.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:16

Do you know Xiao San?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:17

Yeah, but in Taiwan, it never happened either. Actually, I had I was I was trying to learn guitar for a very, very short period of time, and I had a guitar language exchange where he was going to teach me guitar. A local man about my age was gonna teach me guitar and I was gonna help him with his English, which was clearly already far ahead of anything that I knew in Mandarin. And we went out to eat after one of our sessions and he got seriously harassed. It w it was not in a major well, it was in a major city, population-wise, but not mentality-wise. Right. In a major city, and he got massively harassed as we were eating because they assumed that we were romantically intertwined and and and I would be weakening the gene pool kind of thing.

SPEAKER_07 1:06:55

That's fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:56

Well, and how fat I was and how foreign I was, how old I was like every single flaw you could imagine. It was sort of like a YouTube comment in real life. Like for a woman. Yeah. And and thank goodness it was in a language I couldn't understand, but I got the tone and the stare. So I understood what was happening, and I asked him because I was that stupid then to what was happening, and he tried not to tell me, and I was very pushy because I didn't understand how much face he was losing. And yeah, it was just it was awful. We didn't really continue the exchange much after that because I think I embarrassed him so much by wanting to know.

SPEAKER_08 1:07:25

Yeah, it's it's it's funny how much cultural literacy involves knowing what not to ask. I used to ask where people are from, and sometimes they'll say, Oh, I'm from Shandong. And like I say, I'm I'm from a little town in Texas called Marshall. And Americans think that's very normal. But if someone in China tells you the state that or the province they're from, but not the town, that means they don't want to tell you the town. And oftentimes the reason is that they feel embarrassed for being from a small town. But I used to push for that, oh, what town? Where's is that close to Qingdao? And people just wouldn't want to tell me. And sometimes people will say they're from big cities when they're not from big cities. And that's something I've learned not to push. I think I think asking where are you from is not as big of a deal, especially if you're a foreigner. So long as you don't push the answer.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:04

That's true.

SPEAKER_08 1:08:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:05

That's true. But it'd still be nice to just think of a different question. It's just like when they ask, you know, are you do you have do you have children and why not?

SPEAKER_07 1:08:15

Oh, you're not.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:16

And I'm like, I kind of wish you guys wouldn't push the why not, because I just really don't need to have that conversation when I first meet someone.

SPEAKER_07 1:08:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:24

That's an intimate answer.

SPEAKER_07 1:08:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:25

And I'm like, so if you don't have that and I don't ask this, we'll be good.

unknown 1:08:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:08:30

One of the things that I do to sort of combat those stock questions, because you know, as as a foreigner here, you know that we always get asked the same questions over and over and over and over again. The way I combat that, the way I subvert that is to come up with ridiculous answers. Like when someone asks, Are you married? I say, No. And he says any recommendations? And oftentimes oftentimes it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, well, you know, you have my contact information. If some people ask me, like always, always, always, always people say, Wow, your Chinese is really good. And my reply is always, Oh, it's not as good as yours. And that sort of puts them off balance.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:09:03

Something that they thought they knew how this interaction was going to go.

SPEAKER_07 1:09:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:09:06

You flip it around on them. That's something that I really enjoy. And it goes back to the very beginning when I was talking about I enjoyed writing because it allowed me to create these surprising experiences for people. Because these interactions are are so formalized and so almost stylized.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:09:20

It allows me to know where other people are coming from. It allows me to see everything coming in slow because it's almost like the first time that I meet someone, I know what they're going to say before they say it.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:09:29

And so I have all these tricks for them. But it also means that when someone comes at me with a new angle, I am deeply impressed. And a lot of the friends that I've made are people who have come at me with non-centered questions or didn't even seem interested in the normal questions.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:09:41

Even if someone's English is not super great, I will be much more impressed by their communication if they come at me from a new angle.

SPEAKER_06 1:09:48

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:09:49

Like, okay, you don't have as much vocabulary, you don't speak as well, your accent is a little bit hard to understand, you don't really have a lot of grammar going, but you're comfortable enough with this language to give me something that you clearly made up on the spot with considered thought behind it. That's incredibly impressive to me. And that's one of the reasons you talked earlier about how you like to focus on fluency over correctness. I absolutely feel that way a thousand percent because my Chinese was fluent before it was correct. And I think people who focus too much on the correct never get to the fluent because they're they're kind of at odds with each other.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:21

I could not have fed you that line any better. Thank you for being my mouthpiece for this. And part of my uh gripe with the language classroom, as much as I love classrooms and being and being in a learning environment, is that it seems to favor accuracy over production/slash fluency. And it drives me crazy. Because it's 99% of the time for communication purposes, whether it's on paper or in person, it's to communicate. Right. And honestly, there's a lot of maneuvering back and forth, even between super uber fluent speakers and users of the language. Right. Even when you think you're speaking the same language, you're still navigating what each other means.

SPEAKER_07 1:11:03

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:05

That's what the So passionate, I knock I knock over my microphone.

SPEAKER_08 1:11:08

That's one thing we'll talk about. I'm just gonna throw this in there because this is the this is a little uh compact thing that we have. One of the things that we wrote about in our book, which is kind of a critique on how English is usually taught in Chinese. The name of the book is Chinese, it's not gonna help. If you can't if you can't speak Chinese, you can't buy it.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:21

But the name of the book is Some people listen, some people who know Chinese are listening.

SPEAKER_08 1:11:24

The name of the book is Yu Lau I Zia Pan Yu. It's by Motia Tushu. It's by Zhou Shu Hua, Zhou Jianhua. I'm Zhou Shu Hua. My friend is Zhou Jianhua, and the name is very similar, but that's a coincidence. I had my name before I met him. Um is the difference between the test taking mindset and the communicating mindset. Focusing on correctness over fluency is a test-taking mindset. That's only useful if you're if the success of your interaction with the language is judged entirely on correctness of grammar. A communicator mindset is about fluency and clarity. You don't have to be correct to be clear. Not always.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:01

That's very true. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:12:02

Right. So if you're if you're coming at language from a test-taking mindset, it's like trying to learn how to ride a bike and never being allowed to wobble. Like you're only allowed, like if you start to wobble, you have to stop.

SPEAKER_07 1:12:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:12:14

That's not a good way to learn to ride a bike.

SPEAKER_07 1:12:16

Nope.

SPEAKER_08 1:12:16

Um, it's a good way to perhaps put on a show of riding a bike for someone. If there's a very controlled circumstance where you have to go five meters without wobbling, yeah. You can do that better.

SPEAKER_06 1:12:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:12:25

But if you want to ride four blocks down the street and buy some bread and turn around and ride back with the some bread, maybe some milk in your backpack, um, you can wobble all you want and it's fine as long as you don't fall.

SPEAKER_06 1:12:34

Exactly.

SPEAKER_08 1:12:34

Um, and that's the communicator mindset. Just get it done. And after you become comfortable with it, then it's much easier for me to straighten out the wobbles than it is for me to try to do it without wobbles from the start.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:43

Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. So, okay, geographically, we've got I've got you going from starting in Guangzhou, right?

SPEAKER_08 1:12:49

It's already pretty far south, yeah. And then even further south. Yeah. Yeah. Starting in Guangzhou, yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:54

Yeah. Okay, so you started in Guangzhou, then you went to Haiku, and then Beijing, and then Hangzhou, and then Shanghai?

SPEAKER_04 1:12:59

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:00

Okay, so we have to talk about linguistic differences that you encountered when you were talking to people in all these places, because that is a an interesting mix. And just for the listeners, we started south, went to Island South, went way far north in the in the capital, and then Hangzhou is south again, but not as far south.

SPEAKER_08 1:13:16

Uh is it? It's considered south. It's not a good thing. People in China literally, pretty much anywhere south of Nanjing, yeah, people talk about it as being the south.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:26

What is the biggest difference that you've noticed? Okay, let's stick to Punang Hua. In all the areas in China that you have lived, uh-huh, what have you noticed being the biggest shift within Punang Hua, which is the quote unquote standard Mandarin Chinese?

SPEAKER_08 1:13:39

This is one of my favorite factoids, Pulonghua. Literally. There's so many science fiction novels where like with oh, we speak galactic common, or oh, we speak common. They don't call it English, they say we speak common. Pulonghua literally is c common. That's the translation. There already is a place on earth where the people call their own language common.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:13:58

It's a thing. Oh, it's just not in English.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:00

Fun fact.

SPEAKER_08 1:14:01

Yeah. Started learning Mandarin when I was in Guangzhou. And when I tell people that, Chinese people are often very put off by that. Like, oh, uh, you can't learn Mandarin in Guangzhou. They have such a strong accent and they have they speak Cantonese there. And it's true. You do hear a lot of Cantonese on the streets. When Cantonese people are are together, it's impossible to get them. There are times where I'll be hanging out with three friends who are all Cantonese, and I could not get them to speak Mandarin because it's just so natural for them to speak Cantonese.

SPEAKER_06 1:14:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:14:25

In the school systems, you legally can't. You have to be speaking in Mandarin. So that the idea being that if someone from the north, if their family moves to Guangzhou for work, the kid has to be able to go to school.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:36

Right.

SPEAKER_08 1:14:36

And everyone in China should be able to speak Mandarin. So everyone does, except for the really old people. They all speak it, but there is a bit of an accent. And sometimes the accent can make it hard to communicate a little bit. Well, my Mandarin was bad. It was not a problem.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:50

So you're saying there's a Cantonese accent on their on the Mandarin?

SPEAKER_08 1:14:53

Very strongly.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:53

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 1:14:54

To the point where sometimes like What does that sound like?

SPEAKER_03 1:14:56

Can you imitate that a lot? I'm putting you totally on the spot here.

SPEAKER_08 1:15:00

I'm gonna call out one of my friends. So when I was in Guangzhou, I couldn't really tell because my Chinese was very bored. So it wasn't an issue. But then I lived in Beijing for a while, lived all over, I became a translator, blah blah blah blah blah. I'm now a Chinese podcaster. So when I go back to visit, I hear people's accents for the first time. And it's incredible how much their accent informs my impression of them.

SPEAKER_07 1:15:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:15:22

Not like, oh, you have this accent, so you're this kind of person. Sure. Not like that, because I already know them.

SPEAKER_06 1:15:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:15:29

But oh you have this kind of accent. So this is how other people must see you.

SPEAKER_07 1:15:32

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_08 1:15:33

Like I have a friend who lived in Australia for a year. She went to graduate school in Australia. Um, she's a very, very intelligent person, and we always spoke in English. Her English is almost unaccented, except that she calls Breakfast Brekkie because she lived in Australia. Australia? Yeah. Got them. But I never spoke to her in Mandarin because her English has always been better than my Mandarin.

SPEAKER_06 1:15:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:15:52

I went back last year to Guangzhou and I was meeting a lot of friends, and I and I saw her, and we spoke in Mandarin for the first time, and I was like, oh my god. Like you would be uh chided if you went to somewhere outside of Guangzhou and spoke this. Like her name is uh uh Deng Z. Um but she pronounces it like Dung Zh.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:14

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_08 1:16:15

Like the zh. Actually, that's not her name, that's one of the names that she was considering taking because she doesn't like her real name.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:20

Gotcha, okay.

SPEAKER_08 1:16:21

But like certain sounds like that are hard to do. I think I think of another example for um Well, in the North, like the the standard sort of Chinese has the R, the R Huayin on it, like the um like mun door becomes mark, like you put R on the end of it instead. And they just don't they can't really do that uh in the South. It's not part of the like how a lot of Americans can't roll their R's because a lot of languages don't have R roles, you have to kind of learn that. A lot of a lot of Southerners can't really do that. And a lot of them are very worked up because um if there is no official place, like everything official you do, going to school, getting a job, having an interview, you have to do it in Mandarin, then the native language of the place will eventually die out. Because that means every time someone from that place marries someone else, they almost certainly will not speak the native dialect.

SPEAKER_07 1:17:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:17:06

And the native dialect will become more and more something that people only speak at home, and then it just sort of gets shoved further and further out.

SPEAKER_07 1:17:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:17:12

And I've met people who are just sort of enraged by that.

SPEAKER_07 1:17:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:17:15

Local people who are who are just sort of I think Cantonese especially because they have such a rich culture.

SPEAKER_07 1:17:20

Right.

SPEAKER_08 1:17:21

And they are very proud of their language. A lot of ancient Chinese poetry no longer rhymes in Mandarin, but it does rhyme in Cantonese, indicating that it is closer to a more traditional sort of Chinese than Mandarin. Because Mandarin is heavily influenced by the Dongbei dialects, the the Northeastern dialects from the Manchus.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:36

That's right.

SPEAKER_08 1:17:37

Okay, considered to be Chinese. They were cinicized, which is a word I fucking love.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:42

Because you're the first person to bring that up, and I I there's been talk around this topic, but we haven't actually fully addressed it before in the podcast.

SPEAKER_08 1:17:52

So basically the the the Puto Hua, the Mandarin pronunciation is taken heavily from the the Manchus.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:57

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_08 1:17:57

Who were not all they were invaders when they first came. That was the Qing Dynasty, the final dynasty. And they were invaders at that time.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:03

So pronunciation and grammar and vocabulary or just Oh, I don't know so much.

SPEAKER_08 1:18:08

Probably. I mean, how could it not, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:18:10

And do they still okay.

unknown 1:18:13

God.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:13

You're bringing up so many areas where I do not have knowledge in, which is good. I am so humbled right now. Manchurian language from Manchuria, which is a region, not a country. They're all question marks at the end of what I'm saying right now, right? Okay, so what country what so that would be a part of China now, right?

SPEAKER_08 1:18:33

That's the Sunshine, the three northeastern states. Uh Xilongjiang, uh Chilin, and I've been to all fucking three of them. Uh Xilin. What is the third one? I'm gonna look at a map on my phone. Liaoning. Yeah. Liaoning, Jilin and Xilonjiang. Right. And they were at various I'm not my Chinese imperial history is not a hundred percent. They were I at various times also subjugated to the Chinese Empire. But it wasn't until the Qing dynasty that those ethnic groups came down and were like, I guess it's us now. Now we're the emperors, and so please talk like us.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:05

Yeah, you said you said Heil Heilongjiang.

SPEAKER_08 1:19:09

Black Dragon River.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:10

You said these three areas, right?

unknown 1:19:12

Uh yes.

SPEAKER_08 1:19:14

Also in that map, you have part of Inner Mongolia highlighted, which is technically part of the Dongbei, but it's not um it's not the uh Inner Mongolia is a province of China.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:23

And it's saying there's a Japanese connection here, too.

SPEAKER_08 1:19:26

Oh, absolutely. Um during World War II, the Japanese went there and turned it into a country that they called Manchuria.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:34

Ah, okay, there we go. And for you, history buffs, sorry about that, but we needed to backtrack because yours truly is crap with history, apparently. Yikes! Okay, so that is where what Pudanghua is based on.

SPEAKER_08 1:19:48

I I hesitate to say that because I'm not 100%.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:50

Or influenced. It was heavy.

SPEAKER_08 1:19:51

The current influenced dialect of yes, what we call Pudonhua is very heavily influenced by that. If you go some people say that if you go to like Heilongjiang, uh those those areas, the the local dialect is closer to Mandarin than the Beijing dialect.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:05

Um dear God.

SPEAKER_08 1:20:06

So here's the thing, though. Here's a great anecdote. When I was learning uh Chinese in Guangdong, in Canton, um people were always talking about like, oh, you're not gonna learn, you're gonna have a Cantonese accent, it's gonna be real bad. So when I moved to Beijing, I was finally like, oh yes, I finally get to to have some like real like get in there and learn that real Mandarin, have that great environment. So I get off the plane and I said in my best, crispest announcer voice, I get in the taxi and I say, Bali juang. Bali zhuang is is a location. I said, Hello, I am going to Bali Zhuang. And the taxi driver said, Shumanar! I was like, what the fuck is that? In like actual Mandarin that would be Shun Ma Di Fang. What place? Yeah. What place are you talking about? Nobody's gonna be able to do that. And I was like, the fuck is that? So I said very slowly, Wa Yao Chu. He was like, oh Bali Zhuang! Because it was like a very like local Beijing accent, which is not the standard type of Mandarin. And the worst, worst, worst, worst, worst thing is I had a much bigger problem talking to Beijingers in Mandarin than I did talking to Cantonese in Mandarin. Because Cantonese people know their Mandarin is not standard and they will try to meet you halfway. Beijing people think that if you don't understand Beijinghua, Beijing language, that it's your fucking fault when your Mandarin's not good enough. But that's not the case.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:28

And I think this is exactly why, and I've heard this from a number of people, that if you go to parts where the parts of China where Mandarin is sort of the second language, then it's easier to communicate because they they use more of the standard. And I think this is why I can talk to more taxi drivers than I can to Shanghai's because uh there's less of that. It's my language, I'm using it this way kind of thing, and and there's more of this the standard thing. And and and there's more flexibility with going back and forth to navigate the the communication part of it.

SPEAKER_08 1:21:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:58

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh my gosh, that's so funny.

SPEAKER_08 1:22:00

It's kind of like um the difference between a language and a dialect is very critical. We think of we talk about Chinese as being there's Mandarin and there's different dialects in the change.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:08

Oh my gosh, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:22:09

But I mean, historically, like does they had different scripts.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:22:12

They would sometimes they say, oh, they all use the same characters, but sometimes they would only use the characters phonetically.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:22:16

They would have their own language with their own grammar or their own vocabulary, and they would choose the Chinese characters that represent sounds that fit their local language. This is places inside of China that were doing this.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:22:25

Um and so now we use the the the dialects are becoming more and more closer to Mandarin because that's that's a political necessity. That's it's it's institutional.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:34

I I only know a few I've only seen a few countries in Hansa characters, but the ones I've seen so far seem to be only using the characters phonetically. Is that true across the board?

SPEAKER_08 1:22:44

For countries? Yeah. Oh I i i in most cases, yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 1:22:49

The same way that we call France France and not whatever France is in French.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:54

I should know this.

SPEAKER_08 1:22:56

I should I want to say France, but I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:57

I want to say Francais, but I'm like, is that the like?

SPEAKER_08 1:23:00

Like we call it Spain, not Espana. Because we don't we don't start words with the uh and we don't have the NA in English. So we call it something close to that, we call it Spain. Fun similar idea.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:09

I was always a step, a step to my Spanish students because they couldn't do Stephanie or Steph. Yeah. They had to a step, a step, yeah. Um I yeah, that was completely.

SPEAKER_08 1:23:19

I switched from Josh to Tom because when I was in Haiko, my boss couldn't say Josh. She would say. And Mandarin means to hang to death.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:26

Oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_08 1:23:27

So I was like, you can call me Tom. Let's just switch over to that. Please stop telling me to hang to death. That would be great. Thanks.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:33

Oh my gosh. Okay.

SPEAKER_08 1:23:35

Tom's my middle name, by the way. I didn't just pull it out of nowhere.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:37

Oh, I no, I got you. Hey, Stephanie is my middle name.

SPEAKER_08 1:23:40

Whoa, oh, we're getting deep in there, little character development.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:43

No, it's actually just a fact.

SPEAKER_08 1:23:47

It's like you get the fourth chapter of the book and you finally learn what the what the hero's name is.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:51

I don't think I would ever claim myself as a hero, but I'll just take a look at the first time. Hey, you're the hero of this podcast. Technically, you're the guest, so you're the hero this time.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:59

Oh, that's sweet.

unknown 1:24:00

Ah.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:00

So as you were learning Mandarin Chinese, were there ever any moments where you feel like you where you felt like, see, you were losing you were losing any of your English?

SPEAKER_08 1:24:10

Occasionally it is hard for me to think of English words for things.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:12

Oh, you did talk about one of the things that I think.

SPEAKER_08 1:24:14

Right, but that was that was when I had never I had never done event marketing in America, so I had never talked about this language. But there are times when I go back to the States and it's kind of hard for me to think of words because I just don't use them as often.

SPEAKER_06 1:24:26

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:24:26

And I joke about that in Chinese, and people Chinese people think I'm joking, and I'm like, nah, for real. Like sometimes because you don't use it all the time. And your vocabulary is fluid. Your vocabulary is it's not a bank where you put your money in there and it just sits there. Like there are heavy bank fees. If you're not making deposits, it will be withdrawn.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:43

If you're not refreshing it, it will be the second mathematical comparison we've made in this conversation.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:48

For math folk.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:48

Yeah. Well, I mean, there is a certain I wanna I want to say one plus one equals two-ness to language, and then there isn't. See now I can't even think of the words.

SPEAKER_08 1:24:58

I I I think of the reason why I forget English words as similar to or the same reason why review is the most important part of learning a language. Which is something I've convinced myself. I I think of it like making sand castles.

SPEAKER_07 1:25:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:25:13

If you just m make a mound of sand and you leave it there, it's gonna wash away. But if you this is such a terrible metaphor because it's not true. But if you maybe clay is a better metaphor, you have to continuously reshape the thing and you have to reinforce the shape. And you you let go of it for a day, you come back, it's gonna be droopy, you gotta shape it back up again. And eventually it's gonna dry and harden into that shape. So many Chinese people, I and so many people who are learning foreign languages in the States, those things are like, oh, you can learn a thousand words in a day, or like, or something like that. Like, no, yeah, you can maybe recite a thousand words at the end of the day. Yeah, wait a week, it's all fucking gone.

SPEAKER_07 1:25:44

Exactly.

SPEAKER_08 1:25:44

Because that's not how it works. Yeah. Well, my most popular I make videos uh on the Chinese internet too. And my most popular video with hundreds of thousands of views is about um long-term versus short-term memory.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:55

Um What is it on? You could?

SPEAKER_08 1:25:56

I'll send it to you. It's on uh Tencent Video.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:00

Oh uh You're a multimedia guy.

SPEAKER_08 1:26:03

Uh yes. I have a beard, can't waste it.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:08

Really?

SPEAKER_08 1:26:09

Yeah, sure, why not?

SPEAKER_02 1:26:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_08 1:26:11

Um and the idea is if you learn something once, it goes into your short-term memory and then you just forget it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to reinforce it over time before it goes into your long-term memory. And even stuff that's in your long-term memory can go away. Can go.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:26:23

Much, much, much, much, much more slowly than stuff that you haven't been reinforcing.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:27

And comes back quicker, but it does go. Right. That's the whole idea on the Lightner box. Have you ever used that?

SPEAKER_07 1:26:32

No.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:32

Oh, it's um I want to say it was uh created by a German. But it's um Lightner. Lightner box. It's it's a time it's what the time space repetition software is based on. So it's like it's supposed to remind you to review something just when you're about to forget it.

SPEAKER_07 1:26:50

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:51

Because too soon is too easy and it's not really going to cement it. But if you do it just before you're about to forget it, then it kind of goes to the next level of remembering the next level, the next level.

SPEAKER_08 1:27:00

There's something when I when I'm reviewing, I force myself to recall things. A lot of times, excuse me, people think of reviewing as reading your notes again.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:09

No.

SPEAKER_08 1:27:10

That's not how it works. You have to force your brain to go through the act of recalling the things.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:13

There has to be pain.

SPEAKER_08 1:27:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:27:15

But that that's that's like that's the physical assertion of opening a door again in your in your brain or like using your hands to force something back into shape. Yeah. When you hit recall it. Um, and the the more often you go through that process of recall, the stronger the shape becomes in your mind, and the longer you can hold that shape in your mind, even when you're not focused on it.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:31

Alright, so Josh and I are talking about reminders and lightner boxes and all kinds of language stuff, and I want to step back just a little bit and get meta with you for a second. If you are very interested in recording your own podcast, then by all means, let me give you a month free. What? Yes, it's so true. If you go to podbeanp-o-d b e a n dot com forward slash changing scripts, don't forget the S at the N there. You'll get one month free. That is part of the podcast. Affiliate program. I use them for my podcast hosting and I love them so much.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:05

I'm saying this because I know the pain of starting a new podcast and not knowing which reputable companies there are and how to do this, and so many choices. There are so many choices in all of the decisions you have to make, and I want to make that easier for you. Especially if you're thinking of starting a language learning podcast. Because, hmm, let's face it, there need to be more of us out there in the world. Podbean.com forward slash changing scripts, you'll get a free month, and a very easy to use, great customer service, and reasonably priced podcast host. How can you do better than that? Thank you for producing a great language learning podcast in the future. Let's get back to Josh and his language learning story. What languages do you dream in?

SPEAKER_08 1:28:47

Uh I very rarely remember my dreams.

SPEAKER_07 1:28:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:28:53

I am not convinced that all of my brain all of my brains. Oh, that's that's weird. All of my dreams are necessarily linguistic. I think that there's a dream that I only hazily remember this morning when I woke up. And I remember there being communication, but I don't remember what language it was in. It could be that you simply know things. Um and this is a whole other debate on whether knowledge can be a linguistic, which is a whole other can of worms. It probably well, it has to be in some way, right? Yeah. Otherwise everything you can't speak would just be a lump laying on the ground.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:24

Well, there was a period of time when we didn't have language. So it had to, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:29:28

There are creators who don't have language, and they still know what to eat and what not to eat. There there's there's a form of information that's held in the brain that's not linguistic.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:35

And there's communication between different creatures of that species. Yeah. Anyway, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:29:40

Yeah. It's possible that I have dreams where I communicate in both English and Chinese. It's sometimes, and I say that because sometimes I I forget which language I'm speaking. Like when I first started doing interpreting, which is different from translating and a whole other pack of worms.

SPEAKER_07 1:29:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:29:53

Um, where I would forget which language I was supposed to speak to whom. So someone would tell me something in Chinese and I would turn to the person I'm supposed to be interpreting for and repeat it to that person in Chinese.

SPEAKER_07 1:30:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:30:03

Which is just me not being conscious of like this is the information, I'm expressing the information, which language I'm using for that is not as critical. Um so learning to differentiate them actually was was a weird hurdle I didn't expect to go over.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:15

Yeah, yeah. See, you not remembering what language they're in when you do remember your dreams, I think speaks to how much of a Chinese identity you have linguistically. Because if you were still like at my stage, when I have moments of Chinese happening, not necessarily me using it, but it happening in my dreams, I wake up and I remember it. And I it stands out more than other dreams because I'm like, oh, that could mean something, or I wonder what was happening there. Do you plan on learning any languages in the future?

SPEAKER_08 1:30:44

That's something I think about a lot. Yeah. Because my career is somewhat unstable. I'm making money pretty much exclusively on a freelance basis.

SPEAKER_06 1:30:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:30:50

I have a company that I started in Shanghai, but it doesn't require a lot of my time because I'm starting with some friends and I'm just only in some of the projects.

SPEAKER_06 1:30:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:30:57

I make money off of translation, off of making podcasts, which I could do anywhere.

SPEAKER_06 1:31:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:31:01

And I did not expect that I would be able to learn Chinese as quickly as I have. And I did not learn it quickly. But it was, I think if I had moved to a country with a more similar language, uh any romance language, maybe even German, I would have picked it up a lot faster. Yeah. Because there's so many uh conceptual hurdles at the beginning of Chinese. Like the idea of what a language is and how the spoken relates to the written and how you relate to the language, I think it's all very different in in uh Chinese than it is in in Western languages in general. If I didn't start if I moved to a place where we could speak a language that didn't have those hurdles, I'm sure I would have learned a lot faster. And now that I've gotten over those hurdles here, I'm thinking, well, Thai is a tonal language that has a funny script. How long would it take me to learn Thai? Probably a lot less than it would take me to learn Mandarin. So am I wasting my life by not taking my highly mobile career to a different place and becoming trilingual, right? I think about that a lot. Um and you know, laziness. I'm fine.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:01

Well, there is something to be said for not being hard on yourself and working too much.

SPEAKER_08 1:32:05

Right. And there's something to be said for not just trying to walk into a store and grab every shiny thing you see on the shelf, right? Like sometimes you need to I could doesn't mean that I should.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:12

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:32:14

That's not a solid reason to do it.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:16

Thai would be so neat, though. I I am a sucker for scripts now, and I wish I knew this years and years and years ago. But yeah, no, looking at their script is just wild.

SPEAKER_08 1:32:24

Look at the Jurchen script. I think I'm pretty sure I could be putting my foot in my mouth uh real hard. Uh is the Manchu script, I believe. And it's fun. Spell that. It's kind of like verticals. J-U-R-C-H-E-N.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:36

J-U-R-C-H-E-N?

SPEAKER_08 1:32:38

I think that is.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:40

It's from where?

SPEAKER_08 1:32:41

It's from Manchuria. I think. I could be have my foot at my ass.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:46

Do you ever go to omniglot.com? I'm sure.

SPEAKER_08 1:32:48

I've never heard of it.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:49

Really? Really? Oh my god, it is the best. Listeners, it is the best. They've they're probably sick of this by now. They've listened to previous episodes. Yeah, the best language comparison site for it in English anyway. Um so it shows you it, you know, it gives you just general information, then it shows you the script. It it has different sound clips and different things. Okay, yeah, that is pretty cool. Oh my gosh. Yeah, this looks a little bit like Thai for me. Is this based on Sanskrit too?

SPEAKER_05 1:33:18

That'd be pretty cool if it was.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:20

It would be. See, no, actually, part of that looks more like traditional Chinese, and part of it looks like Sanskrit. Okay, that's crazy cool. Okay, yeah, listeners all have this in the show notes. Oh, and they go up to down orientation-wise. That looks like poetry, and it could probably even just be like directions for cooking.

SPEAKER_08 1:33:38

It's one it's one of those cool languages where it looks beautiful. Like English poetry doesn't necessarily look beautiful. No, you can print up English poetry and be like, oh, that's that's a bunch of little stuff. But this is one of those languages where people say that Chinese looks beautiful. I have never ever seen that. Does I don't think Chinese looks beautiful. I think it looks I think it looks busy. I think some calligraphy, some styles of calligraphy I think look pretty cool. I think it's cool. But that I think actually is more intriguing to me than characters are. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:03

See, I think I think it looks part Sanskrity and part uh Hanzi-y.

SPEAKER_07 1:34:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:10

That's if I can add it. Yeah. I want to blend that word. Damn it. That's very cool. Have you do you do would you ever learn? Is that still being used?

unknown 1:34:22

I don't think so.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:34:24

Especially because now that area of the world sees themselves as being quintessential Mandarin.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:29

Right, right, right, right, right. Whoa. 19 1644. Whoa. Okay.

SPEAKER_08 1:34:36

I don't think I could ever learn a language that was not something I could immerse myself in.

SPEAKER_07 1:34:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:34:41

I couldn't learn Sanskrit. I couldn't learn Roman.

SPEAKER_07 1:34:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:34:44

Uh which is called Latin. Good job, me. Because because I because if I couldn't learn Spanish in school, I definitely can't learn those in school.

SPEAKER_06 1:34:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:34:57

I think uh the the tools that I've built are all built around necessity, they're all built around interactivity.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:35:02

And I so I'm gonna have to have that if I have learned that.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:04

You do have a deep discount with one of the three scripts for Japanese.

SPEAKER_08 1:35:09

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:09

Having learned Chinese already. Yeah, so there is that if you're interested in that.

SPEAKER_08 1:35:13

But I can I can understand a little bit of Japanese writing because of that, but it's not always the one-to-one.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:35:20

So then it's very infuriating for people who are learning Chinese, is they learn rules like, oh well, sometimes the left part of the character indicates the pronunciation or the meaning in the right half indicates the the meaning and his pronunciation. And it's like, yeah, that's true sometimes. And what good is the rule that's right sometimes? What good is the rule if you can't look at a character and know whether or not to apply the rule? And what's one of the things that's infuriating is there are all these at different historical times there were rules that were more or less hard and fast, and then things keep changing and things keep getting added, and now whoop, now it's the Yuan dynasty, and whoop, now it's the uh Manchurian dynasty. And um the it's now the sort of something that speakers of English uh deal with without really being conscious of is that it's a hodgepodge of all this random stuff thrown together. And it's infuriating for people who speak something like Spanish who want to know what the rules are, and there should be rules. Yeah, right, right. There should be rules, but they ain't there are some rules that work some most of the time, but not all the time.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:13

I love it. Modern English is modern English because of the mistakes that people made as they as the fault quote unquote foreigners made as they were learning it.

SPEAKER_07 1:36:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:22

So it's it's intentionally butchered to the point of simplifying it, which is just so beautiful to say to people like English is so proper. No, it is an immigrant language.

SPEAKER_07 1:36:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:32

Keeping in mind that in this podcast we interview, we slash I interview people who learned Mandarin Chinese as an adult, as well as people who grew up with the language and learned other languages, namely English, because that's how I communicate with them. What questions are missing, or what questions would you add to either of those populations or both?

SPEAKER_08 1:36:53

One thing that I think about a lot, and we touched on this a little bit, is um the in-between space. Like you use the word open, and then we talked a little bit about quai di. Like there there's this space between Chinese and English that I find really fascinating. All right, like there's there's some Chinese words that people who don't speak Chinese use because that's what people hear say.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:12

Like uh like when you were talking about the four languages.

SPEAKER_08 1:37:16

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Uh yeah. So things like Kwai. I had a friend who um is mixed, I believe. And she was in in a way that often happens, like people who were not of not entirely of the culture in question can be more purist about it than people who are to them, it's just water, the water they swim in, they don't think about it.

SPEAKER_06 1:37:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:37:36

She was enraged about how foreigners who can't speak Chinese would say quai when they mean uh yuan.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:42

Like that's why Chinese people use quai all the time.

SPEAKER_08 1:37:46

Right. But and she was enraged because she felt like you can't speak Chinese, why are you why are you doing this? Why are you using this one little word?

unknown 1:37:52

Really?

SPEAKER_08 1:37:52

Which doesn't make sense to me. Yeah. I don't know why you'd be enraged by that. That's how language always goes. That's how it's it's always a collision, it's always a messy swamp bag of stuff.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:00

So that's that's so are you getting at like what people's pet peeves are in their first language? No, okay.

SPEAKER_08 1:38:06

I sort of confused the issue. No, no, no. I think I took it somewhere. But I mean whether or not people are upset by that, I think is a question that might come out if we if we talk about this moon space. So there's there's one is the words that people adopt from Chinese, like Kwai or Kwai Di.

SPEAKER_07 1:38:17

Right.

SPEAKER_08 1:38:18

Uh, which are two different Kwai's, by the way, pronounce exactly the same, same tone, but very, very different meaning. So Chinese is scary. Um there's also the words like open.

SPEAKER_06 1:38:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:38:25

Things like English words that have taken on completely different meanings because of how Chinese people use them. There are words, and there's a great video by Papi Tiang that I should send you. You know Papi Chiang?

SPEAKER_03 1:38:35

No.

SPEAKER_08 1:38:35

She's uh she's uh I'm trying to think of a she's she's a Chinese internet celebrity who makes videos that are all very funny. And she did one, I think last year, um, making fun of Chinese people who you throw English words into their Chinese.

SPEAKER_06 1:38:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:38:48

Um which I found very, very hilarious. And um I'll try to find that video, I think I saved it. Um if you can't speak Chinese, you're not gonna get the whole video, but you are gonna see the hilarious ways when she starts just throwing English words just in the middle of language. So that's always fun. When I was working in uh and I lost this file, I feel real sad about it. Um I was working in marketing in Beijing. I was every time we were in a meeting and a client or someone would use an English word in the middle of Chinese, um I would write it down. Yeah. I was gonna make like a list of the words that might as well be Chinese because Chinese people always use them. Um a line was a big one.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:20

Yeah. Like a internet, I've heard a few times too.

SPEAKER_08 1:39:24

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:25

Just in the middle of nowhere. Um but we do that in English. Oh god, but we have so many loan words that sometimes it's hard to distinguish when we do it. But we but we do do that consciously too. Uh say la vie and um Data Vu is even a freaking loan word, like completely and utterly. Like we there are times that we do do that. Yeah. Yeah, but it does stick out because I think the sound differences are probably bigger.

SPEAKER_08 1:39:50

Well, uh what I'm talking about basically is is the central space that is emergent. It's not Chinese, it's not English, it's sort of a combination of the two and something very different. Like we have a meeting and someone's like, oh no, cover la hand duo, raho, chu can negabuma a line sha raho circle back bah.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:05

Like what the hell did you just say?

SPEAKER_08 1:40:07

I said, like, oh, we talked about a lot, we covered a lot today. Okay. Um you need to go align with that department and then we'll circle back to it. Um so like these these super business jargon words often don't make the switch to Chinese. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because in Chinese they're not jargon.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:20

Yeah. I gotcha. Okay, so there's English and there's there's English. Oh my gosh, how have I not thought of this question before?

SPEAKER_08 1:40:30

That's the space in which I live.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:33

There's English English language. And there is the the Mandarin Chinese language. Ha. And in caps, there is It's like a third culture kid.

SPEAKER_08 1:40:51

It's like a third culture language.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:52

Exactly. Yes, that's exactly micro room to the side of and there is a third language that is sort of like the Venn diagram allude to. I'll I'll change it.

SPEAKER_08 1:41:08

And there's lots of different flavors of that. Of the two. From from this side, from that side in different settings.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:13

Third culture kit of language.

SPEAKER_08 1:41:16

If you hang out in a cafe, which means coffee shop, um, why am I saying the word cafe?

SPEAKER_07 1:41:22

I don't know.

SPEAKER_08 1:41:23

You will you will hear people pepper their Chinese with English. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And it's always almost always the same small vocabulary.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:30

Cafe, um everywhere. I've tried to listen to podcasts even though I don't understand them in Chinese. And I I hear it there, I hear it on the street, I hear it everywhere. I hear English and Chinese and Chinese and English all the time in Chang'ai.

SPEAKER_08 1:41:43

And people from both sides make fun of me for doing that.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:46

Um But people in every language borrow from the other languages.

SPEAKER_08 1:41:50

I think that the central space is Ooh, central space. No. It's occupied by foreigners less often.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:41:58

So it comes off more forced, it comes off more jarring, I think, when a foreigner does it.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:03

But okay, for example, IE. People use that all the time.

SPEAKER_08 1:42:05

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:06

Nobody ever says my main. Nobody ever says that. Wait, okay, so I've got the context of it being that third culture kit of languages. So is the question like, what are the words or phrases that they use in that space?

SPEAKER_08 1:42:18

Yeah. Do you have any third space, central space stuff? Um, is that a part of your life at all? David, do you find that the way you speak English has changed since you learned Chinese? Do you find the way you speak Chinese has changed since you started learning English?

SPEAKER_03 1:42:32

Oh my gosh. That is such a cool question. Okay, so what's your answer?

SPEAKER_08 1:42:39

I find that sometimes I fuck up English grammar, because I'll put the Chinese grammar in there. Um I find that I don't react. I was in Macau a couple days ago. And uh I was just speaking English for this guy. I always feel awkward when I'm like Macau in Hong Kong because they're not technically Mandarin speaking places, even though a lot of people can't speak Mandarin there. Technically the local language is going to be Cantonese. Yeah, yeah. But if you're in Hong Kong, also English. If you're in Macau, also Portuguese.

SPEAKER_06 1:43:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:43:02

But ever most people in the service industry at least can also speak English and and and and and and Mandarin.

SPEAKER_06 1:43:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:43:07

I was talking to this guy in English and I I got a cocktail, and uh he was like, Oh, we're about to close. And I was like, Oh, can I just have one drink? And he goes, can, can, can, can.

SPEAKER_03 1:43:14

Yep.

SPEAKER_08 1:43:15

Because in Chinese it would be kay, which in English, it would if you want to translate it correctly, it would be sure, of course you can. But directly translating just means can.

SPEAKER_06 1:43:25

Yep.

SPEAKER_08 1:43:25

Uh the same thing, the same thing happens in Singapore a lot. I can't think of an example of how I fuck up English grammar, but sometimes I do use a Chinese construction with English words in it.

SPEAKER_06 1:43:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:43:34

And then immediately correct myself. I know. I was I was kind of thinking about before the interview today that maybe we would get to talking about examples of how I fuck these things up.

SPEAKER_03 1:43:42

But the can thing they do in Malaysia, and when I was teaching my students from the Gulf, not the US golf, but the Gulf Gulf, like from Yemen and Saudi and and and such, teaching my students from there, they kept asking me why are the local teachers, the Malaysian teachers, why are they using can all the time? And um and I didn't have an answer for them. I'm like, it's just the local English? I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. And now I have more of an idea, but I was like, it doesn't matter. Do you understand what they're saying? Right. Which is my response to everything. Is it confusing? Is it confusing you what what they're saying? And they're like, Well, no, but I just need to know if I need to do that. And I'm like, well, need. If you did that, people would still yeah, people would still understand what you're saying, but depends on are you staying, you're you not staying here? I don't know.

SPEAKER_08 1:44:29

We touched on how we we both liked grammar when we were kids, and I talked a little bit about how I feel like my my love of grammar was a little bit elitist.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:36

I don't know that I liked it, but I could do it well.

SPEAKER_08 1:44:40

Yeah. I I I think I mentioned that one of the reasons I liked it was because I could do it well. Yeah. And so that was sort of tied into my my liking of myself in a way.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:48

I could identify it well. I cannot produce See, that's the problem I'm having right now with Chinese, actually, is I've got these words and putting them together in a way that the communicatively through grammar says things is my absolute number one hurdle right now.

SPEAKER_08 1:45:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:45:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:45:05

Well, the the way that I attacked that when I was learning Chinese was because I had textbooks that would have sentence patterns in them.

SPEAKER_06 1:45:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:45:10

And I would always I would use the same sentence pattern over and over and over again, but I would switch out the subject, right? Switch out the thing. And just to make myself go through that process.

SPEAKER_03 1:45:17

I know that's what I need to do. And I think for me, now knowing how visual I am after struggling with just the words, is I know I need to get out a piece of paper or like a notebook and start doing that. And start like writing it out sentence by sentence and switching it. I know that's what I need to do, but there's I write so slowly in general. Here's the thing though. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:45:38

For me, writing was absolutely crucial to learn vocabulary.

SPEAKER_03 1:45:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:45:42

But grammar I learned entirely through speaking. See, that's not that's I did not I did not practice writing grammar at all.

SPEAKER_03 1:45:47

By far, in every language I've tried to learn, getting that down has been my biggest hurdle. And I've never gotten over it. So if I can do this in the next few months, even in any small way, then it is by far the farthest I've ever gotten in a second language.

SPEAKER_08 1:45:59

Vocabulary through just writing characters over and over and over again, and then quizzing myself, covering up the pinion and asking how do you pronounce this, then covering up the character, looking at the pinion and saying, How do I write this? And then covering up everything but the definition and saying, okay, what is it? Like those three, like three different directions of forcing myself to do recall.

SPEAKER_07 1:46:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:46:14

That's how I learned vocabulary on the page. But for grammar, I would look at it and get a sentence structure in my head and then use it without writing it down.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:22

I wish I was like that.

SPEAKER_08 1:46:23

And that's I think one of the reasons why I can type in Chinese. And Chinese people always talk about how I type really, really fast in Chinese.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:28

I can type in I can type words in Chinese.

SPEAKER_08 1:46:30

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:46:31

Here's the thing though.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:32

I can't do sentences.

SPEAKER_08 1:46:33

If I gave you a pen, could you write it in Chinese?

SPEAKER_03 1:46:37

Very few things.

SPEAKER_08 1:46:39

Same for me. I can type you a long ass email. Yeah. I wrote a book that was mostly I wrote in English and it was translated by someone else. But a lot of the Chinese parts was I was I wrote it.

SPEAKER_07 1:46:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:46:49

Um if you gave me a pen and a piece of paper and told me to write down like a simple sentence, I'd be like, oh, can I use my dictionary on my phone? Because Chinese typing for me, I type in pinyin. Yeah. So I type the sound of it.

SPEAKER_06 1:47:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:47:02

And then I just have to recognize which character is correct. I could not produce that character on a blank page. Exactly. So we talk about language having four parts speaking, listening, reading, writing.

SPEAKER_07 1:47:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:47:11

There is no writing. If you type on a computer, that's not writing. That's speaking plus reading.

SPEAKER_03 1:47:18

I agree. So when you were talking about writing a lot before, writing the characters before, you were talking about typing them.

SPEAKER_08 1:47:23

No, no, no. When I was learning vocabulary, I would get a pen and I would do that. And I I have books and books and books full of me having written characters over and over again. And I cannot write those characters now.

SPEAKER_03 1:47:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:47:34

But I can recognize them. And if I had not written them hundreds of times, I don't think I'd be able to recognize them.

SPEAKER_03 1:47:39

I started out tracing and then I moved to flashcards, so I literally at that point only wrote them once.

SPEAKER_08 1:47:43

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:47:44

On the flashcard, usually pretty badly.

SPEAKER_08 1:47:46

To me, that motor thing of doing the strokes in order and putting it in the city.

SPEAKER_03 1:47:49

I know that, but I was very greedy for language. I wanted vocabulary. And so for me, that was hard enough. And it took a long time to look at the stroke order. You know, and Plecko, you can see the stroke order. Right. I played the video over and over and over, and I play it like good six to ten times to try to get just that one card right. And then I'd be like, I need content now. I need the listening part and the context and the sentences. And I even though I can't produce it, I absorbed a lot of language and I needed to get to a certain point. And now I feel like I need to go back and do the writing, so I think that's when I have to come back and slowly sit down and write sentences. I think that might be the next hurdle. Oh, that sounds so painful.

SPEAKER_08 1:48:26

I I I I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone write sentences again. I know that.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:32

But and that's the part of this project, also known as trying to get a second language under my belt, is to try things I haven't tried before.

SPEAKER_07 1:48:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:39

And I know how visual I am from the beginning of this, of of learning this, that I know that if I write those out, like I remember in my astronomy class, my first science class after high school, and high school I was completely out, like like out in space somewhere, literally, no joke intended to the astronomy thing. But my I loved my astronomy class. And I remember as I was taking the test, I could remember like what page of my notes the information was.

SPEAKER_07 1:49:05

Wow.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:05

And not exactly word for word. Like it's not that I know there's a word for somebody that can remember like a photographic memory, that's it. I don't have a photographic memory, but I can remember some things depending on like especially if I've written it and highlighted it and circled it and and like wrote questions next to it. Like I started to write questions to myself in my notes and things like that. And those are the things I remembered.

SPEAKER_07 1:49:25

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:26

And that's why I think that this might be the next excruciating step that maybe break my soul. But we'll probably get finally get me to the next level.

SPEAKER_08 1:49:33

I think that's one of the things that was one of the first things that we talked about, which was if I if you add more levels of meaning while there's complexity to something, yeah. I'll speak clearly now. If you add more levels of complexity to something in a way that makes it easier to remember because there's more hooks attached to it. So if you when you circle it, when you write questions, you're putting more hooks on that thing that makes it stick more easily in your brain and makes more connections between that thing and other things and makes it easier to recall. For me, I guess the grammar, just the act of using. The grammar to form sentences in my mouth over and over and over again was enough repetition for me to get it.

SPEAKER_06 1:50:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:50:06

I don't think I personally would have been able to learn Chinese if I had forced myself to write sentences. No, I shouldn't have. I would never have finished.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:11

And and as we're saying this, I'm thinking, oh, maybe I should just type them. But that it is it's not the same. It's so not different.

SPEAKER_08 1:50:19

I have written proposals, I have written essays, I've written a book, I have translated a book, I have written very bad poetry in Chinese. But if you put a pin in my face, I can't.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:31

No.

SPEAKER_08 1:50:32

I would be very hesitant to write even one character without checking to make sure that I'm writing it correctly on my phone.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:36

I know, I know. And when I started to do to type with pinion input, I was like, that's it. I'm definitely not going to write Chinese. I know I'm going to exist in a digital space, but I feel like I've been kind of going against this wall of what next, what next, what next for about like what, five or six weeks now. And I feel like this might actually, I don't know.

SPEAKER_08 1:50:53

And here's the thing though, even if you do it and you realize that's not the thing that you needed to do.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:50:58

So long as that is the thing that is that you feel is in front of you, that is the thing you have to do. Oh, yeah. Even if the only good thing that comes out of that is you realize, oh, that's not what I was supposed to do. Oh, totally. That's still a step you can do.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:08

At least I'm still studying as I'm or studying slash using the language as I'm figuring out if it is or isn't the right place. Because right now I'm just stuck.

SPEAKER_08 1:51:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:15

So could it get me unstuck? I don't know. I guess I'll find out.

SPEAKER_08 1:51:19

So many Chinese people told me, Oh, you don't have to write characters. You'll never write characters. Why are you wasting all your time writing these characters over and over again? In my heart, though, I I felt that I had to do that if I wanted to remember the word. Yeah. Now.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:51:30

This is all empirical. It could be that I could have not done that and I could have remembered the words. But I felt that's what I had to do. And so that was the only thing I could do because that was the only thing I felt urgency to do. That was the only thing I felt compelled to do. Yeah. Because if I had not done that, I would not have done anything.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:51:44

So in a way, you kind of have to follow your compulsion to the next thing. I'm going to I'm I'm not I'm I'm I'm agreeing with you here. I'm not saying, Stephanie, why have you not followed your compulsion? I'm saying, yeah, I absolutely agree. Yes. Even though that wouldn't work for me, it maybe won't work for you. It is the only next step to take if that's what you feel like you gotta do.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:02

I am the sacrificial lamb for slow language learning. Use me if you will for because there's tons of people out there that that show you how quickly you can learn a language and how well you can learn.

SPEAKER_08 1:52:10

You don't, though. You don't learn it quick. You don't learn anything quick.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:13

Like not a lot of people say that and and show that long, excruciating process.

SPEAKER_08 1:52:19

I think the people who can learn language quickly are on the far end of that long.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:24

And I'm very impressed, and I wish I had that in my brain, and I don't, and I don't think most people do. So here I am, slowly trudging through and encouraging folks to follow me.

SPEAKER_08 1:52:34

How long have you been learning Mandarin? I can't believe I haven't asked you to go.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:36

Oh god. The first nine months were more of playing with tools because I thought I was going to make language learning tools, right? Apps and all that kind of thing. So it was learning about the language and playing with the tools. So I really don't count that. So I'd say probably a year. With the main focus being on reading.

unknown 1:52:54

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:52:55

And I made heaps, like leaps and bounds with reading last year. And then after my HSK III test, that's when I kind of fell off.

SPEAKER_08 1:53:03

You took HSK 3 after studying for less than a year.

SPEAKER_03 1:53:06

A year. I'd say self-studying, but honestly, I used a lot of people's resources and the HSK standard course books, which are disturbingly good. And I'm very critical of language textbooks.

SPEAKER_08 1:53:17

I looked for a while to try to find standard, like official HSK books. I couldn't find any. What? I guess I'm just real bad at internet.

SPEAKER_03 1:53:25

No, no, no. I'll I'll give you the name of this series. It's really, really good. One of my coworkers who just took an crazy ACE, HSK 6, was the one when I first started studying HSK who recommended them. And I I really like these books. Well, HSK is not speaking, right? HSK is the speaking test. HSK is the reading, listening, and writing aspect. And writing is very loose until you hit level four.

unknown 1:53:48

Right.

SPEAKER_08 1:53:49

So here's the here's here's the thing about HSK. I have not taken the HSK. After I had been learning Chinese for a year, I could not have passed HSK III. I am a thousand percent sure. So your first year has been much more productive than my first year was.

SPEAKER_03 1:54:02

But there's different things. You were using the language, and this does not Right.

SPEAKER_08 1:54:06

So this is a commentary on tests. Yeah. You know Hannah Lund. Did you interview Hannah Lund?

SPEAKER_03 1:54:10

I did, yeah. For a different podcast.

SPEAKER_08 1:54:12

She's real great. She got her master's degree at a Chinese university.

SPEAKER_03 1:54:16

I know.

SPEAKER_08 1:54:17

She knows more Chinese than I do. She could probably, and probably has, passed a higher HSK than I can.

SPEAKER_03 1:54:22

I think she said she took five. She probably ate six, though. I mean her university classes were in Mandarin, right?

SPEAKER_08 1:54:29

Oh yeah. Her like her thesis was on Chinese poetry, I think.

SPEAKER_03 1:54:32

Exactly. So she's reading and writing and listening, like everything in like higher level Chinese. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:54:38

So I hang out with her a lot, and we talk in uh we talk in Chinese sometimes. This is something we talk about, is the differences, and mostly I bring it up because I feel embarrassed that I'm making a living as a translator, and her Chinese is better than mine. I think if you if you gave me HSK right now, I could pass four. Don't think I could pass five. You're gonna have to pass four to start taking like non-language-based university classes. And I think five to start taking four like four or five.

SPEAKER_03 1:55:00

It's lower than you think, so it's probably four. Four.

SPEAKER_08 1:55:02

And then if you want to start.

SPEAKER_03 1:55:03

But it probably varies between programs and like bachelor's versus master's kind of thing.

SPEAKER_08 1:55:07

Right, right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they generally split it between, but um basically for cultural things you're gonna have to pass the five. I don't think I could pass five. Five. I don't really think I could. Because the reading speed that you need and the specific vocabulary, and then six, they have just so many idioms. It's insane.

SPEAKER_07 1:55:20

Exactly.

SPEAKER_08 1:55:21

Things that I have never come across.

SPEAKER_06 1:55:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:55:23

I would maybe come across a couple idioms in some like flowery marketing language, but I can just look them up. I don't have to have them all in my brain the whole time.

SPEAKER_07 1:55:30

Exactly.

SPEAKER_08 1:55:30

Um I I I in a way, if if I were not in China, I would have to depend on those tests to sort of prove that I can speak Chinese and that I to have some sort of thing to study.

SPEAKER_03 1:55:44

You don't need to take the test unless you need to prove your language ability for any sort of economic or or studying reasons.

SPEAKER_08 1:55:51

I'm so worried that I'm gonna go back to the States and have to try to get a job based on my Chinese ability. Oh, then you would need to take it. Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:55:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:55:57

Right. And that terrifies me. Because I've been making my living off Chinese for years now.

SPEAKER_03 1:56:00

But you're clearly good at studying language, and like I said, with the the course books, they're really good at prepping you for the test.

SPEAKER_07 1:56:06

Okay. That's fine.

SPEAKER_03 1:56:07

So you'd be fine.

SPEAKER_07 1:56:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:56:09

You'd be fine. I mean it'd be hard as hell.

SPEAKER_07 1:56:11

Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:56:11

But I don't like it. Because it's such a different thing. It'll be hard as hell. It's not a problem. Because it's it's a test. Right, yeah. It you're not talking to the computer. Right. You're done. Well, you can take a paper-based or you can take a computer-based. Right. And I like the paper-based so much more because I could write in the margins as I was trying to do it within the time frame. But I could be goofy for a second. But the test is on this really awful. Well, the what the one I took in Chang was on this really awful old colored screen, and it was just pick the answer and there was no scrap paper, and it was just I'm never taking the computer. You have to type it again.

SPEAKER_08 1:56:44

Like Chinese?

SPEAKER_03 1:56:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:56:45

Because here's the thing though, like Chinese input systems, even if you're just typing in pin yin, different input systems work differently. Yes. So they give you different suggestions. Yes. They different keys do different selections, and then selections available to you. So if I walked into a test, like learning the input system would be the first hurdle to even take in the test.

SPEAKER_03 1:57:05

I've only taken three. And the writing, they call it the writing section, was basically pinion input for a word. And then you then you select it. So that part wasn't bad at all. And the questions at the same time.

SPEAKER_08 1:57:15

But at the same time, I can't not take the computer test. Because I can't write with a pen.

SPEAKER_03 1:57:18

Then you wouldn't need to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_08 1:57:19

Yeah, if you if you want me to take a test.

SPEAKER_03 1:57:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:57:22

I need that keyboard.

SPEAKER_03 1:57:23

I know. I know. Because you do get dinged heavily, I'm I'm told, by people who take the paper test for your handwriting and your stroke order.

SPEAKER_08 1:57:30

I could even pass an English test if handwriting was Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:57:34

So you probably would have to grin and bear it for the ridiculousness of the format. And I did an entire video, literally half an hour after it, talking about the ridiculousness of the format and the different and the test room and all kinds of things. Thank you so much for coming on Changing Scripts today.

SPEAKER_08 1:57:49

It's my pleasure to be here. I am always excited to talk about these sorts of things because this is kind of my life. Language in a large way is your life. It's how you interact with people around you in a lot of ways. And it's not often that there's someone who is as deep in language as you are who has lived here for a while and is also learning it and can talk about these sorts of issues that we're facing all the time, these things that are important to our lives. Well, I almost feel like I am a third culture kid, and I'm I'm being I'm very appropriate I'm appropriating the word by using that.

SPEAKER_03 1:58:17

We should make up an I like making up TLA.

SPEAKER_08 1:58:18

Third language kid. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:58:19

Third language adult. TLA. Oh, three-letter acronym. That one is already taken. Especially in education shit. Um we'll think of one. We'll think of one. We'll think of one. I'd like to talk about that.

SPEAKER_08 1:58:29

This is this is a space that I never thought that I would be in.

SPEAKER_03 1:58:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 1:58:32

And that has all this fascinating stuff going on inside of it. And so I really love talking about it. Thank you for inviting me.

SPEAKER_03 1:58:37

The avalanche of thank yous, grazie mille, and sheshany are coming up right now. Thank you so much to our guest, Joshua Ogden Davis, who has not only volunteered so much of his time for this one episode, but he has volunteered to come back, and we are definitely going to take him up on that in the future. Number two is Damon Castillo, a brilliant musician based in San Luis Obispo, California. Woo woo! It's where I went to school. That's where I did my undergraduate work and where a little bit of my music heart continues to be thanks to Damon's music. You can find Damon's music, including his newer album, on DamonCastillo.com. It'll be down in the show notes. Last but not least, thank you to listener. It's because of your listening to the Chain Age Crypt podcast and also watching the Chain Age Cript YouTube channel that I continue to make these recordings. I really appreciate all of the feedback that you give, all of the listens, and all of the recommendations that you do to folks that you think might be interested in this. So please do pass on the podcast. We really, really appreciate it. Alright, thank you so much. More soon.

SPEAKER_00 1:59:46

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