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julietToday I am in Xi'an. On arrival this morning I felt bizarrely grumpy, not to mention a bit knackered, so decided to spend most of the day being lazy and sitting around in the hostel courtyard, which is rather nice. Earlier they were playing L Cohen (Alexandra Leaving, among others), which made me happy. I did also have a wander along the city walls this afternoon, which were - well. They were wall-like, really. Most impressive, but I got more enjoyment from walking through the little park just outside the walls, where people were sitting around playing cards and some variety of draughts-like board game, and doing tai chi, and playing music, and suchlike. Maybe I am monumented-out.
The train last night was fine; I was in a carriage with a very friendly French tour group. (There was also one lone Chinese chap in our compartment, who took his bags and ran away shortly after the train started off; we presume he found a berth elsewhere that wasn't full of scary foreigners.) The lady in my compartment, Eliane, was lovely, and very pleased to find that I spoke French. Although my ability nosedived as I got more tired...
(I also have forgotten the strangest words - like "forget", indeed. And "train" which of course is, er "train". Whole sentence-constructs have stuck, but my tenses were sadly erratic. Happily Eliane's English was better than my French so we could migrate into that whenever I couldn't manage something in French. I did reasonably well, though, I thought, given that I haven't had a conversation in French since GCSE 14 years ago. This has, however, inspired me to lift a Poirot novel in French from the hostel bookshelf - I shall replace it with my book about the Terracotta Warriors before I leave tomorrow. My French is at least good enough to read something like that without a dictionary, albeit slowly.)
Last night on the subway I had a sudden breakthrough in terms of reading Chinese, when I was playing the "identify the small number of characters I know" game, when it suddenly registered that those characters don't just mean particular words, they also mean syllables, and that is how you put words together! I knew this intellectually already (as in if you'd asked, I'd have said that Chinese is syllabic), but it suddenly *made sense*. It was v exciting. I suddenly recognise a bunch more characters now, as well.
Curiously, this took *about* the same amount of time (a little longer, maybe) as a similar switch to seeing Russian as words did. I also noticed that when I went to Mongolia, where they use Cyrillic but to write Mongolian, not Russian, I suddenly slipped back to only being able to read things incredibly slowly - because I'd become accustomed to certain sorts of pattern-recognition, and those patterns don't exist in Mongolian. I'm guessing that the sudden increase in the Chinese I can read is a similar sort of pattern-recognition, and there seems to be a threshold experience-level of some sort. (Which I didn't hit in Mongolia as I was only there for about 36 hrs.) I shall be able to confirm this in Vietnam...
(Of course, I still can't actually *read* Chinese, I can just scan characters and go "ooh, I know that one! It is bei and also means north!".)
Speaking is more complicated - there seems to be a similar threshold where things start making slightly more sense and/or start sticking - I had real trouble with keeping *any* Russian words in my head at all for the first 2 or 3 days, and then it suddenly got easier. Practising a little bit on the people on the train helped. Chinese I'm much more nervous about because of the tonality, but I'm just about getting to the stage of looking more phrases up and being prepared to try them out.
It is a bit rubbish being Crap English though, and not speaking other languages. I really want to come back to both Russia and China, but not until I can actually *talk* to people.
The train last night was fine; I was in a carriage with a very friendly French tour group. (There was also one lone Chinese chap in our compartment, who took his bags and ran away shortly after the train started off; we presume he found a berth elsewhere that wasn't full of scary foreigners.) The lady in my compartment, Eliane, was lovely, and very pleased to find that I spoke French. Although my ability nosedived as I got more tired...
(I also have forgotten the strangest words - like "forget", indeed. And "train" which of course is, er "train". Whole sentence-constructs have stuck, but my tenses were sadly erratic. Happily Eliane's English was better than my French so we could migrate into that whenever I couldn't manage something in French. I did reasonably well, though, I thought, given that I haven't had a conversation in French since GCSE 14 years ago. This has, however, inspired me to lift a Poirot novel in French from the hostel bookshelf - I shall replace it with my book about the Terracotta Warriors before I leave tomorrow. My French is at least good enough to read something like that without a dictionary, albeit slowly.)
Last night on the subway I had a sudden breakthrough in terms of reading Chinese, when I was playing the "identify the small number of characters I know" game, when it suddenly registered that those characters don't just mean particular words, they also mean syllables, and that is how you put words together! I knew this intellectually already (as in if you'd asked, I'd have said that Chinese is syllabic), but it suddenly *made sense*. It was v exciting. I suddenly recognise a bunch more characters now, as well.
Curiously, this took *about* the same amount of time (a little longer, maybe) as a similar switch to seeing Russian as words did. I also noticed that when I went to Mongolia, where they use Cyrillic but to write Mongolian, not Russian, I suddenly slipped back to only being able to read things incredibly slowly - because I'd become accustomed to certain sorts of pattern-recognition, and those patterns don't exist in Mongolian. I'm guessing that the sudden increase in the Chinese I can read is a similar sort of pattern-recognition, and there seems to be a threshold experience-level of some sort. (Which I didn't hit in Mongolia as I was only there for about 36 hrs.) I shall be able to confirm this in Vietnam...
(Of course, I still can't actually *read* Chinese, I can just scan characters and go "ooh, I know that one! It is bei and also means north!".)
Speaking is more complicated - there seems to be a similar threshold where things start making slightly more sense and/or start sticking - I had real trouble with keeping *any* Russian words in my head at all for the first 2 or 3 days, and then it suddenly got easier. Practising a little bit on the people on the train helped. Chinese I'm much more nervous about because of the tonality, but I'm just about getting to the stage of looking more phrases up and being prepared to try them out.
It is a bit rubbish being Crap English though, and not speaking other languages. I really want to come back to both Russia and China, but not until I can actually *talk* to people.
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not speaking other languages
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