your story of learning/using Chinese

[huaxia]

Hi, guys.

Would you like to share with us here a story of your Chinese learning/using that has made your very proud of yourself or maybe something that has motivated you to continue your Chinese study for years? Or anything that would be motivating for the folks who just started the journey of Chines study?

I'm an instructor of Chinese and would like to know your stories and share them with my students. It's a long way to go for them.

[renzhe]

Chatting to a young couple on a hard sleeper train from Xi'an to Beijing was one of the highlights for me.

Just imagine -- you're on a sleeper train travelling through China and talking to the locals in Chinese.

How many people back home will experience something like that?

Also, some of the novels and series I've watched, which have never been translated into any European language.

[Meng Lelan]

My first summer ever in China, 25 years ago, I was shopping in 北京百货大楼 and saw a couple of deaf Chinese ladies walking and browsing the clothing section. I walked up to them and signed to them in American sign language. They responded in a flurry of Chinese sign language. Totally different. So we had to whip out note pads and scribble in our only mutually intelligible communication mode - Chinese characters. A crowd of over 100 curious shoppers surrounded us. The police had to come break them up. I'm not making this up.

Having to really handwrite in Chinese in order to communicate with the deaf shoppers really motivated me to keep writing in Chinese for the next two decades.

Those two ladies and I still correspond and visit each other by the way.

[huaxia]

To renzhe, sharing a hard sleeper cabin on a train and chatting with locals, wow, it's a once in a life time (or none in a life time) experience!

To Meng Lelan, writing to and visiting each other for 25 years, with this kind of long term friendship, it'd be hard for you to be not good at writing in Chinese.

I really see that you have to have some special personal experience to keep you learning Chinese (or probably doing anything else) for years.

[Daan]

Being in a school in a Beijing hutong on a freezing cold Saturday morning, surrounded by thirty quite poor kids in a classroom without heating, but fortunately endowed with many Marx posters. And then seeing them play outside afterwards, while their parents were working to make some money. But the straitened circumstances didn't deter those kids from having the time of their lives.

Or talking to an old couple taking care of a temple under a waterfall in the hills here in Taiwan. I didn't understand much because of their Mandarin accent, but I have the deepest respect for them. They must have been 80, yet they still climbed the almost inaccessible jungle path that took me over an hour every day.

[renzhe]

You've just reminded me.

When I was climbing Huashan, there was an old gentleman carrying food and other stuff up the mountain. He had two sacks tied to a long stick, which he carried on his shoulder. Everybody who has been to Huashan knows how difficult it is to climb some of the paths, even for younger people not carrying anything. It was extremely impressive watching him scale almost vertical stone steps carved into the rock with that pole on his shoulder.

I caught a bit of a conversation he had with a passer-by. He wouldn't say his age (maybe he didn't even know it), but did say that he was over 50 years old and that he carried a load up the mountain in the morning and went down in the afternoon every single day. He was one of the local villagefolk who made their living hauling things up and down so tourists staying in the hotels at the top have it easier. The passer-by was a wealthy guy from a city, and thought that the old man could find another job to do if he wanted to, that there was no need for him to climb up every morning, but I guess that he wasn't familiar with the life and conditions that the locals live in.

If I didn't speak any Chinese, I would have missed all that and he would have just been an old man with a stick.

[skylee]

The story at #6 reminds me of this picture I took at Taishan last year.

Many people do this at famous mountains such as Emei, etc. Personally I think it was inconsiderate for the passer-by to chat with the man in Huashan. I would think he was tired enough carrying his load. I was not being polite taking this picture either.

[buzhongren]

Im an avid tea drinker. On my first trip to SF Chinatown in the early seventies I bought tea tins with characters and pinyin. Each visit I bought more but beside the pinyin tea name the rest of the characters had no Pinyin or English. In the mid nineties I taught myself to lookup the characters using a Radical index to verify the pinyin was correct. I plowed through the rest of the characters one by one learning some grammar along the way in books. I can remember the first day I made the 茶 character appear on my Windows 3.2 NT computer using HTML. By 2000 the Internet has supplemented anything else I know about Chinese. Someone I know in China via Internet and I will soon attempt our first video audio Skype hookup so he can practice his English and my Chinese. I think Chinese has always been my calling from a previous life. I find it stimulating as all get out. I purposely keep myself from the education grind. I wished I could have starter sooner but maybe finish it in the next life.

Jim

[chrix]

Actually it's not really a once-in-a-lifetime story, but here goes:

once I was in Seoul for a 10-day Korean course during the Japanese Obon holidays, so I was taking the class with a bunch of Japanese OLs and housewives (apparently Japanese men don't even take time off when it's time to take time off), and we were living in this dorm, and there was a communication problem with the housekeeper, something about a key apparently, as the level of our Korean was way too low to meaningfully communicate with her.

But then I somehow realised the housekeeper spoke Chinese ("yàoshi"! She's talking about a key!), so I finally was able to talk to her, and tell my classmates what the trouble was with the key in Japanese. (I'm told many members of the Korean minority in China have come to Seoul to find work.)

[taijiphoenix]

I have been learning chinese formaly for about 5 months. This past weekend me and my husband went to a chinese resturant and my husband pointed out the drinking glasses had chinese writing on them. With my limited amount of chinese I was able to read the characters. I was very proud of myself. Although this event is rather dull, it has motivated me to work harder to learn more characters.

[Glenn]

I just caught the sentence 美國不因該這樣做 in regards to economic policies with China, by ear only. And not too long after that I caught 怎麼樣？美國年輕人說的話有道理嗎？ all by ear. That means I'm slowly progressing from a word here and there to a phrase here and there to even full sentences. That's pretty exciting (to me, at least).

I hope that counts. I'm on the low end of the ladder here too. No life-changing or once-in-a-lifetime experiences for me yet.

[taylor04]

I'm the same as renzhe, just talking to random people makes me happy. I've met some of the most interesting old people on trains for some reason, and this one guy from Hunan sticks out in my mind.

Another older guy that lived in my apartment complex started talking to me about the government, spouting off Maozedong quotes, had a lot of fun.

It was also really fun when I had family come over, teaching them all the little things about China, and showing them "real" China. I like to bargain for other people, and I remember how confused they were when I told them to walk away!

For me, I don't like to watch Chinese tv/movies, read Chinese books/newspapers or anything else. I get all my enjoyment from just talking to the locals. It's not the same using English, I just seem to enjoy speaking in a foreign language.

[crazillo]

When I came to China in January 2008, my intention was to fiind out whether teaching could be my lifetime passion. When I left China in the middle of 2008, two things were left behind: first the dream of teaching, although I liked it I now knew I wouldn't want to do this all my life, and secondly a part of me had changed and felt like it belongs to China. When I was back home, I knew I had to remain in contact with this country, this culture, these people. Enrolling for Chinese studies was the obvious consequence and I feel I've found my passion.