JanieM （好久不見 or, if your browser prefers pinyin, hao jiu bu jian le）apparently just got back from the Middle Kingdom, so this is a shameless attempt to drag her over here.
A travelogue thread
Mar 17, 2010 by libjpnComments
Mar 17, 2010, 18:54:40 JanieM wrote:
Thanks, lj. ;)
Maybe this is a good way for me to stay in touch while avoiding the mother ship for a while. I have been saying for a long time that I need to reclaim my life from the internet (speaking of addiction) (see the other thread on OCSteve kicking the smoking habit), and this trip made a good opportunity. Besides just the difficult access, every time I looked at Obsidian Wings I saw Marty Marty Marty and more Marty, and the word dislike doesn't come close to describing my feeling about the effect he has on the discourse. It's not the opinions (other people share them, more or less, and don't have that effect on me)...but it's not worth spending more time trying to articulate.
As to travel in the Middle Kingdom -- I had an amazing and wonderful trip and will come back here and write a bit about it as a reward to myself after I've started to catch up on work. In the meantime, I did keep a travel log for family and friends at:
http://www.iwantthefish.blo...
Since my mother was reading the blog, it is heavily censored in certain ways. ;)
There were other reasons for self- censorship which maybe I'll explain later. Related to that: When I come back here, one of the things I'll want to say something about is the teaching of English in north central China -- I taught my son's classes with him for the first week of the semester, and made myself available to the faculty as an ad hoc consultant. That was an adventure!
And there's plenty else to talk about, too.
Mar 19, 2010, 00:56:56 libjpn wrote:
That brings back a warm memory, when my folks came over to Japan when I was teaching in a high school, my mom ended up talking to everyone and she mused just before she left that she could come over and start teaching English. She loved talking to people and had an infinite amount of patience. (which she obviously needed with a son like me)
Mar 19, 2010, 10:44:20 JanieM wrote:
There's enough to write about to fill a book, and I don't know what would be most likely to get a conversation going, so I'm just going to plunge in and try to write under two big headings: travelogue, and language learning/teaching. I'll try to keep the comments to a manageable length and will (depending on busyness elsewhere) keep posting until I run out of steam or everyone else runs out of interest. ;)
It would/will be especially fun to bounce some of the language thoughts back and forth with lj (or anyone else who has some experience teaching a language to non-native speakers), so I hope I manage to say something provocative in that department.
[u]Travelogue item #1[/u]
One special feature of my trip was the timing. I went during the long winter break so that Jamie (my son) could do some traveling with me. We didn't take a whole lot of advantage of that in the end, but being in the country for Spring Festival let me see a lot of local culture that I would have missed otherwise.
The constant visiting and feasting -- for days, and I saw only slivers of it -- were unlike anything we have at home. The [I]weeks[/I] of fireworks, ditto. The fact that most restaurants and a lot of businesses were closed for days or even weeks, ditto again.
Jamie has been teaching oral English at Yulin University (Shaanxi province; Yulin is maybe 40 miles from Inner Mongolia) for a year and a half and is committed for another year and a half. He came home during a lot of winter vacation in 2009, was involved in some teaching over last summer's break, and was generally unprepared for the complete and utter desolation surrounding the college over winter break. All the little restaurants where he (and the college students) eat were closed. For my first few days in Yulin we walked a mile or so to the grocery store almost every day because otherwise we would have starved. After the first 6 days of the new year (starting with the new moon on 2/14), places started gradually opening up, though many seemed open but really weren't because they were doing the major cleaning that is traditional at the time of the new year.
By the time the students came back for the start of classes on 3/4, everything was bustling again. We walked out each morning to Jamie's favorite breakfast place, where you go up to a window and buy pancake-like and breadlike objects for takeout (there's no seating; you can't go inside). I typically bought a round thingie like fried bread stuffed with chives. Jamie usually bought 2 "pancakes" (more eggy than our pancakes, but similar) and a big sheet of another kind of breakfast bread. With all that plus Jamie's habitual can of Coke, we paid about 5 yuan each morning (well under a dollar) for food that carried us easily through the morning. The food was fresh and delicious. I have yet to eat anything at home that doesn't seem plastic by comparison, except organic vegies I've been cooking for myself at home. It is beyond depressing that it's so hard to get good fresh food here in what is still, despite hard economic times, one of the richest countries in the world.
/rant about food; I'll take up some other topic for the next travelogue installment.
Mar 19, 2010, 10:56:43 JanieM wrote:
[u]Language item #1[/u] -- background
I have been a language nerd since third grade, when they made us start diagramming sentences. Despite that, and despite the fact that I was a diligent student, grammar didn't really begin to "gel" for me until I took Latin during freshman year in high school. Latin helped me understand English grammar better; I especially loved the orderliness of all the inflected grammar that Latin has but English doesn't.
After 2 years of Latin came 2 years of high school French, plus a semester of German in college, a year of Old English in grad school, and various dabblings later on: Irish, Russian, Italian, lately (with little success) Chinese. I never became fluent in any of them, partly because I'm an incurable dilettante and a bit lazy at heart, and partly because I never went overseas and immersed myself in a place where I would have been forced to become fluent or be too lonely for words.
Besides all that, I studied linguistics both on my own and in classes at the University of Southern Maine from 2004 to 2007, and taught phonology and morphology at USM in the spring of 2007 and again in 2008. If I had been younger and there had been any job prospects whatsoever, I might actually have been well on my way to a Ph.D. in linguistics by now.
And besides all [I]that[/I], I have done a lot of writing and editing, and I have a Ph.D. in English literature. So I somewhat rashly considered myself knowledgeable enough to be useful to the English teachers at Yulin. That enterprise turned out to be more complicated than I expected, and a little humbling. Stories to follow in the next installment.
But before I close for now, I want to say that I was touched my lj's reminiscence about his mom's visit and and her musings about returning to Japan to teach English. I had a wonderful time with Jamie, both in terms of the whole visit (5 weeks) and in terms of our experiment in teaching together. I went from being incapable of imagining how he manages to survive in Yulin (long story, bits of it will come out in the travelogue items) to seeing how it might be possible, with the support of a few good friends. But I suspect that there's one advantage that lj's mom had that I don't, and that is -- I assume she could speak Japanese, while I can't speak Chinese. Actually two advantages: I am far from having an infinite amount of patience. Also, I refuse to believe that she needed any excess of patience to have lj for a son. ;)
Mar 19, 2010, 18:35:13 libjpn wrote:
I should point out that when I upgraded the blog installation, I couldn't get the BBcode plugin to work, so there is no available mark up in the comments right now. Sorry about that.
I should also note that my dad is Japanese American, but my mom immigrated from England when she was 14, so she didn't have any Japanese. I was, as a young person, too smart by half.
One thing I wish I could tell my mom is how much her and dad coming to visit me came to me as validation. It's not that my parents were saying (or even implying) that I wasn't going to amount to anything, on the contrary, they have always been totally and incredibly supportive. But there is a gap from them being supportive to me showing them what I had accomplished. For me, it's probably not that much different from my 5 year old daughter coming to display the picture she just drew, but having the chance to show your parents that you can cope in this strange foreign place is a special kind of blessing. It's a gift that I don't think my mom realized she had given (and I am only being able to see that 20 year old gift because of JanieM commenting and bringing back those memories) I imagine that the same thing happens when you show your parents where you work, or that they saw how you raised your kids (if that worked out, knock on wood), but my parents married late and I did as well, so that stretching out of the generations makes that possibility disappear. And there is something about thriving in a foreign country that makes it special.
Anyway, keep the stories coming! If this thread gets too full, I'll make another one, unless you'd like to post them on the front page.
Mar 20, 2010, 00:26:04 JanieM wrote:
lj, I knew at one time that it was your dad who was Japanese, but I had forgotten. When your mom visited and talked with people, was she talking with people who knew some English, or were you translating? Jamie and I did some of both. A lot of his colleagues, naturally, speak decent English, and some of his students aren't bad either, and with those people I could have something resembling a "normal" conversation. Though in all honesty, after a week or so I had slowed myself down quite a bit, both in articulation and in vocabulary. And sometimes Jamie translated when the conversation didn't get too esoteric.
This business of talking with people is a central factor in a lot of my reactions to the trip. It will keep coming up, for instance right now, in the next thing (after food) that is on my mind as I process my impressions.
TRAVELOGUE item #2
[Abandoning tags for now.]
A big theme that I didn't address in my travel blog was the frequency of "China or America?" questions. One variation was when people said, baldly, "America is better. I wish I could live there." These comments I just left alone, a response made all the easier because the handful of people who made them to me didn't speak English. One poignant one came from a woman who, if I had met her in the U.S., I would have taken to be in her late 70's (at least) and who turned out to be roughly my age (60). I gathered that her impressions of America came from TV (heaven help us), but in any case I just nodded and followed her into the kitchen to watch her cook some festival food. That required no translator. (General and generalizing note: people of my generation or older in China are, let's just say, *weathered*-looking. Considering what they've lived through, it's no wonder.)
Another, more difficult "China or America?" question was of the form: "Here's a topic. Do you like China's way better, or America's?" The topic could be anything from where the oldest generation lives (and who decides), to the existence of a national education policy and the mandating of English study, to whether parents should buy houses for their adult children when they get married, to ... well, I'll get to the broadest one that came my way later. But invariably, the person asking the question was ready to argue that China's way was better.
I was thrown off guard by these questions. I am reasonably articulate (I hope) in writing, but not quick of tongue. And I am especially not quick to figure out how I want to respond when I feel like the question is a set-up. In this case, the "set-up" aspect came because the questions assumed both an either/or answer, and a monolithic notion of what a huge modern nation-state is like. The context generally did not allow for all the qualifiers, disclaimers, nuances, subtleties, and exceptions I would have had to introduce in order to even attempt to answer the questions.
Before I describe a couple of these encounters, it may be relevant to note that Yulin, though it's a city of some 300,000 people, is in the back of beyond. Even its size is (I assume, though don't know for sure) relatively recent, a side effect of the booming energy industry in the area (coal and oil, maybe gas?). As I wrote in my blog, no one paid any special attention to us in Beijing. In Yulin we were like zoo animals. Apparently the admonition that weaves through an American childhood (at least the ones I'm familiar with) -- "Don't stare, little Johnny/Janie, it's not polite" -- is not part of Chinese notions of courtesy.
Mar 20, 2010, 00:27:00 JanieM wrote:
[Seems my last comment was too long. Either that or it's going to show up 3 or 4 times. Sorry about that. Anyhow, here's the rest of it.]
The staring was the thing I found most wearing during my month in Yulin. It was the thing that at first I imagined must wear on Jamie the most (I'm not sure of that now; I think he has evolved ways of blocking it out to some extent); it is the chief reason one of Jamie's "foreign" (in this case American) colleagues has decided not to spend a 2nd year there. I softened my descriptions of the phenomenon in my blog, partly because there's a chance some of Jamie's Chinese colleagues will end up reading it, and *I* didn't want to be rude or overly whiny, ha ha. But I'm not sure I would ever be able to block out the sense of threat or at least dislike that I felt in some of the stares. They came from men and women, older folks and younger people, groups of teenage boys, well-dressed women and weathered farmers carting their wares in from the country, businessmen with cell phones. Some people looked away when I gazed back; some nodded a smile if I smiled and said "ni hao"; but many did none of those things. They just kept staring.
The point of this digression is to raise the question of whether the "China or America" questions were more a characteristic of Yulin's isolation than of Chinese attitudes in general. I don't know the answer (and I myself need to be careful about generalizing). A lot of people I talked to in Yulin had never been out of Yulin District, much less out of Shaanxi province, *far* much less out of China. But some of them, including people who posed this kind of question, had been AFS exchange teachers in America. So I can't ascribe the phenomenon entirely to the fact that it came from people who were relatively untraveled. And it seems telling that no one ever tried to start a discussion that implied room for "my country has strengths and flaws, so does yours, let's explore them."
I'll describe a couple of the specific instances next time.
Mar 21, 2010, 09:26:44 JanieM wrote:
LANGUAGE item #2
Having never become fluent in any language other than English, I have to start out by saying that I have great respect for the effort put into the task by anyone who has become competent in a second (or third etc.) language after babyhood. The students in Jamie's oral English classes have a lot more courage than I do about opening their mouths and trying to speak a foreign language. More globally, I am also amazed and bemused by China's top-down mandate that all school children learn English.
Or should I say, "English." Because that's the part that I find most interesting. "Chinglish" in itself is a source of endless entertainment (a small collection of my favorites here: http://picasaweb.google.com...), but I'm talking about something broader than that.
As a sometime linguistics student, I know that there's not just one "English." And who's to say that the one spoken in the country that will allegedly soon have more English speakers than any other on earth isn't as valid as all the rest?
But let me back up.
Via email, Jamie often uses me as a resource and sounding board in relation to questions posed by his colleagues and students. I collected more such questions directly when I was there. Here's a sampling:
1. Why is it correct to say "I'm going to school, church, jail, etc." but "I'm going to *the* theater, or *the* movies, or *the* races"??? What's the pattern, i.e. how do you know when to use "the"?
2. When do you use "anyone, everyone, etc." vs. "anybody, everybody, etc."?
3. We've been taught (they told me) that it's correct to use "each other" when you're talking about two people, but "one another" if there are more than two; do you agree?
4. In a sentence like this: "Stephen Hawking has experienced the obstacles facing people with disabilities." -- is the phrase that starts with "facing" an an adverb of time, or a participial something or other... I forget the exact second option, but neither option covered what I think the phrase basically is, which is a participial phrase function as an adjective modifying "obstacles."
For other language nerds, I may come back to these later. But my basic reaction, especially once I had been in Yulin, taught some classes, talked to the faculty, and gotten a feel for the whole enterprise and for the range of people's competence in English, was to say something like this:
Stop worrying about this stuff. Most of it has very little to do with everyday fluency; most native speakers have never heard of any distinction between "anyone" and "anybody" or between "each other" and "one another," they couldn't care less, and they wouldn't notice one way or the other as a mistake on the part of a non-native speaker. Conversely, spend more time on things that native speakers get right totally unconsciously, but that many, even some of the best, of the Yulin English majors habitually get wrong, e.g.:
-- how to use "not" and "do" in negations (e.g. they'll say "I want to not go" where a native speaker would say "I don't want to go);
-- how to talk about future time (e.g. they'll say "I'm going to Beijing three weeks later" where a native speaker would say "I'm going to Beijing in three weeks" or "I'm going to Beijing three weeks from now");
-- how to use kinship terms (e.g. in English, "grandfather" does not mean all the men of your grandfather's generation; in this kind of context, it often seems like people are just speaking Chinese with English vocabulary, and they can be very stubborn about it).
However -- it is not up to me to tell them what their priorities should be, and the experience of trying to answer questions directly has made me rethink how I might be helpful in the future, when Jamie sends me questions or if I ever go back for another visit.
[More eventually. But I would love some commentary from people who are actually in the trenches teaching English...hint hint.]
Mar 21, 2010, 13:27:13 libjpn wrote:
I'll give number 1 a try. My starting point is Charles Fillmore's Lectures on Deixis (highly recommended), and I go on to suggest that the reason we use go to [ø] school/home/church is that those places are deictic, similar to words like here/there, right/left, or this and that. The absence of a definite article suggests that the location is somehow unique to the individual, and another person might not go to the same place, yet it is common enough that we imagine everyone has a home they go to, a school they attend(ed) and a church. I note one shouldn't draw the conclusion that all Americans go to church, but one should take into account the cultural ubiquity of these institutions. In fact, in some places, one can say 'I went to hospital', (it sounds vaguely British), which suggests that either there is a particular hospital, but the experience of going to hospital retains so many common points of reference that if you weren't discussing aspects of one particular hospital but the general problems of being in a hospital, you would use that.
Another parallel is the fact that many placenames don't take the definite article ('I'm going to France', but 'I've been to the US' or 'I want to see the Pyramids') so if they think of these nouns as a list of particular places, that also helps students who works from brute memorization (like a lot of asian students do)
Mar 21, 2010, 23:25:49 JanieM wrote:
Quick reactions:
You implied another variation that I hadn't thought of -- the presence or absence of "to":
Go to school.
Go to church.
Go to jail.
But:
Go [ø] home.
FTR, I can't think of an example where "the" would be present without "to." Although on second thought, you might say "It went the way of the wagon train" (i.e. became obsolete).
I have the impression that "in hospital" is standard usage in the UK and Ireland, whereas "in the hospital" is standard in the US. (Though I think I have seen counterexamples lately, so the usages may be migrating and mixing.)
One of the books on articles that Jamie asked me to buy for his department treated "to [ø] x" etc. as the default (with lots of examples) and "to the x" etc. as exceptions that just had to be memorized. FWIW.
I wondered early on whether this distinction might have something to do with the history of English: the examples of the “the” usage that were given to me were “to the theater” and “to the cinema,” and it occurred to me that “theater” and “cinema” came into English from French, whereas “school,” “church,” and “jail” didn’t. This was a typical glib “I can dream up an explanation for anything” reaction, inspired by a vaguely remembered explanation (perhaps in The Language Instinct?) of how in English the words for animals we eat are survivals from Old English, while the words for the meat came via the Normal invasion: cow/beef; pig/pork; sheep/mutton.
I also tried an explanation something like yours: that “the theater” and “the cinema” (or “the show,” as we called it when I was a kid) are generalized abstract places, quite different from e.g. that particular movie house on the corner. Jamie’s colleague immediately came back at me with “well then, why do we say ‘go to church’?” In the same vein, I wonder, in the context of your explanation, why something like “jail” fits in with “church” and “school” and not with “theater”? It doesn’t really make a lot of sense to me, but I’ll keep thinking about it. (And “home” without “to” adds to the puzzle.)
Also FTR, I can't think of many "the" usages: theater, cinema, show (all very similar in meaning), and races. Can you think of any others in this generalized sense? I.e., I thought of "I'm going to the game tonight" -- but that implies a specific game, so "the" makes sense there.
Place names coming in a separate comment.
Mar 21, 2010, 23:38:26 JanieM wrote:
Place names --
I’ve always wondered (but not so pressingly as to do anything about it) why it was common to refer to
the Ukraine
the Ivory Coast
the Gambia
(I can’t think of any others off the top of my head)
but not
the France
the England
etc.
I never included “the” United States with Ukraine et al. because (without much reflection) I assumed that “the” is because of “states.”
Googling “The Ukraine” I came up with this, from http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/...
[blockquote]Some country names are preceded by an article—like “The United States” and “La France”—but most are not. Sometimes it depends on what language you are speaking: in English we call the latter country simply “France” and “La República Argentina” is just “Argentina” although in the nineteenth century the British often referred to it as “The Argentine.”
When the region formerly known as “The Ukraine” split off from the old Soviet Union, it declared its preference for dropping the article, and the country is now properly called simply “Ukraine.”[/blockquote]
(Using tags, even if they don't work, to avoid the problem of embedded quotes.)
Funny enough, that is another of the usage books Jamie had me take to China. This set me wondering about French usage...”Vive la France” and “les Etats-Unis” etc.
Googling "Ivory Coast" I found this:
[blockquote]Despite the Ivorian government's request, the Anglicized rendering "Ivory Coast" (sometimes "the Ivory Coast") is still frequently used in English.[/blockquote]
On the one hand, I'm surprised that the BBC (inter alia) declines to follow the Ivorian government's preference. On the other hand, we don't refer, in English, to "La France" or "Roma" or "Deutschland," so why we shouldn't use the English rendering of "Cote d'Ivoire" is perhaps a bit of a mystery.
??
Mar 22, 2010, 08:19:46 libjpn wrote:
The observation that home doesn't need to be preceeded by to suggests that home is even more deictic than the others. In the linguistic framework I worked in, (functional-typological), the notion was that linguistics resembles biology more than it does binary logic, so grammatical phenomena would be placed on clines. The clines we would have here would be
true deixis>>>indefinite entities and
shared reference points>>>RPs that have to be introduced into the conversation
so
here/there>home/downtown>school/church/jail>(the)mall/bank/gym>>>(a) small restaurant/new place/friend's house
(don't know if those are going to show up on one line)
As references move from being shared entities to being new points introduced into the conversation, articles and other stuff are appended to them, sort of as flags to tell the listener 'hey, I'm going to start talking about this now'. This also is nice because it helps students figure out how to make a distinction between definite and indefinite articles. Thus, in the first introduction of an entity that we are not sure that the listener knows about, we use the indefinite article
'I just visited a new restaurant downtown'
If the listener actually knows the restaurant, they can confirm it is shared knowledge by using a definite article or a demonstrative
'You mean the/that new Thai place? How was it'
Once the referent is placed in the shared knowledge of the participants, you can then refer to it using a pronoun
'It was nice, but not as good as the place uptown'
I think that this framework can also provide an partial explanation of place names, which, coupled with the historical weight of usage, creates an inertia so that you find 'residue' that retains the old usage. Thus, lots of place names that we get from French (like The Dalles, end of the Oregon Trail) or undefined regions (like the Arctic, the Great Plains, The Deep South) end up with a definite article.
btw, does Jamie have access to decent computer printout and/or photo copy facilities? I've got a 'textbook' that is primarily made up of various activities Japanese ESL learners that I can send him as a pdf (or bung it in an envelope and mail to him) Even if he didn't want to use the activities as is, it might give him ideas for generating his own versions.
Mar 22, 2010, 08:54:21 JanieM wrote:
Okay, now I really have to slow down and think this through.
Meanwhile, Jamie would love to have a pdf with activities he might use with his students. I'll send you his email address via the email I have for you from when we corresponded a while back.