Reignition

Sometimes motivation is just like a switch: without it you might think you can achieve something, but several months later it becomes a mere memory; with it, action flows like breathing. And such is my ceaseless study of the Chinese language. In China, over a year and a half ago, and in the weeks after, again I found my stride and lifted my general level. And then the power dissipated in the competing demands of life.

Now, again, on the scent of an imminent trip, I've swung my mind into a complete state of lingual urgency: absorb everything, spare nothing: not even a single character. My listening has almost reawakened; I still occasionally am overcome by streams of language, but generally it all goes in. My vocabulary will be the hardest to reactivate but some promising signs have emerged already; I've been hearing four-character phrases that I haven't seen for ages and recognising them. Feeling I was being misunderstood by one of the many agents in China, I launched a comprehensive Chinese e-mail to clarify what is a major city and what is not, and why a position in a major city is of high importance to me. And reading, apart from a few rogue sentences, has been fine.

All in all, nothing will stop me till my direction changes, and that could be quite some time!

Hidden highs

There are very few aspects of teaching that I don't enjoy. One of the ones I do enjoy immensely is just pronouncing words, preferrably multistress words, to model them for students: anXIety, eVENT, COMF'table. In my line of work, you can say them once, repeat them with exaggeration and drama. A single bugbear word can be several minutes of a lesson, first of all modelling the pronunciation with specific directions for tongue, tooth and lip locations; once mastering it, the student should next practice it in the context of a sentence, because producing a sentence takes some attention away from pronunciation - and pronunciation in real life has to be done with a lot of competing thoughts; and then they need to be monitoring themselves in speech to be aware if their accuracy has slipped. All of this entails a lot of repetition.

One of the recurring mysteries is how certain words can be so hard to say for some. ACcess, for one, is bothering one of my highly able students. He can say each syllable well, but together he either says: AXis or exCESS. When he stresses the first syllable, the vowel on the second automatically reduces; when he makes sure he says the correct vowel on the second, he instinctively stresses the second syllable, reducing the first. It does his mind in while I just get my kick from saying: ACcess, ACcess, ACcess.

There is also the mystery, constantly posed by another student, of how he is pronouncing what he is pronouncing. A common word like "that", he somehow mixes the "th" with "l" producing both sounds simultaneously. Usually mispronounced phonemes (sound units) are somewhere on a continuum of sound, like ten and -tain (from "maintain"). But there is virtually no continuum of sound between "th" and "l". I cannot replicate the sound (I may have once, but have no idea how I did it), yet he does it naturally when not monitoring the exact position of his tongue.

Of course, it's not always my students' pronunciation that can cause wonder; my own baffles me and others too. As stated in a blog sometime ago, my exuberant reading of difficult books in my youth caused me to create my own pronunciations for words I rarely heard. While teaching a few weeks back in the home of a friend, I defined a word my student, his wife, found: "AWry, that's when things don't go according to plan." The friend emerged from the kitchen cocking his head to one side to see this unfamilar word, before saying: aWRY. So much for the clouds of wonder that make an "infallible" teacher. "whilst" has also been mispronounced in a lesson by me.

Yesterday I borrowed a book I thought I must read: 100 words that everyone mispronounces. Here are the ones I have discovered that I fail at: niche, gnocchi, concupiscence, desultory, cadre, cache, lingerie, harass. (Of course, many of these have several "accepted" pronunciations which have to be considered correct.) While reading it though, I found one of my youthful pronunciations was in fact correct: BANal can have a first syllable stress!

English

It is always interesting to find the arbitrariness or the finickiness of the English language. Here are the classics for the last week:

"I did the gardening at outhouse (it must be big!)... My wife did the cooking inhouse (she doesn't contract out!)"

"I had to put my ass online (how important is the word 'the')"

A new adventure in Chinese

Argh. It is always a thought I express, accompanied by a lot of hitting of the head, after getting off the phone to a radio station. I have called talkback before and it's quite a thrill but this was the first time I had done it in Chinese.

Everytime I have called talkback it was weirdly surreal - you're wired with adrenalin, have a bit of a tremor going, you can no longer speak smoothly, forgetting your meaning, tripping over words (even in English): It is all rather frustrating. This time language naturally made it more difficult.

My biggest difficulty was actually trying to get the phone number before I called. It would be announced suddenly and rapidly, leaving me with bits and pieces. Then calling was interesting because you are just listening to a dial tone, hoping that you aren't just ringing the wrong number (there is no operator or background sound of the DJs). So you just wait and then suddenly they greet you and put you on the spot to start speaking (usually when you are thinking about the work day ahead).

Anyway, my call was to berate the poor quality of the Chinese New Year event at Ellerslie Racecourse. I was more timid than tigerlike. Ah well. They politely said they would take my advice to heart.

Swingback

Language learning is something that I've become quite skilled at. I can call upon huge resources and install regimented training and systems to absorb vocabulary, practice skills for every aspect of a language. This, of course, is even more true for the foreign language that most familiar to me - Chinese.

Two years ago, I resolved to pass the Intermediate Chinese Proficiency test and started an intensive period of self-study. I surpassed my expectations but fell less than 1% short of the highest grade. Since then I've been rather lax and my acuity became rather blunt.

So with new energies I have thrown myself back into language study and am even more regimented than those two years ago. These past two weeks my blurry listening skills have been sharpened to very close to the level they were at the time of the test and I'm recovering copious amounts of past learnt vocabulary and warming them back up. One thing that is always surprising whenever you start to relearn language is that you learn vocabulary that you know that you've never learnt before - and then think how you ever got by without it. In the 9 years that I have been learning and using Chinese, I finally learnt the word for tinfoil.

Whether it was from this sudden change in routines, however, by the previous weekend I was suddenly having trouble sleeping. Every morning I was feeling like repeatedly microwaved crud. This was compounded with a virus of some sort that blighted my work days and wrecked my weekend. Fortunately, the virus symptoms seemed to lessen when I was being sociable (I've always been like that), so I could comfortably celebrate the wedding of Myles and Sufong on the Saturday. Congratulations!

Work-wise, it has been a slow beginning but I have already gained students and once everyone is back working (some are abroad, others are yet to start the training formally for the year), I'll have a busier average work week than last year. And with the zeal I've pursued Chinese, every day has been full-on and satisfyingly tiring.