It’s been a busy week.
It always seems to be a busy week here.. but really, this week was a Busy Week.
I had my first exams this week – Oral Chinese yesterday (which I think I screwed up) and Chinese today (which I feel so-so about).
I can almost recite the texts we had our exams on. I can write hopelessly stupid/idiot, bonfire and deep pool in Chinese – those three words contain the most difficult characters I’ve had to learn to date: 窝囊 (wo1 nang)，篝火 (gou1 huo3)，沟壑 (gou1 he4)。Incidentally, why is a word for hopelessly stupid so hopelessly difficult to write? I can’t help but think it’s a test of some sort…
I should feel exhausted today after studying non-stop for a week and writing a two-hour exam, wanting nothing to do with Chinese the entire weekend. Instead, I like studying Chinese more than ever, and learning characters is like opening one of those Russian wooden dolls – each character is like the biggest doll, with its meaning, history and development over the years as little dolls bundled up inside of each other. It’s absolutely exhilarating when I get the opportunity to open one of those dolls.
Examples:

膏 (gao1) – 唇膏 (chun2 gao1) is one of the Chinese words for lipstick, meaning literally lip cream. “cream” (as in lotion, shampoo, etc.) may be one of the definitions of 膏 today, but it originally meant fat, grease, oil, specifically the grease that cooling fat turns into. Mmm, attractive, no? I wonder what lip gloss translates into… Also, the meaning of the character becomes even clearer when one looks at the words it’s made up of – 高 (gao1) indicating the pronounciation and 月 (yue4) indicating the meaning. Apart from meaning moon, it also denotes that it’s a word related to the body – in this case, body fat. Cool, huh?
裹 (guo3) – means to wrap up, or be wrapped up. Same principle here, part of the word denotes the meaning, the other part the pronounciation. But instead of using the normal clothes radical (as in e.g. 衬, the left part of the character is the clothes radical) on the left side and the pronounciation part on the right side, it sticks the pronounciation part (果 guo3) in the middle of the character for clothes (衣 yi1). When I discovered this, the character became a joy to write – it was nigh impossible before to figure out how it should look. Oh, and also the character 裸 luo3, which was my suggestion for how 裹 should look, already exists, and it means to reveal, particularly by taking off clothes. It’s used in words like topless and nudity.
I have a couple of other examples nagging me, but I can’t remember them for the life of me, so TBC. I’m sure you guys are on the edge of your seats in anticipation.

Oh, and let’s not forget lots of cool set phrases, like 夫唱妇随，”husband sings, wife follows”, describing the traditional Chinese family structure of patriarchy. Although, our Oral Chinese teacher, Mr. Zhao, dryly noted that it’s the opposite with Shanghai women.


Wednesday was quite fun – I spent all evening studying for my Oral Chinese class with an American in my class and apart from a few phrases or specific words, we spoke Chinese the entire time. This is rarer than you’d think, since even advanced Western students tend to revert to English after a while. (it’s only with the Japanese and Korean students that I can maintain speaking Chinese, and that’s mostly because their English is hm, not very good) But he kept up the Chinese, and I didn’t mind at all, though it is an effort for me as well – Chinese is still my third language after Swedish and English. The crazy thing is, he’s only been studying for a year.
Work that around in your brain for a while. A single year, and he’s at my level of spoken Chinese, occasionally throwing out words I’m unfamiliar with. He gets my Northeastern accent, and I can recall only once where he asked me to clarify a word. I know people can be linguistically gifted, but that’s very, very impressive. Although I’ve yet to meet another person who’s attained the same level of Chinese in that amount of time, I’m constantly impressed and humbled by the Western students in my Oral Chinese class. Unlike Koreans and Japanese, who are used to character-based languages and have an easier time picking up words (a lot of Japanese and Korean words seem to be derived from Chinese, just pronounced differently), the Western students seldom have more than two years under their belts. Nico, whom I consider to be the best in my Oral Chinese class, has studied for two years, and he’s always asking about obscure characters, phrases and literary references that few others have heard of. Sure, it’s a little daunting, but most of all incredibly motivating.


(out of context)
“We’re HIBERNATING!”

Classmate on how he studies for the exams: “I have set phrases taped all over my walls.”

You know the expression “to want a piece of the cake”? There’s a similar one in Chinese, though for some unfathomable reason, the expression is “to split a glass of gruel”. Why on Earth would anyone want to split gruel?
We joked about this for the better part of an hour during Business Chinese class.