Thursday, August 1, 2013

Was ist los mit ihm?

As the more astute amongst you may have noticed, I haven't posted anything in quite some time. I've got a few reasons...

One big one is that I've taken on some contract work in my "spare time" which any regular readers of this blog will realise is extremely limited. In order to make any progress with this extra project I've been staying up late and so losing sleep. I can't work on it during my commute, of course, so I can still listen to language learning audio.

But I haven't...

Well, I have. I listen to German audio of course. There is just so much interesting and informative content. I've had some technical issues with my old phone (a Nokia N97) which I've since upgraded to a hand-me-down Galaxy S2. Unfortunately, it doesn't have an FM transmitter built-in and I need this to listen to the audio on my car stereo (no, it doesn't have bluetooth!). I plan on fixing this technical issue soon.

That doesn't answer the real question - what happened to my Chinese and Latin studies?

Well, firstly, let me say that I haven't definitely given either up. I did really enjoy both (problems with the highly variable Latin pronunciation aside) and I had made good progress for the time I devoted to it. One major thing is that although I still have my drive in which to do the study, which was the bulk of time I spent on it previously, I just feel like I don't have the "headspace" for it. When I have a spare moment, I'm focused on my new contract work. To study the languages the way I was requires some amount of reading too. When I've had some spare time to read when I couldn't work on my coding project, I've read about technical topics related to it to understand it better, because I am learning something new there as well. I have also made a lot of progress reading my German novel "Das Todeskreuz" (currently up to page 462 out of 515 - almost there!). I'm really enjoying it! Certainly more than the rather disappointing ending to "Der Beobachter". I understand German well enough that reading this novel and listening to German podcasts is actually relaxing, which is great because I spend a lot of my mental energy on my contract project.

But there was one thing that really depressed my enthusiasm, on top of everything else. In particular, my enthusiasm for learning Chinese.

You see, learning a spoken language necessarily involve a lot of, well, speaking. Speaking to native speakers of the language. I have plenty of them around me - far more than native German speakers. There was always one nagging problem which I figured would only affect me in the long term and which is exemplified by the following typical dialogues (in German and English respectively):

Conversation with native German speaker

Me: So, what did you do on the weekend?
German Speaker: We went bushwalking/rock-climbing/visited a museum/saw a movie/etc.

You know - they live an interesting life. They also have interesting opinions that show some deep level of thought on various topics, even if only in passing. Whereas...

Conversation with native Mandarin speaker

Me: So, what did you do on the weekend?
Mandarin Speaker: Nothing. Just some shopping. Nothing special.

Now, I've been working in my team with 2 fluent Mandarin speakers (one is a native speaker and the other was schooled in Mandarin but spoke Cantonese at home) and in the 1.5 years I've had this conversation with them, the answer is never really any different. Sometimes they go to a friend's house. Seriously. Even when they visit China you'd think they'd have a bunch of interesting things to talk about that they could do there that they don't get to do in Australia. No, not really. "What did you do on your holiday?" - "Just some shopping, visiting some friends."

So, shopping. Personally, I'm not that interested in it that I can talk about it every single time I have a conversation, but I guess it's not bad for a beginner. I know one or two topics which can get them excited - like how awesome China's communist army was in expelling the KMT or Japanese, and how great their military hardware is, and all that, but I found the one-sided, brain-washed point of view that I'm getting out of them to be quite dull, if not downright frustrating as no other point of view has any validity.

It makes for quite tedious conversations.

To be fair, I was a long way from caring about the specifics of the conversation, but I guess it just depressed my motivation to know that Chinese communist party propaganda was basically what I was in for. One of the Chinese I know in particular has definitely been "reprogrammed". This is the impression I largely get from the ones I work with - they're either brainwashed or they use a self-defensive ignorance (or just plain ignorance) to avoid discussing anything even remotely controversial.

I know, I know, I can just find more Chinese to talk to, ones that are more, well, "varied" in their ways of thinking. I'm guessing though that, in general, these will be fewer than the ones I've found so far.

I had a particularly unpleasant run in with one of them when I tried to point out the reason for simple things like why Chinese made products are cheaper than Australian products. I wasn't putting China down, just stating the facts like: lower environmental standards, lower standards of living, etc. I pointed out that the Yangtze river dolphin had gone extinct quite recently as an example of poor environmental controls. I got quite a rant in reply which was full of penis-comparing bluster about how fast China's fastest train is and how powerful their biggest supercomputer is and how great their army is. I also learnt that not many Chinese people have even heard of the Yangtze river dolphin, let alone know of its extinction.

So, yeah. I let one particular person get to me I guess.

My coding project is due to finish at the end of the year (let's see if it does) and parts of it will be ready sooner than that. It is language related, so once it's finished I'll post details here for language learners to take a look at.

What will I do on this blog in the meantime?

Well, I'm not entirely sure, though I do see that posts about the Goethe exams are still very popular, so I'll try to provide more material to help those getting ready for these exams, or just plain learning German! Hopefully my next post won't be so far after the last one!