Zhao Ziyang's secret memoirs
May 14, 2009 by libjpnI've been trying fitfully to learn Chinese for the past three years. I'm not making any progress, but everytime I chuck the books, something happens that makes me want to give it one more try. There is no connection to these happenings, except that they make me want to be able to at least engage in basic conversation in Chinese. The latest is this which talks about Zhao Ziyang's secret memoirs. It is not like I want to read them, but things like this suggest, at least to me, that if you could just get below the surface, you might find out some really amazing things. This is not to suggest that only chinese culture has unplumbed depths, but it seems that if one could just get a peek under that covering cloth of language, there would be a whole world of things to see.
Comments
May 15, 2009, 01:05:14 nous wrote:
I definitely hear ya on this, although my languages of choice for plumbing unexplored depths would probably be Old English, Old Norse, and Finnish. I'm more likely to learn Swedish than any of these, though, and I'm not likely to learn any of them at all until after I can finish my damn dissertation.
But yes, I do yearn for more languages under my belt.
May 20, 2009, 22:07:21 Slartibartfast wrote:
OT, but I'm now reading [i]Mao[/i] by Jung Chang. Interesting, but written with rather less detachment than you'd want from a serious historical piece. Which, I guess by definition, it's not.
Really, it's a work of barely-contained fury. Not that Mao didn't earn quite a lot of that, but it'd be nice to see the same material presented more dispassionately.