Chinese language break-down

I've had a couple of questions about things with Chinese language, so I thought I'd try to address this. I am by no means very knowledgeable, but I will share what I know.  First, a clip from one of the recent Pink Panther movies. In this clip, Inspector Clouseau is attempting to get rid of his French accent and speak English better so he can blend in in America. This is how I feel on a regular basis when I learn a new word in Chinese. 

Every time I feel like I say something right, I get corrected. Jonathan says I add lots of Rs and Gs where they don't belong, or I use the wrong tone. I'll come back to tones in a second, but first let's talk about pinyin and characters. 

Pinyin- This is the system for writing the phonetic sounds that the Chinese characters make using the Latin (Roman?) script. Wikipedia tells me, "pīnyīn literally means "spelled-out sounds." It's tricky though because, it looks like English, but the letters make different sounds than they do in English. For example, an x in Chinese makes the sound of a sh. So the word xiao (meaning small) is pronounced sh-ow (the ow like OW! I hurt my finger!) but read it as one syllable. The vowel i in Chinese makes an ee sound like the ee in bee. But, it is a very phonetic system, so once you learn their letters, than you can read anything that is written in Pinyin. From what I've seen thus far, pinyin can be helpful in some places- road names, metro and bus stops, but more frequently you see things written in characters instead. 


Chinese characters- Characters are the picture words. Each picture means something and when you put different pictures together they form different words. So, 大 means big. But 大象 means elephant. It makes sense that the character for big is part of the word elephant right? Sometimes the combinations make sense to me, sometimes they don't. Chinese is frustrating at times to me because I see a character I know and get excited but then it doesn't actually mean what I think it means. For example, I saw this the other day- 人口. The first character means person, the second means mouth. I asked Jonathan what it meant. Turns out the combination means population. So close, yet so far. The only thing I can compare it to in English is how you can change words by adding more letters. Take the word eat, then put a gr- in front of it and you have great...which doesn't mean anything along the lines of eat. 


Tones- Last, but not least, we have tones. There are 5 tones in Chinese. Tones are the rise or fall your voice needs to make to say different words. The following picture illustrates how they work. If you have any kind of music background, I think it will make sense. You'll notice there isn't a 5th tone on the picture, because 5th tone is neutral. 

It's really important to use the right tones when you speak or you could very easily say the wrong word. This is illustrated below. The word 'ma' means 5 different things depending on how you say it. Also, if you look right above the 'ma' in each of the examples you can see the tone marks written. What? Ridiculous I know. How am I supposed to learn this language. Also, if I get excited about something or angry- any tone knowledge I have goes right out the window.  

Last example, because I thought this was just too fantastic. The word for dumpling is (in character and pinyin) 水饺 shuǐjiǎo. See the tone marks on top. You pronounce it shway (falling and rising tone) jow (falling and rising tone). Now, the word for sleep is: 睡觉 shuìjiào pronounced the same way, but with 4th tone falling tones on each syllable. Now I'm just nervous I'll be walking somewhere with Peter and he'll be sleeping and I try to tell someone and instead I say, "He's a dumpling." Or, I actually want to eat some dumplings and instead I say, "I want some sleep." I will confuse the heck out of anyone. Awesome. Wish me luck on talking here.

Catch that train!

Last week, we went to Shanghai for church district conference. It was a great trip. It was fun to get out of our city and see some neat things. We stayed with an expat family while we were there...it was amazing to be with them and have some good food. But I'll save that for another post. This post will focus on our getting to Shanghai.

We left on Saturday. That day, Jonathan had a cultural field trip with his program. We went to a really cool mausoleum and walked up many stairs (more on that later too). Our train left at 7.22pm. The field trip ended at 5.30pm...plenty of time to catch the train, right? We got back from the trip, took the bus home, and stopped by a bakery to grab some dinner to take on the train. The bus took longer than expected because traffic was really busy. We got home and quickly packed our bags and left. We considered taking the bus or the metro, but decided to grab a taxi just to be sure we caught our train. 

We got in the cab at about 6.45pm. We felt like we had tons of time until Jonathan told the cabbie where we were going and when our train left. Our cab driver told us there was no way we were going to make it. Now, the thing about the trains here is you need to have your passport in order to buy your ticket. My passport was at home; Jonathan's passport was at the police station with the paperwork so we can get residency here. So if we missed our train, we weren't going to Shanghai. No church, no making new friends, no break. I started praying that we would make it. I really needed this trip. I need to get out of our apartment. I needed a change of scenery. Jonathan kept talking with the cab driver, and it was at that moment the cab driver decided he would do everything in his power to get us to the train station as fast as he could. My prayers quickly changed from, "Please let us make it to the train station on time." to "Please don't let us die in this taxi tonight." Our dive was flying. We were passing everyone and taking different routes, We were driving through tunnels I didn't even know existed in our city. 

Jonathan and I were keeping a close eye on the time. Minutes ticked by and I accepted that we would not be making it to Shanghai. I started composing an email in my head to send to the woman we were going to be staying with. Then, we could see the station in the distance. We arrived with mere minutes to spare. Jonathan paid the cabbie and tried to tell him to not worry about the change, but our driver insisted on giving us our change- and he did it in record time. The time was 7.19pm. 

Now, naturally, Pete had taken this moment to decide to fall asleep. He was sleeping so peacefully in my arms. His little hand was pressed against his cheek- so angelic. Jonathan helped me with my backpack, we walked briskly to the doors, and went though security. Luckily there was no line. We went up the escalator, dodging people the whole way up. When we got to the top, we saw our gate. It was about halfway down the station. Jonathan said, "If you give me Peter, I can run with him." "But, he'll wake up!", I said. Jonathan responded, "Either we run and wake Pete up or we miss our train." I handed the baby over and we ran like there was a pack or hyenas at our heels. Peter woke the second Jonathan started to run and looked back at me with a look of terror/surprise, but he didn't cry. We made it to the gate- the doors were closed. But the nice lady let us through! We ran down the stairs like mad men and turned the corner. The train was still there! We were the very last ones on, and the train pulled away as we were still finding our seats. Whew! What an exciting time catching our train. We never want to be that close again.

Peter's new tricks

Since we've been here in China (one month today!), Peter has learned a thing or two and gotten bigger. He is now 8 months old, and he weighs 16 lbs 12 oz. It's incredible how fast he seems to be developing now. One day he will start doing something new and in a matter of days he'll be so good at it. So, here's his latest skillz...

#1: Pulling up on anything taller than he is (aka: everything) and standing, walking along it, and falling down.

 He can pull up on the tv stand in the living room...

 He thinks he is so big now.

 Baby feet, because they are cute and you know you want to squish them.

 He can wake up from naps and pull up on the big bed.

 He can pull up on the couch! See, told you. Anything that is taller than he is, and bam! the child can climb it.

#2: Escaping from his bed.

 Until very recently, Peter slept on the floor on this mat. In the above picture, his mat is situated between our bed and the closet. We push it up on the wall above his head so he can't play with the outlet and so he doesn't bonk his head when he is sleep crawling or when he wakes up and tries to crawl but is still really tired and starts ramming things with his head.

Anytime we put Peter to sleep when he didn't think he was tired enough, he would lay really quietly, until we leave the room. I would sit down on the couch and all would be silent, for a few minutes more. Then, I'd hear, Smack! followed by heavy breathing. Then another, Smack!, then some more breathing. The smacks were the sound of cute little baby hands coming off his nice soft mat and hitting the fake wood floors. Anytime I'd go to get him I'd be greeted with this face:

 Oh, hi mom, I was just lonely, so I came to find you.

 If you didn't get him quickly, he would either come around the corner and find you, or he'd go the other direction and play with the empty box, the nightstand or the green chair. 

His other recent skills, unphotographed, are eating food with his own hands, saying (usually in a loud voice), "Da da da da da da da da." He doesn't connect the sound with Dad, but he loves to say it. He can also sit down from his standing position without toppling over (about 80% of the time), and he can let go with one hand while he is standing (about half the time when he does this he falls). The Chinese people still love him- he got 2 lollipops when he went to the store with Jonathan last week. He's a good baby and we love him.

Living the Dash

A couple of Sundays ago, our bishop (local church leader) took a moment to speak and he said something that really stood out to me. He talked about how there are sections of time in our lives when we are doing different things. He was the scout leader from 2003-2006, he worked a certain job from 2000-2007, and so forth. Sometimes these things overlap. Some of them are of a longer or shorter duration. Now is our (the Nelson family) time in China: August 2013-June 2014. We have a time right now where we get to start over. We can choose how we want to live this section of life.

He stressed the importance of "living the dash", that period of time in between the 2 numbers. Instead of just looking forward to the end and saying, "Only __ amount of time left until...", we should instead grasp hold to the dash, to the time we are in right now. Instead of missing my oven and different foods, we should throw ourselves into our time now, here. This has not been an easy thing for me here in China. There are many times I want so badly to be back in America, where I know what foods I like and how to cook them, where I can communicate easily, where I'm not scared I'll die anytime I'm on the road. But I'm trying harder to "live the dash". We will only be here a short time. I want to have good memories that I can share. I want to grow and become a better person from this experience. I know that is possible. So, here's to living the dash. Do the same wherever you are.

Learning to Read

Three of the other wives in the Flagship group are native/pretty dang awesome Chinese speakers. Mengxi- grew up in the states, but her parents are Chinese and she is in the program, her English name is Margaret. Esther- grew up in Taiwan until she was 12- her mom is Taiwanese. Amy- is Chinese and she grew up in China, but lived in the states for some time. Esther and Amy are not in the program (because they grew up speaking Chinese), but their husbands are. 

Esther has offered to teach the non-Chinese speaking wives as much Chinese as she can while we are here. We have class 3 days a week for about an hour and a half. We just tell her what we want to know and she helps us with pronunciation, characters, tones, and pinyin (when Chinese words are written in Roman letters). We've had 2 classes so far and they are great. It's nice to have a reason to get together and she is incredibly patient with us waiguoren (read it- why-go-wren, meaning foreigner- I hear this one a lot on the streets). 

The first day of class she showed us this video. It's a Ted talk called: Learn to Read Chinese....with ease! by a Taiwanese woman named ShaoLan Hsueh. It's crazy fantastic and makes me feel much better about my ability to learn characters. Watch this video. It's neat.