Eric's Beijing Diary

Well, I went back to school this week. No, I mean me. I am a student again. I am going to school again at Diqiucun (Global Village), the Korean language school in Wudaokou. I had dropped out for a year to study hanzi (kanji) on my own. I say "Korean," because it is a Korean company, not because they teach Korean. There are two main benefits of this school. One is the flexibility. You can choose any two-hour period during the day, and the minimum period you need to pay for is two weeks. The other benefit is cost. A school like this over in the Chaoyang business district would probably be a lot more expensive. But this school does not cater to foreign businessmen. Most of the students are working class Koreans. Wudaokou is one of the "little Korea's" that are springing up around China. The students at Diqiucun are the "hewers of wood and drawers of water" for the Korean business community--working class people who come to Wudaokou to work in one of the Korean businesses here. So the tuition is 12 RMB ($1.50) per hour. Because the structure is so flexible, the class composition does change from time to time, especially at the beginning. There are about 10-12 students in the class I have chosen. The majority of the them, as mentioned, are Korean. At the beginning of the week, the only other foreigners were a kid from Katmandu, a Spanish guy, and myself. The kid from Katmandu disappeared after the first day, the guy from Spain after a couple, then a guy from El Salvador showed up for a day or two. Now I haven't seen him for a couple days. But I think I am going to stick with this class. It takes about three months to get through one book, and the book I have is one I have used before. The last time I used it, I brought my digital audio recorder to class every day and recorded all the dialogues. They are coming in handy now.

As I mentioned, I had dropped out for a year to study on my own. The problem was that I was having trouble keeping up, because I couldn't read the exercises, at least not very well. I have talked before, I think, about the fact that I have spent the better part of my adult life developing self-teaching techniques. But in the past, self teaching has been based, primarily, on my love for reading. This includes language study. During the years I lived on the road, I always carried a Latin grammar with me. Mind you, I didn't get very far, because I stopped my study when I left on the road and focused on studying technology. The only remnant of that experience is a very good Latin dictionary, which I use once in a blue moon because of my interest in etymology (word origins). But the point is that what little I was able to gain from my study of Latin, I could gain right away, because I knew the Latin alphabet. With Chinese, it is quite a different matter. To speak a language, you need grammar and vocabulary. But it's not easy to learn vocabulary without an alphabet. Most people in China tell me that you need 800 characters to be comfortable. I think it might be more than that, but even 800 is quite a bit. The grammar books are pretty good, but you do get to a point pretty quickly where you just can't do much if you can't read. So I decided to drop out and study on my own, concentrating on hanzi. In other words, I wanted to teach myself to read, so that I could manage the exercises in the grammar books. Problem is, its pretty boring. I addressed that problem by downloading a bunch of sermon mp3's from the Internet. I centered on a bunch of sermons by Dr. Ferrell Griswold. Griswold is a Baptist from the Old South who takes his time saying stuff. Every day, I would do my study with preaching in the background, keeping my Bible handy in case there was something I had to refer to. I would force myself to keep studying my hanzi until old Dr. Griswold said, "Let us all rise for prayer." Somehow, that helped me to keep focused, and provided just enough distraction to keep me from getting too bored.

Now I am back in school, and reaping the benefits of that effort. I still don't know that many characters, but it's a lot better than it used to be. But I did need to get back to the classroom, because I have noticed that when I am taking classes, my listening comprehension improves considerably. It has suffered over the past year that I have been focusing on reading. This summer when I was in Langmusi, some Chinese tourists invited me to a barbecue. I heard someone ask one of the young ladies who had invited me about my language proficiency. (One of the interesting things about being a foreigner is that people are always talking behind your back right in front of your face.) She said, "His speaking is alright, but his listening is not so good." I was struck by this comment, because it represented precisely the tradeoff you are signing up for when you do what I did. Now I need to switch and put a little more emphasis on listening. When I was in Qingdao, I was accosted by a peddler hawking tourist maps. I told her that I already had one. A lady sitting nearby said to her husband, "His Chinese is very good." Her husband said, "He said, 'you.' How hard can that be?" While I appreciate the lady's complement, I tend to agree with her husband. My conversations tend to be choppy and fragmented. I am not comfortable yet. Part of the reason is that I just don't have enough vocabulary. Little by little. Stay tuned...