The issue has even popped up in the U.S. presidential campaign. Former U.S. Ambassador to China  Jon Huntsman claims fluency in Chinese, the result of a youthful stint as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan. On the campaign trail- Huntsman is seeking the Republican nomination for president- the American media states his fluency as a matter of fact. But is it? This in-depth article in Slate shows why there might be good reasons to be skeptical of Huntsman’s claims.

In the American political context, who cares? It’s dubious whether fluency in a foreign language (especially Chinese!) is an asset in the Republican field, anyway. In the annals of U.S. History, “I speak Chinese” doesn’t quite rank up there with “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”.

Of more interest to the Lost Laowai readership is this notion of “fluency”. What does it mean to be fluent? And is it a useful metric at all?

Technically speaking, no. For one thing, fluency refers only to spoken Chinese and doesn’t reflect skill level in reading, listening, or writing. Put simply, “fluency” refers to a speaker’s ability to speak without hesitation and self-correction. A person can be fluent in Mandarin without having a particularly good grasp of vocabulary, pronunciation, or grammar. Likewise, I’ve met many foreigners with a deep understanding of the language who have trouble putting even basic sentences together. Language learners come in all different types.

Rhetorically speaking, “fluent” has come to mean “advanced” when referring to language ability. After all, nobody wants to go to the trouble of defining his Chinese skills with HSK-like precision, especially in conversation with someone who neither knows what he’s talking about or cares. What is lost in accuracy is gained in convenience.

How do you define fluency?

If you’re reading this, you have already decided to seek higher education in an English-speaking country. Congratulations! Going abroad takes a lot of courage, and I’m sure you’ll do very well.

Before you go, though, I’d like to send you a modest list of things to remember when using the English language. While your friends and teachers will no doubt have suggestions of their own, you should keep this list handy. Without further adieu:

The words “beautiful” and “interesting” are neither beautiful nor interesting.

When asked about your favorite food, you don’t have to cite vegetables because they’re good for your health. And that’s health, not healthy.

If you use the phrase “in a word”, you only get one word. That’s it.

As the late New York Times columnist William Safire once noted, “avoid cliches like the plague”. Every coin may have two sides, but being reminded of that is like fingernails on a chalkboard.

It’s OK to say something negative about your hometown, province, or China itself. In fact, it’s refreshing.

Though technically accurate, describing your occupation as “worker” and your aspiration as “boss” isn’t descriptive enough.

Yes, we know China is a developing country.

You can’t relax yourself, as fun as it may sound.

And remember: as embarrassed as you may be about your English, it’s a hell of a lot better than our Chinese will ever be.

Have fun!

Sincerely,

Your collective lost laowai.

Wenlin was what helped me understand that characters had their own internal logic and weren’t simply randomly-scratched ideograms bearing no relation to one another. I have since had the honor of giving Wenlin to more than one newbie laowai and felt the same paternalistic glow as a father handing his 16-year old son the keys to the family Mazda.

The purpose of this post is to discuss which dictionaries to use when studying Chinese, and when. As John points out in the post, Wenlin is hardly the only tool in the laowai’s arsenal. There’s also Pleco for mobile devices, website based dictionaries like www.nciku.com, and Google Translate. Let’s also not forget those venerable paper dictionaries that your ancestral laowais were forced to rely on. They have a role to play, too. Here are some situations and the dictionary you might want to use while tackling them. This is merely my own set of rules, by the way, and I hope people will pipe in with their own amendments.

Your Chinese friend just sent you an article she’d like you to read, in Chinese, and you want to make sure you really understand it before you get back to her about it. Wenlin. Google Translate simply doesn’t have the accuracy yet to provide deeper understanding, and through Wenlin you’d be able to parse phrases and get to a deeper understanding of how the text works.

You’re slurping a bowl of noodles in a roadside cafe and don’t recognize the sign of the shop in the building across the street. Pleco. Being able to whip out your PDA or phone and get to the bottom of new characters on the spot is what makes Pleco such a handy tool for learners.

You’re a businessman who has been asked to translate a Chinese document for sale in the English-language market. Hire a professional Chinese-English translator. There are lots of good ones, both laowai and Chinese.

You’re curious how idiomatic English expressions can be rendered into Chinese. Nciku. The site’s English to Chinese dictionary is still superior to all others I have seen.

You have 10 minutes to get the gist of a 1,000 character essay written in Chinese that someone has asked you to interpret. Google translate. I hesitate to recommend it as a studying device, but in a pinch it can be helpful.

You really want to get to the bottom of how the whole stroke order and radical systems work. Paper dictionaries. They confound the hell out of most foreigners at first, and if you spend a lot of time trying to read them you begin to feel eternally grateful that the other, electronic dictionaries exist. Paper dictionaries though do contain the guts of the Chinese language and it’d be hard to call yourself an expert in the language without knowing how to decipher them.

Clearly these are just my preferences, and I’m sure other laowai would have their own set of guidelines. The point is though is that if you’re serious about learning Chinese- and if you want to stay in China awhile you ought to take it seriously- knowing what tools are at your disposal is key. Chinese is hard but doesn’t have to be a painful slog. The next time you run into that cute 美女 or 帅哥 you’ll have a better chance at communicating with them.

As you probably have guessed, this hypothetical guy described above was me. As of the end of July, I am no longer a laowai, but rather an ex-laowai. Or, if the term ‘ex’ has too permanent and negative a connotation, I am a laowai emeritus. A laowai in exile.

You get the idea.  For the past seven weeks I have been back in my native US, here in New York City beginning my Masters at Columbia University.

To a person who has never lived outside of his home country, the rigors of reverse culture shock can be difficult to understand. But like a lot of expats I approached the prospect of going home with some trepidation. On previous, short visits home in the past I had always felt a little out of sorts, never knowing how to convey my lifestyle to people who couldn’t imagine it.  I was afraid that these nagging difficulties would amplify once I returned home full-time.

On the contrary, my return home has gone far more smoothly than I was expecting. There are certainly moments when I miss China like an old friend, but for the most part I’ve been pleased with how things have been going. Granted, living in the pressure cooker of New York has kept me too busy to be overly sentimental. But all things considered, with the caveat that it’s only been two months, I feel like I have a few words of wisdom to offer those of you thinking of making a similar jump to mine.

1. Everyone says that having China experience is valuable. Is it true?

Yes and no. Some people assume that just having gone to China to work, in and of itself, will make them employable for life. This certainly isn’t true. Even being able to speak Chinese well is no guarantee for prosperity either unless you want to focus solely on translation. But China is certainly a major buzzword these days, and the country will not become less important anytime soon. Having China experience combined with the language and some other skill (photography, writing, business knowledge, etc) will be immensely valuable. At least I hope so, as this is what I’m banking on!

2. I’ve been home for short stints a few times since moving to China, and I’ve always found it a little weird. Is being home for good just as bad or even worse?

Actually, it’s better. One of the problems with previous visits home for me was its temporary nature; once the initial euphoria of being with friends and family wore off I felt out of place and just wanted to go back to China. This time, I’ve done things people do when they settle in somewhere: I’ve bought a phone. Applied for credit cards. Even got a library card. Having these trappings of a stable, normal life have made it much easier to deal with the transition.

3. Will there be other people around who can relate to my experience?

This depends on what you do when you go home. For me, being in New York and in a grad school program where half of my classmates are foreign has made it extremely easy to meet people who can relate to me. For others, though, it can be difficult. But to be sure, the world has become more globalized- far more people have chosen to live abroad, and far more immigrants have made their way into the West than before. With a little bit of effort I don’t think it’d be difficult to find people who have similar stories to share.

4. Everything seems hunky dory. Have there been any unexpected challenges?

For me, the simple nuts and bolts of living as an adult in the US has proven to be more difficult than I had imagined. For a person a few months shy of 30, I had to learn things people my age normally have down: how to rent a car, how much produce in a grocery store should cost, how to set up online banking, etc. These were things I simply never had to think about, or were completely different in China.  Two years back here should take care of many of these things, but for now this is something I’ve found slightly vexing.

For many of you, I suspect this post might be redundant or irrelevant- either you have no plans to leave China, or you’re sufficiently flexible in both worlds that my advice isn’t needed. For the rest of you, I hope my words of advice on being an ex-laowai might be of some use or even comfort…and after all, when it comes down it you can always renew your Laowai card!

Image by Bentley Smith

My friend is Chinese-American.

When I mentioned this fact to the head of the school, she frowned and looked down. She then said that while she herself harbors no grudge against English teachers who look Chinese, such a teacher would be unacceptable to the parents of the children at the school. She then, in an futile attempt to be helpful, suggested I recommend a white friend for the job, even one ‘who doesn’t speak much English’.

When I broke the news to my friend, he took it better than I expected. ‘It’s nothing new,’ he said, adding that even when he lived in Shanghai he encountered similar discrimination.

I was reminded of this story this morning while reading this post in Foreign Policy magazine’s excellent Passport blog. The author, a Chinese-American like my friend, recounts the derision, discrimination, and just plain confusion he encountered as a so-called huaqiao in China.

At first, the difficulty of many Chinese to deal with foreigners of Chinese ancestry seems quite peculiar. Millions of people in China know of relatives who live outside of the country and are well aware of the ubiquity of Chinatowns in just about every major Western city. When I tell people in China that I come from San Francisco, they often immediately bring up the city’s famously large Chinese population.

Yet despite the great numbers of Chinese who have traveled and lived abroad- much less emigrated- the vast majority of people in this country inhabit a very Sino-centric universe. In the rural hinterland, where roughly three-fifths of the population resides, many people have never left their province, much less country. Many have never spoken to a foreigner in their life. For these Chinese, the only trappings of Western culture they are familiar with might be tin cans of Sprite and Coke.

We Americans are often accused, with some justification, of being unworldly. This trait stems from the vast size of the United States, the fact that one of our two neighbors is culturally similar Canada, and the convenience of being native speakers of the world’s de facto lingua franca. Yet most non-aboriginal Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders can clearly trace their ancestry back to various ‘Old World’ countries.  In my own case, being of mixed Italian/Norwegian blood carries as much significance to me as being born and raised in the United States.

As a result of our ‘new world’ mentality, we are able to differentiate ethnicity and nationality without much difficulty at all. In China, a vast, largely poor nation that has sustained several periods of complete isolation in its history, ethnicity and nationality are knotted together firmly in the national psyche.

Slowly, things are changing. Greater numbers of Chinese nationals are able to study and work overseas than ever before, while simultaneously greater numbers of foreigners are choosing to live in China. The net effect of these movements should greatly alleviate the notion that people, like my friend, of Chinese appearance are necessarily Chinese.

Ask any Chinese person about his or her favorite food and you’re bound to hear the word ‘delicious’ peppered into the conversation with alarming frequency. An example: “In my hometown you can eat many delicious food”. Another, when eating together: “How is your food? Is it delicious?”.

I don’t mean to slag off the Chinese whose success in learning English in a vacuum are admirable. But it’s time we, the collective laowai, must put a stop to the overuse of ‘delicious’. I hereby propose that we help relegate ‘delicious’ to the truly extraordinary situations in which the term applies.

In essence, ‘delicious’ for some reason has become the standard Chinese translation for hao chi (好吃), an extremely common phrase one hears in the culinary mecca that is China. What’s odd is that hao chi is used in almost precisely the same way we use the simple term ‘good’ to describe food. In both languages a distinction between food that is merely good and food that is extremely good (‘delicious’) are made without difficulty.

Furthermore, the Chinese do have a term that corresponds well with the English ‘delicious’: fei chang hao chi (非常好吃), or literally  ’unusually good’. Even the simple hen hao chi (很好吃) would suffice.  A conscientious English teacher would simply have to ask students to reserve ‘delicious’ for food that doesn’t come around every day.

So how does this happen? How can so many Chinese people make this simple error in English, whereas situations of similar complexity are handled with aplomb? My sense is simply that when the Chinese began to study English en masse and the vast majority of English teachers were fellow Chinese, someone wrote ‘delicious’ as the translation for hao chi in a glossary and the entire nation thus became inculcated with the slight, yet nagging, error.

This, my laowai teaching friends, is where you come in. Every time one of your students says delicious when they mean hao chi, please give them the courtesy of correcting their error. Little my little, we’ll be able to put ‘delicious’ in its proper lexical context.

Anyway, I lasted a month. For awhile I liked it; being able to be picky, feeling light after meals, munching on protein pills, experimenting with exciting new foods like tofu, and feeling solidarity with the vegetarian masses from my exceedingly vegetarian-friendly hometown, San Francisco. But one day, a hunger pang so great came upon me that I instinctively knew only good old fashioned meat would satisfy it. So I caved and ate a chicken burger. Then another. I was deeply, deeply satisfied and haven’t considered vegetarianism ever since.

Kunming, where I now live, has a fairly sizable population of vegetarian foreigners, and as a result quite a number of vegetarian-friendly restaurants exist in the city. Yet the other day I met a foreigner who has chosen temporarily to give up on vegetarianism while living in China. He has by no means become a full-blown carnivore, but has simply accepted that occasionally he will have to eat meat, like it or not.

When I asked him why, he gave me two reasons. First was simply convenience. A number of vegetable dishes and even the odd tofu dish in China contains bits of meat, and this vegetarian simply grew tired of asking waitresses in broken Chinese to alter the dish for him.

More surprisingly, he gave up vegetarianism for what he termed ‘ethical’ reasons. He recalled traveling into the Yunnan countryside and being the guest for a rural family who obviously had little money. This family had slaughtered a pig to serve he and his friends, and he simply couldn’t bear to refuse them. So he ate the pig.

He told me that he normally avoids meat and when he returns to the West, he’ll happily resume being a vegetarian.  But for now, in a nod to his new environment, he’ll eat meat when he feels that it is appopriate to do so.

I found his story quite interesting, and wondered whether such behavior is unusual. So, a bleg to the LL community as I’m sure a number of you are vegetarians. Has your vegetarianism changed since moving to China? Have any of you temporarily or permanently begun eating meat in China?  If so, why? Also- have you encountered a situation in which you felt bad about refusing meat?

I’d be interested in reading your stories in the comments.

This situation happens, I think, for two reasons. One is that those laowai who have taken the time to learn Chinese at a decent level feel a sense of pride in their ability and want to use it as much as possible. Having invested much in learning the language, they don’t want to sound like just any other fresh-off-the-boat foreigner in the country. They’re in China, darnit, and they want to speak Chinese.

The second reason is the belief- mostly incorrect- that the Chinese simply don’t believe foreigners can learn their language. The foreigner might speak flawless Mandarin but the barman or service person might see the big nose and think, “laowai= English language”. The foreigner then thinks that his effort to learn the language might be worth no more than a hill of beans if nobody thinks he can actually use it.

In reality the reason most Chinese people want to speak English with you is because they don’t often have many opportunities to practice.  At schools everywhere in the country, even in tiny towns, students are required to learn English. Yet despite the massive number of laowai teachers in the country, the vast majority of Chinese students learn their English from Chinese teachers.  Added to a general inability for most people to travel abroad, opportunities can be scant for the locals to practice the English skills they spend so much time trying to refine.

These Chinese people I mention don’t include the juvenile yahoos who scream ‘Hallooo!!’ at you while you’re walking to work.  They’re merely ordinary folks eager to flex their English muscles, and while it may pain you to hear again about 5,00o years of history or that China is a developing country or other tired chestnuts, you’re doing a well-meaning local a rich favor.

Fortunately, the vast majority of people in China don’t speak, or don’t want to speak, any English so there’s plenty of opportunities for us to practice. And I’m sure listening to us butcher their language might just be the inspiration they need to throw some English our way.

I suppose had I arrived in China a little later in life, I’d have known how to cook. Over the years the friends with whom I used to scarf burritos and pizzas during our university days gradually learned how to prepare their own meals. They had little choice; in the West, young people with meager salaries simply cannot afford to eat in restaurants all the time.

But in China, eating in restaurants is one of life’s great pleasures.  From the beginning I embraced the wonderful Chinese concept of 热闹: hot and noisy. I’d gather a group of friends, order way too much food, and enjoy a raucous meal for a mere fraction of the amount it would cost back at home. And when you’re done, you’re done. No dishes!

I admit this is a strange way to begin an essay about why I now like to cook. I think, however, that my experience described above might resonate with some of you who, like me, enjoyed a mid-20s period of adolescence as laowai in China.

As you might have guessed, I now cook. I cook even though it probably doesn’t save me a lot of money, even though my repertoire of dishes isn’t terribly impressive, even though I could certainly spend my free time doing other things I like. I cook even though I live in a neighborhood where there are literally dozens of cheap and cheerful dining options.

So in homage to a neat little essay I stumbled upon this morning, I now present why I cook:

• I cook because I derive an almost primeval pleasure in controlling fire
• I cook because I like to know exactly what I’m eating- a lifetime of eating processed foods, America’s unfortunate contribution to global cuisine, has instilled me with a desire to eat simple, natural foods.
• I cook because as I approach 30, being able to provide for myself- and perhaps someday for others- has become a greater priority.
• I cook because sometimes I can cook for others, and seeing their enjoyment of my culinary creation is a real pleasure
• I cook because I’m not one of those people who can just eat anything and not gain weight. To the contrary, if I don’t watch what I eat I can fatten up real fast.
• I cook because I was raised by two good cooks and feel that the ability to do so is part of my lineage.
• I cook because I love food. And wine.
• I cook because I even like doing the dishes now. Funny, huh?

What about you? Why do you (or don’t you) cook? Perhaps a lost-laowai recipe thread might be the offing, no?

photo by massdistraction.

First, Ben Ross debunks the myth that Chinese is the hardest language to learn in the world, even if it certainly seems like it at first.

And from back in 2003, here’s a Brendan O’Kane post going through the basics of mastering our beloved 中文.

Enjoy!