Chinese Lessons Part I

When I first got to China I started to carry a notebook around and take little notes about the strange things I ran into. I thought it would be great material for a blog or story entitled “Chinese Lessons” in which I exposed about the whimsical and not so whimsical lessons of a middle aged man’s life journey in China. This strategy had some fatal flaws. First, I am a lousy note taker. Always have been. I considered trying to compensate by using a voice recorder but given that I don’t like to talk or draw attention to myself, speaking into a voice recorder was a double whammy. The second flaw is most of my whimsical and not so whimsical observations are hardly unique. Books and blogs of poorly written prose already exist on “chinese people cut in lines” or “i regained my soul while eating dumplings”. And, the final fatal flaw is I do not speak Chinese. Hard to write a blog called “Chinese Lessons” when you don’t know the word for “lessons”. In general I learn things when I have an interest and an aptitude. Maybe this is true for most folks. With languages, I neither have the interest nor the aptitude. My best friends in childhood spoke english as a second language. Did I ever ask them, even once, to teach me some spanish. Not that I remember. I had pretty much zero interest in taking a language class in high school, instead I choose “computers” as my high school elective. Kind of the the opposite end of the aptitude/interest pendulum for me. Most people assume I speak no Chinese except for 7-10 year olds who have no concept that someone would not be able too and they just blah,blah,blah (however that translates to Chinese) when they speak to me. The other common reactions I get is locals pointing out foreigners who speak “good chinese”, think Yang could teach me, or that I secretly can understand much of their conversation. That last bit is partially true but I understand it at an IQ level of about 35 so I wonder how intelligent those people think I am. But I am in China and it would be nice to be able to ask for paper when using the restroom so I decided to take some lessons. Well, I’ve decided at least five times to learn Chinese which will be the subject of my next post..