Class Roundup: Humanity

Humanity in Globalization ended on a high note in all regards. The final I felt I did quite well on, having used the entire two hours to compose two solid essays. There is one service here at HKU where you can pull up old examinations from previous terms, but being that the first time this class was taught, this particular resource became more approximate than anything else. For part of the course content, our professor said to look up exams from a different class, Human Security, to get a good idea of what that will look like. Some questions were almost exactly, if not entirely, word for word the same.

To study, I went over all the readings (again) as well as my class notes. Being that most of the lectures were guest speakers, my notes were kind of sparse and largely irrelevant. However, for the optional review session, the professor gave us a thorough outline of the class with which we could structure our studying better.

Besides the final examination, there were also the term research paper, which I did on language rights and language evolution in the wake of globalization, as well as participation grades in lectures (based mostly on attendance) and tutorials.

For the last two tutorials, we did a role-playing exercise called Zanda. Zanda is a multinational state with a president who bombs tribal people to get them off their well-endowed mining lands, which the government has leased to a multinational corporation. Yanda is a neighboring country that has national security on its mind with the instability of Zanda yet supplies rebel armies with weapons. Wanda also borders Zanda and has had an influx of tribal people coming in as refugees. Queensland is the ex-colonial government that owned Zanda up until recently.

We got roles from tutor, ranging from nurse with multiplex relationships to heads of state and United Nations officials, along with NGO leaders, journalists, and the head of that multinational mining company. I was given the role of President of Wanda.

The whole exercise was quite amusing, with us debating for our interests and attempting to reach solutions. The problem was that we had no idea if we were allowed to reach solutions, meaning that we had no idea how much action we could take or if we were just talking.

The funny thing is that we were told that we were allowed to bring up Zanda as an example for our final examination. I thought it was funny to use such a frivolous activity as evidence for such an examination. Needless to say, I didn’t use it at all. Instead I referred to readings and guest speakers. Anyways, Zanda was mainly done to show how much work it is to reach consensus and get action done on such levels. I think that most of us already understood this concept though, seeing that not much gets done on the macro level on a day-to-day basis in the world.

The class ended on a positive note in all regards because my little dispute with Globalpost.com has been resolved. To refresh, they republished this blog by automated means consistently and without permission. To make things more irksome, they in no way acknowledged the fact that they did not own my content, claiming copyright over absolutely everything on their site. And on the monetary side of things, they were ostensibly making money off of my original work. After persistently emailing their blog coordinator for about a month, informing them of my position, they finally got back to me.

They apologized profusely, saying that they thought they got permission from all the authors of the blogs they copied onto their website to do so and that mine just fell through the cracks. They also said that if I would like, they would keep my posts on their website, praising my writing, lol. Maybe if they had said it the other way around, that they would like to publish my posts on their website for whatever reason, I would have gotten off my high horse and granted it.

One more final to go now!

The Trips that Never Happened

I thought I was going to go out with a bang. To end my stay here, I was going to travel around—to Singapore, Japan, and South Korea to be exact. Despite my intentions though, I won’t be going to any of them in the near future, and while I’m a little saddened, I know I’ll get over there some day. 

It came down to a lack of earlier planning and the fact that I would have been traveling by myself. I was highly advised by my parents not to travel alone, because it’s always good to have at least one traveling companion for safety, even if you speak the language. (English and Mandarin for Singapore—yes, Japanese I could brush up on, South Korea I would have been relying on hoping to find English speakers.) I understood my parents concerns, but I wanted to go for it at least once. I heard that traveling alone is an experience like no other, and similar to studying abroad, I wanted to make this experience my own.

The ultimate reason why it didn’t work out was because of money. Because I hadn’t planned earlier, the prices were all inflated for the holidays. Because I was to be traveling alone, accommodation priced for two was little cheaper for one. One of the major services that I’ve been using, Cathay Pacific Holidays, doesn’t even allow for single travelers to book because all their prices are worked out for parties of two.

I looked into a weeklong trip to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Hotel and flight alone would have cost me $700 USD. For just $300 dollars more, I could have brought along two more people. So in the end, I decided that in order to spend money in a more sensible manner, I would postpone these trips indefinitely. After all, I’m most definitely coming back to East Asia sometime.

Class Roundup: Phonetics

Here I sit in the medical library—three exams down, three to go, and that’s it to the semester. I think I did well enough on my last final, that being for Phonetics, one class which I’m glad to have taken abroad. It’s not so much that it’s bad back home, because it’s not; it’s more because I get to study phonetics in light of other languages here, and the best part is that instruction is still in English.

I’m told that here, HKU imposes a curve. I’m used to curves just being advantageous to the student, because back in UCSD professors have a lot of leeway in letter-grade assignment. Hardly ever would a curve be used if it would systematically lower most everyone’s grades. I had one teacher who only gave out Fs to people with less than 40% in the class (whereas the standard F grade is under 59% or 60%).

So I don’t think I did poorly in the class, but I hope that I did better than average. Even though most of the class was focused on English (and I have English intuition), I found that on the first midterm I missed a lot of points because I wasn’t dealing with Standard American or British English. It worked to the local students’ advantage because they got to memorize standard language rules, whereas I had a hard time memorizing standard language rules since I had intuition to contend with. On the other hand though, the local students were allowed to go by their intuition in the Cantonese segment of the course.

The final examination turned out to be all right. It wasn’t super easy but it was fair. It turned out to be okay mostly because the professor allotted us a lot of choice, all languages considered.

For the last two assignments of two exercises each, we had to transliterate a series of sentences and phrases in and out of Cantonese and Mandarin to the International Phonetic Alphabet. It was difficult for me because even though I have some experience with both languages, many of the words that I know in my head I wouldn’t know how to write down. This is because while there are something aspects of writing characters in Mandarin that lend hints as to their sounds, there is little to no other indication of how to pronounce characters you don’t know (especially considering the tone). Colloquial Written Cantonese, using many of the same characters as Standard Written Chinese (based on Mandarin), is a whole other story, since many older speakers of Cantonese can write things down as they would literally say it. Luckily, I have a friend who helped me pronounce these phrases, and with the fact that we went over them in tutorial before turning them in, there was no problem with the exercises.

What was disconcerting was that the professor said that he’d have some similar problems on the final examination. It was a little worrying, but I was confident that he would try to accommodate the few exchange students because not knowing what characters were going to be presented beforehand practically meant that you had to learn the language to do the test. After the TA/tutor sent an email out asking for a reply for those needing accommodation, I was confident that it would be fine—and it was. The final had six questions translating the orthography of English, Mandarin, and Cantonese into the International Phonetic Alphabet and six from the International Phonetic Alphabet to English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. We only needed to answer two out of each set of six, so I ended up picking the two English ones in each section after having a look and subsequently deciding I had no idea what was written in Cantonese and Mandarin.

In addition to those two sections, there was a vocabulary (definition plus example) section that I think I fared well on. What was different from the midterm examination was the addition of essay questions—two to be exact. They were straightforward enough, and I’m confident I got most all points for both. What was almost to be expected though was that though I had spent plenty of time studying for the examination before the fact, the subject of one of the essay questions was something that I had literally study half an hour before the test, sitting at Starbucks on campus with my venti drip coffee.

Now, I don’t know if everyone studying linguistics (especially phonetics) does this, but I find that when I study, I talk out loud to myself. It’s not complete sentences or anything that makes sense, more examples that I’m told exist and I just want to check.

As an example, I’ve read over to myself “Polish is great.” Written down, give it to a group of people and have them read the sentence. Chances are, there will be two ways of pronouncing “Polish.” One reading means polish as in nail polish. The other refers to the Polish nationality, with the grammar of the sentence suggesting that what’s meant is the Polish language.

In phonetics, though, I find myself doing stuff like realizing that in fast speech, “rider” and “writer” are pronounced pretty much the same by American English speakers. Today though at Starbucks, I was trying to straighten out my Mandarin affricates, because I can pronounce all the differences when I’m presented with Hanyu Pinyin but I need to equate Pinyin to the International Phonetic Alphabet. To this effect, I was sounding out. There are six in total in Mandarin (in comparison to two in English), but I pronounced nine sounds in total to get the system straightforward in my head. In Pinyin, it would be “s, z, c. x, j, q. sh, zh, ch;” in the International Phonetic Alphabet, it would be rendered as [s, ts, tsʰ. ɕ, tɕ, tɕʰ. ʂ, tʂ, tʂʰ]. I got some looks, probably from people thinking I was mental, but whatever.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author. 

我咳香港大學嘅學生。

Right after presenting my self-introduction speech to the class, I jetted of to Taipei. That day was made thoroughly busy with the addition of a term-paper project proposal and a Phonetics midterm examination.

But back to the topic of this post, my Cantonese for Foreign Learners 1 class, I have a few more assessments to deal with. Besides the self-introduction speech, there is a group presentation in which we perform a dialogue on any topic we’d like, as well as two reading assessments in which we record ourselves reading a passage and email it to the professor, and a midterm and a final examination.

Like I said, I think I did relatively well on my self-introduction. I believe I hit almost all the tones and got all of the consonants and vowels close to perfect. Especially in comparison to my classmates (who I believe tried dearly), I have reason to believe that I got something in the range of an A on my presentation.

The midterm, which we took the class before the self-introduction presentations I did better than expected on. Using the Jyutping system of Romanization for Cantonese, we have to write either tone marks or tone numbers alongside each individual syllable. While I am confident that I can say words so that they are understood, by direct knowledge of what tone it is wavers with my mood, I suppose.

I got most of the tones right through direct memorization, but when I couldn’t remember, I’d try to remember how I’ve heard the professor say it in my head, and then try to assign a tone number to it. This worked about half the time. Lucky for me though, the professor only marked off like half or a quarter of a percent for each wrong tone. So since I got the actual sounds right on almost everything, I ended up with 91% correct on the midterm.

The class session before the midterm, the first reading assignment was due. I did it in my room while my roommate was away to Macau. I read it over about four times and then proceeded to ask my Cantonese-speaking friend to critique my pronunciation. I probably would’ve asked my mother to critique it as well had it not been for the inconvenience of time zones.

Handing it back, the teacher printed out the dialogue for each of us, circling parts of individual words that we had trouble with. On my sheet, she only marked two tones that I executed poorly, both of which fourth tone (low falling). I ended up with a letter grade A on that assignment.

Half the assignments are done with half to go. My second Cantonese reading assignment is due in her email inbox next Monday and the group presentation script is due the Monday after that with my final examination taking place the Thursday right after that.

So, off to rehearsing for the second reading assignment!

Oh, and by the way, the title is colloquial written Cantonese for the title of my previous Cantonese class post.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author. 

Ngo5 hai6 Hoeng1 Gong2 Dai6 Hok6 ge3 hok6 saang1

So I started realizing about a month ago that I haven't been writing that much about class. So here I'll start.

First up is Cantonese for Foreign Learners 1. Ideally, I've found that for learning languages, practice every day (or at least five days a week) works wonders for subconciously memorizing vast amounts of vocabulary and complex grammatical patterns. Unfortunately, my Cantonese class meets on Mondays and Thursdays for an hour each time. We cover a lot, but the fact that we don't repeat what we learn in class means that I have to study a lot more outside of class.

It's stuctured as we're given material and accomopanying homework than tested on it twice in the semester. So far we've covered the usual topics: acoomodation, self-introduction, money, time, and greetings. And for what we've learned (combined with what I learn myself) I've fared well. In going out of the country I use Cantonese at immigration (though by Hong Kong law I am entitled to use English if I so choose), I manage to hop of minibuses with ease, and ask for directions frequently when infrequently I get lost.

In addition, we have two presentations to deal with. The latter is a group project which we have not yet started. The former is a memorized self-introduction with a minimum of 100 character-syllabes delievered to the class. This self-introduction happened on Friday, right before I departed for Taipei, and by all regards it went well.

I had my speech memorized to the point where I left the script at my dorm that most would use for last-minute review and preparation. I thought I would miss a fair number of tones, but I knew I had all of the phonetic sounds down. The only thing I was lacking was confidence, because while I have little trouble speaking in front of large groups of people, strange as they may be, I've never done so in a foreign language (except in other foreign language classes), and in such a foreign foreign language.

But it went well. With speech not in hand, I delievered it smoothly and confidently. Part of it (bless them for their effort though in learning Cantonese), many of the other students were so poor. Many focused more on the tones than the sounds of the words. Entire consonants were missing as vowels were made to sound overly contrived and highly awkward.

And here's where I get into the nitty gritty of this class. To start things off, when I was learning bits and pieces of Cantonese (never enough to be fluent) from my mother when I was younger, I had already gone through two non-consecutive years of Chinese (Mandarin) school. I was always told that I sounded better in Mandarin than in Cantonese, and in a way that inhibited me from going too much farther.

But in a way, I have something of a natural ability to kind of pick up languages—and whereas everyone honestly does or did, I never seem to have truly lost mine. When speaking Spanish or French, I can go sentences at a time without people thinking i'm a non-native speaker. One woman in France asked me what district of Paris I was from, need I reiterate.

So now in taking Cantonese class here, hearing a native Cantonese speaker speak twice weekly, I find myself sounding more and more native, less and less stilted every day—which is good albeit expected, since the same thing happened to me when I took that year of Mandarin in my last year of high school.

I don't know how nitty gritty I can get into this here for sake of losing eyes, but I'll go so far as to say that we use the Jyutping system in class. Most of the vowels used don't correspond to English, though the consonants do, so go look it up in a book or online. But for the tones, we use six in the class (though some scholars have counted up to a dozen). Basically the first (1) is high-level, the second (2) is high rising, the third (3) is mid-level, the fourth (4) is mid-low falling, fifth (5) is low falling then rising, and sixth (6) is low-level.

So if you speak Cantonese, the sentence "Ngo5 hai6 Hoeng1 Gong2 Dai6 Hok6 ge3 hok6 saang1" means I am a Hong Kong University student."

More to come.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Beijing: My Mandarin

My intentions in this series is to go topic by topic rather than day by day, but for a reference, here’s the breakdown for how everything went down:

Saturday: Arrival at airport, Mao’s Livehouse, Hutong in NW core
Sunday: Tiananmen Square (with national day decorations), Forbidden City, Snack Street
Monday: Great Wall, Ming Tombs, Olympic Park
Tuesday: Tiananmen Square, Mao’s Mausoleum (exterior), Summer Palace, “History of Kungfu” show, Hutong near Temple of Heaven, Houhai Bar District
Wednesday: Lama (Yonghe) Temple, Temple of Heaven Park, Beijing Underground (closed), flight back

My Mandarin

Mandarin (or Putonghua as HKU prefers) is one of the languages that I purport to have conversational fluency in. The others are French and Spanish (and of course English). Besides these, I study Cantonese, Japanese, Italian, American Sign Language, and Latin.

So going to Beijing it only made sense to take advantage of the opportunity to practice my Mandarin, and I did.

The second day we were there, we did the tourist trip of going to the Great Wall and the Ming Tombs, which are located a considerable distance outside of the city. It took a few hours to get to the Badaling section of the Great Wall, the specifics of which I will get back to later.

Two years ago, on my first time to China and my first time out of North America, I decided I would use my Mandarin in the same way. Granted, I was really bad. My Mandarin-speaking friends back home claimed to not be able to understand me, and I found myself incapable of making sentences to the effect of “I bought the same thing back in the United States for ten dollars.”

I can now get that sentence across in Mandarin. I might not understand the response, but what I had was better than nothing. After my ten days in China, my Mandarin had improved in confidence but not in skill. People could, in general, understand what I was saying through my incorrect tones and funny articulation.

Back home, I told my friends that people where I went in China could understand my Chinese yet they couldn’t. It turned out that most of them could figure out what I was saying, but because I was so stilted and heavily accented, they chose not to understand me.

This time around, I had a few more years of Mandarin up my sleeves (one to be exact). By practicing with a teacher on top of learning from books, my problem with tones was lowered to a minimum and my vocabulary and grammar drastically improved.

I was armed and ready to go. For haggling, it was casual. At the Great Wall, I got a plaque with my name on it, saying that I’d climbed the Great Wall for ¥5 CNY (about $0.75 USD) and a mock Beijing 2008 Olympics metal for ¥4 CNY (about $0.60 USD).

The weirdest thing about my using Mandarin in Beijing was the benefit of the doubt that they gave me. I know that no matter how hard I try, I will always have at least bits of a foreign accent in the languages that I learn, but in Beijing, the people didn’t seem to care. (But why would they?)

Well, in many places, there’s a tourist price and a local price, and it seemed that my relative fluency in Mandarin was getting me the local price more often than not. It likely has to do with the fact that I’m of Chinese descent, in combination with my use of Mandarin, but let me give you an example.

At the Ming Tombs, we arrived and got off the bus. Now, the Ming (as in dynasty) tombs are scattered all over the place, and it just so happened that the particular tour bus group that we were on took us to this one, which, luckily, was different than the one before.

It was definitely smaller than the tomb I’d seen before. Equally ornate, this particular tomb appeared to be more intimate in a sense. Far from foreign tourist crowds, this particular tomb seemed relatively empty for the Beijing that I had begun to reacquaint myself with.

On the way out, there were carts on the path back to the bus. Some sold fruits and nuts. Others sold dried goods and souvenirs. Of particular interest was the bottled water that they were selling. A friend of mine who happens to be white was charged ¥5 CNY for his bottle. I went up and asked for a bottle in Mandarin. I got mine for ¥2 CNY. After that notable savings (think of it as a percent), I did all my talking in Mandarin.

But no matter how good my haggling skills were (better than average, if I do say so myself), I was no match for the tour guide that was leading us around.

My Mandarin-speaking friend found this particular tour company as we were wandering around the Forbidden City the previous day. We were approached by an agent (one of many) and were told about what was happening. I understood close to none of it.

When we ended up on this bus, the tour guide as well as the tour group except me and three of my friends understood and spoke Mandarin. I was in a bit of a rut, you could say. However, we only paid ¥90 CNY (about $13 USD) for the whole day’s transportation, admission, and lunch as part of the package, so despite the fact that I couldn’t understand the information she was feeding us (I’m sure it was very informative), the day was a good deal as a whole.

We ended the day being dropped off in the Olympic Village, just north of the city core. I knew what to expect but didn’t account for the emotional factor, you could say. But that’s for next time.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Beijing: The Northern Capital

Reading week here in Hong Kong is similar to many universities’ fall break back in the States and Revision week here in Hong Kong is similar to many (though declining) universities’ reading week. Reading week was last week, with school resuming just this past Monday, and for about half of that week, I was in Beijing, some 1200 miles north of Hong Kong in Mainland China.

For those of you who don’t know (don’t be ashamed), Beijing (北京) is the capital city of the People’s Republic of China and literally means “Northern Capital” in Chinese. According to my reading, Beijing was named when it was fashionable for capitals in East Asia to be named literally as such. Kyoto (京都) means “Capital City” and Tokyo (东京) means “Eastern Capital” in Japanese. Nanjing/Nanking (南京) in the southern half of China means “Southern Capital” (and functioned as such for some dynasties). Seoul and Hanoi both have previous names that mean capital in some capacity.

My journey in the Northern Capital started in Hong Kong, of course. It was to be my second, the first having taken place in the summer of 2007, when my family and I had a China highlights tour. That was my first time out of North America. Now I was heading back, and while excited, I was of course wondering what to expect.

Having been there before, I expected I would see the normal tourist sites: the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs, the Forbidden City, and Tiananmen Square, to name a few. I wanted to make a point to see some new sites as well. Overall I hoped to get an understanding of Beijing more profound and more refined to surpass my first.

And I knew what I was expecting. Pollution, in a word, I thought—gray skies and spitting people, to name some more. When I went there in 2007, they were preparing for the Olympics by building venues such as the Bird’s Nest, improving and expanding the metro, and relaying many sidewalks around the city.

What I expected and what I saw overlapped to less an extent that what I thought as well. Buildings went from being unfinished concrete to painted; pollution, while still present, didn’t embed myself into my clothes. The lake-side hutong (胡同) that I saw over two years ago turned into a well-appointed bar-side lake district—but more on that later.

My journey, as I said, started in Hong Kong, and a three-hour flight. We took the airport bus from in front of Queen Mary Hospital (whose canteen I frequent). The bus ride took about an hour, ending at Terminal 1. Going through the airport and experiencing the clean design coupled with efficiency that is HKG, I was reminded of the false impressions that the airport gave me when I arrived two months ago on August 21 (that fateful night).

Going through immigration, we used the “Hong Kong Residents” line and proceeded through smoothly. Security was simple and didn’t require us to take off our shoes (as we do in U.S. airports), though everyone’s belts set off the metal detector.

After waiting a couple hours in the airport, accompanied by coffee and expensive duty-free stores filled with elitist junk, we boarded our plane, flying direct to Beijing. The security video was double the length (once in English, the international language of air travel, and Mandarin). We had in-flight entertainment consisting of “The Brothers Bloom,” a recent movie with Adriane Brody and Rachel Weiss (with her good acting but bad accent).

Landing at the new Terminal 3 at Beijing Capital International Airport, we found ourselves walking for ages, passing through temperature checkpoint after temperature checkpoint (Swine flu/H1N1 alert still noticeably present), followed by Chinese immigrations, who let us through without a hitch.

We then had to take light rail to the exit of Terminal 3. The entire terminal was decorated with high red-and-white paneled ceilings supported by tall, cylindrical white columns. I personally like the design of Hong Kong International Airport better.

On the way to the airport express train, I picked up some renminbi (人民币)/Chinese yuan (元) from the HSBC ATM and we were on our way.

The airport express train was partially subterranean, but the parts of Beijing that I saw I didn’t recognize. Admittedly, it was dark, but the only thing that told me I was out of Hong Kong was the use of simplified Chinese characters (which I feel more comfortable with).

After transferring lines and getting off at the appropriate station, we had a bit of trouble finding our hotel. One of my friends speaks better Mandarin than I, but being more inclined to ask for directions that most men, I found myself asking everyone, including a different hotel’s bellhop where our hotel was. Finally, we found it on the backside of a building, still in Chongwenmen (崇文门) district.

Over several posts following this I hope to elaborate on and reflect upon my adventures in Beijing.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

A World English

Last year, I was in a social anthropology class called Language, Identity, and Community at UCSD. Taught by an academic (whose name I have chosen to omit), who has done plenty of research regarding the use of Spanish and Catalan in the Catalonia (an autonomous region of Spain), the class aimed to give us an understanding about the role language plays in creating and enforcing identities among individuals and communities among groups of individuals. Though that was a very interesting class (albeit I got my lowest college grade in that class), that’s not what this is about.

The professor shared with us a story that I feel can be related with by one of my friends here. This professor was from the western side of New York State. Unlike a “standard” American accent, which many purport to be like that of Chicago newscasters, she had a regionalized Midwest accent that many people unfortunately could not understand.

And it’s really not that uncommon. Though I would be quick to point out several differences between a more standard Midwest accent and a Californian accent, in many ways characteristics of the two have converged with spoken media (such as Hollywood productions) becoming widespread, and as such, neutral. The logic of which is as follows: there is no one natural way of speaking. As such, everyone has an accent in the language(s) that he or she speaks, though some may be seen as more neutral than others due to exposure and proliferation.

This means that accents that aren’t heard on widespread media are generally understood less. So a regionalized accent such as Cajun, Scottish, or Southern, is often stigmatized as not being the norm. With such speakers’ non-standard pronunciation (and often grammatical forms as well as lexicon), they tend to stand apart from the crowd.

Such problems are made worse as students learning English as a second language are taught British Received Pronunciation or Standard American English. When learning a second language, students are taught what is wrong and what is right, and sometimes things are just different.

This story that she shared took place in Spain, with an audience from all around the world. It consisted of a guest lecture taking place in English by a German scholar. At the end of this scholar’s lecture, she asked a question, which received an answer. Afterwards, she heard people trying to figure out in hushed tones who “that woman who asked the question” was, because they could not understand her. These people were speakers of English as a second language, and in her experience she realized that being a native speaker of English did not automatically give her the ability to be understood in English-language settings. On top of that, she found that those people who spoke English as a second language felt they spoke better than her because they could not understand her regional accent.

Like I said, HKU is an English-language institution, which makes it arguably more attractive to a wider range of students over a different Chinese university where they would teach classes in Mandarin. As such, and possibly to my disadvantage, I rarely have to speak any form of Chinese here as most of the exchange students appear to converse to each other in English.

But this isn’t to talk about Cantonese again. Improperly so, this is to talk about English. I heart English, and as a student of linguistics, I’ve made a point of noticing all the different varieties I’ve heard.

To start, there are the people who’ve learned English as a second language. In that range, I’ve met and heard people from the Netherlands, Spain, France, and Norway.

Native English varieties I’ve heard are Scottish, British, Australian, Canadian, Californian, and Midwestern American. Some that I’ve mentioned I cannot be more specific about because I do not have enough experience with such varieties to the point where I could narrow it down further.

In particular, my friend from Scotland finds herself having trouble being understood the most. Except on the phone, I have little trouble understanding her. Though she is a native English speaker, the lack of understanding of her variety really shows how English is a world language of sorts.

So what have I seen?

Well, English speakers overall use most of the same words, so we can understand almost all of what we’re saying if we speak clearly. There are several words that I’ve not heard of and many more that have different meanings. The majority of the differences are in drastically different sounds.

So how do we cope?

Well we explain things to each other of course. We often make fun of each other though for the particular words that we use. It’s all in good fun. Part of learning about other people is being accepting and understanding.

I don’t have an accent, right?

Well no one thinks they really have an accent, because everyone feels like they speak naturally. So how has my speech changed since coming here?

Well for one, I’ve never really used California slang. I’d be hard-pressed to say there’s ever been a point in my life when I’ve used “dude” excessively, in say every sentence. Beach Boys-slang I’ve never used. Terms like “wipeout” never made it to me, though I know where all the places in their songs are. The thing I used the most that regionalized me is “like.”

Like though I’ve like learned how to, well, like monitor my use of “like” so if I like don’t want to say “like” so much, I like can.

So here I don’t use “like” very much at all. I’ve heard more “hella” here than I’d like from people from Northern California, and have come to terms with it here. Luckily I haven’t incorporated that particular term into my lexicon yet.

The biggest change in my speech is my intonation of questions. Whereas as home I would ask something like “Have you eaten yet?” Like , I find myself making questions sound more like . Whether or not you get what I mean by this, I’m sure I’ll still sound like this for a while after I get back home.

Speaking of returning, I just got back from my reading week trip to Beijing. Stay tuned for all the juicy details and awesome pictures!

Thanks for reading.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

The Tongue of Another

I pick up here where I left off from “A Friend of Two,” posted in late August. I had just arrived here and found myself struggling with the lack of English. Honestly, I knew it was to be expected, and honestly, I know I should have tried to pick up some more basic Cantonese before I left.

But as it became readily apparent—I didn’t.

To this effect, I enrolled in Cantonese for Foreign Learners 1, which has, in the first five classes, served to localize my speech more than it had been before. Being an unstandardized, not completely written language, there is debate over how many tones Cantonese does (or should) have.

For those who don’t know much about the Chinese languages (called dialects), they are tonal, which in short means that same syllables pronounced with different pitches in tone (not all of which steady) have the potential to change their meaning.

Having gone to Chinese school (teaching Mandarin) when I was little, I was used to being told about the four tones in Mandarin, five including the neutral tone. With English being the language of my household, I learned the language an auxiliary language (contrary to popular opinion), and had not been able to pronounce understandably until just a few years ago. Now, in words that I know, I can pronounce the tones properly, albeit with an American accent.

In Cantonese, the debate over how many tones exist ranges from as low as six to as high as eleven or twelve, depending on your source. In the Hong Kong variety of Cantonese, there had historically been seven tones, but two consolidated with the recent “lazy generation.” So in my class, we are being taught with six tones, which usually appear as superscript numerals immediately following the syllable that they modify.

Explained in words, the first tone is high, the second is high rising, the third medium, the fourth medium falling, the fifth low falling then rising, and the sixth the lowest. For the vowels and consonant sounds, we use the Jyutping system, which the book claims was chosen for its resemblance to the International Phonetic Alphabet (though I know it could be closer).

So my goal in learning Cantonese, other than for the sake of learning Cantonese, is so that I can get around places earlier and apply such skills to a future professional career.

But like I mention time and time again, my classes here are in English (with varying levels of quality). This would imply that the local students and the Mainland Chinese students speak scholarly English to be able to read scholarly articles and to understand lectures in their entirety.

This leads me into the way that I’ve seen local students function as a reflection of their education. As my cousin told me, the education system, heavily influenced by the British, “teaches them to take orders, but doesn’t promote critical thought.” My mother, who spent part of her childhood in Hong Kong, told me how though they had English classes, they were not effective in method or end result. And according to my own research, Hong Kong schools only teach English to students based on vocational needs.

But this isn’t about English. Locals speak mostly Cantonese to each other here and most can work with Mandarin. However, with English as a co-official language, one would expect the system to make more of an effort to teach English. With Hong Kong seeing itself as “Asia’s world city,” English competence is one way that it keeps its competitiveness—a trait that it’s not maintaining, if it had it in the first place.

The University of Hong Kong purportedly uses English as the medium of communication for all classes (expect foreign language), so it would make sense that the students are competent in English in a scholarly capacity—which brings me back to what my Hong Kong University buddy, a local student, told me.

Apparently, when I called her the morning that she gave me the tour, she said that she was so nervous to be speaking English to me. Don’t get me wrong—I think that she’s a great person and I remain grateful she gave me that tour, but a student shouldn’t be frightened to speak in the language that they’re being instructed in.

Though she represents just one student out of the 20,000 here, thinking that a lot of local students doubt their own English competency helps explain a lot of things. For one thing, local students focus a lot on face, which is based on the Chinese emphasis on harmony in relationships over individuality and non-conformity. This means that if you say “Hi” to a local, you will get a “Hi” back, and little more. I have experienced this on multiple occasions when I attempted to break the ice with my floormates in my hall.

Needless to say all but like two practically gave the cold shoulder, as they did not know me yet, and did not feel comfortable enough with me to be open, which I feel is perfectly understandable. But a friend of mine, who speaks Cantonese (among other languages), finds that the local students warm up to him faster, which, needless to say, is in all likelihood because there is less of a perceivable language barrier.

So in their not responding to my friendly efforts in attempt to save face, they’ve actually lost face in my consciousness (and most exchange students’ sub-consciousness) as they isolate themselves from the exchange students (possibly as well as the Mainland Chinese).

And I’m not trying to be an English imperialist in the opinion. I believe everyone is entitled to the language of his or her choice, with the thought that one should be open when going abroad, especially to a non-English country. So I failed; I assumed that just because English is the language of instruction that English is something most everyone is competent in.

And to this effect, I am attempting the learn Cantonese. A month (one quarter) into my program, I find that by itself, my Cantonese has not improved, which to the contrary my Italian developed rapidly during my two weeks there last summer. This morning, as an example, I asked the minibus to stop in Cantonese, which, while understood, had a highly apparent accent, which even I myself could hear. So I’ve resigned myself to the primary goal of being understood in Cantonese.

But even if I’m understood and I can understand, I face a second dilemma—a dilemma that could be readily solved by speaking English. Since I look like a local despite being rooted 7,000 miles away, a lot of service workers think I’m stupid or slow when I speak to them in Cantonese. The little that I know is slow and heavily accented. When I speak English though, I get great service and people who think that I’m highly educated. In all likelihood, I probably get charged higher prices as well.

So I guess there’s just no winning. A friend of mine here, a Scottish exchange student who doesn’t look like a local, manages to ask the minibus to stop as well. She told me that when she does so, she get stares from both sides of the aisle. The locals look at her for having a funny accent with little appreciation for her efforts to learn the local tongue, and the tourists and ex-pats look at her, wondering what she just said.

So what can be done?

Well, for me, as I’ve said, I hang out mostly with exchange students. Scratch that—only with exchange students. It’s not my choice, as going abroad is, in my opinion, to branch out, especially into the host culture.

As for my Hong Kong University buddy, she informed me that she, as well as many other local students don’t attend lecture, opting just for tutorial (or section), which are often taught in Cantonese if everyone is competent. She told be that the professors speaking English are hard to understand.

So a few weeks ago, at my faculty’s orientation for registering for classes, I raised my hand with a question about tutorials: “My HKU buddy told me that some tutorials are conducted in Cantonese. So how easy would it be to switch tutorials if I need to get out of a Cantonese-language one?”

And the answer, “Well they aren’t supposed to be speaking Cantonese, so if it is in Cantonese and the tutor refuses to teach in English, tell us and we’ll get everything straightened out.”

Alrighty then.

Shopping for Classes, Part 2

The add/drop period for class registration ended September 14. For the Faculty of Social Sciences, September 15 was when we had to turn in a signed finalization of those classes. Though I met both deadlines, making sure that classes will be approved for meeting requirements for general education and my majors and minor has been a little more difficult.

With shopping for classes done and over with, I ended up with five six-unit classes and one three-unit class, Cantonese for Foreign Learners 1. That class may actually contain the majority of the fun I have on campus. Organized to give us conversational knowledge of Cantonese, the class is simple and entertaining. For the fifty minutes, twice a week that it’s worth, I can tell that the teacher is really enthusiastic about what she does. What makes it more fun is that, since I cannot apply this class to any graduation requirement back home, I’m going to take the class pass/no pass, I can enjoy myself and the content of the class without feeling to bothered about what grade I get.

The three five-unit classes that I plan to apply to requirements back at UCSD are Introduction to Arts of Asia: Past and Present, Traditional Chinese Society, Hong Kong and the World, Humanity in Globalization, and Phonetics.

To be rephrased as Introduction to Asian Art on my University of California transcript, this is the other class that I think I’ll take pass/no pass. This is to fulfill the non-western fine arts class for Eleanor Roosevelt College’s general education requirements. Being in Asia, I figured that this would be a good opportunity to do so.

The class is very interesting to say the least. As of yet we’ve been discussion Buddhist art and just last lecture we were discussing how Buddhism’s arrival to Japan reflected the native Shinto way of life and its reflection in art and architecture, particularly the design of temples. It was further related to the present day, in which reflecting the older works we went over selected contemporary works by such notables as Yoko Ono.

Traditional Chinese Society is an ethnographic, anthropologic class that deals more with contemporary Chinese society in light of traditional Chinese society. Right now, I’m trying to get it preapproved for my minor in the Study of Religion, with my case being that the class focuses on way of life, which is true religion in its essential form. Concretely, similar classes have been approved for the Study of Religion at UCSD, namely Chinese Society (a sociology class) and Traditional Chinese Society (an anthropology class). Here at HKU there is not an anthropology department, so this class is listed under Sociology. In crossing classes with UCSD, the description of my class here at HKU is in between the two UCSD classes, leaning more towards the anthropological one.

If the Study of Religion program refuses to see my logic, I plan to make my case to apply this as an anthropology class to the secondary focus of my International Studies-Political Science major. Unfortunately, UC transfers this course over as a sociology class by default, so I would have to prove its anthropological content through the syllabus and explaining the ethnographic methods used in analysis.

As of right now, we’ve been dealing with what it means to be Chinese (a topic which I have addressed and will address again personally in a later post). Last lecture we talked about creation stories as an aspect of Chinese culture and contrasted the shear view of culture to that of Christianity. Next week we focus on the body and the traditional Chinese view of it.

This class’s tutorial is also the only one I’ve been to so far. With such a small class, there is no teacher’s assistant and the tutorials, called sections at UCSD, are run by the professor himself. It was set up as an informal environment in which we could discuss the readings and the current class materials. In that tutorial, I had to make my case for why I call myself American, but more on that later.

Hong Kong and the World is another favorite class of mine. It is listed under politics and public administration, and rightly so. The professor doesn’t have a PhD but work experience, having a consulting firm with such clients as the William Clinton Foundation. I plan to apply this class to my International Studies-Political Science major.

In light of Hong Kong’s political situation as a highly autonomous part of the People’s Republic of China, we look at why Hong Kong as been such an economic success and evaluate its future competitiveness in light of rising Chinese cities and Hong Kong’s eventual return of full sovereignty back to China.

This particular professor organizes his classes with many guests. Our first is the current director of the InvestHK, and described his job as attracting and retaining foreign investment in Hong Kong. This was followed by an intense question-and-answer section which he handled like a seasoned politician.

Humanity in Globalization is another political science class taught by the same professor as Hong Kong and the World. This actually ended up being a substitute class for me, as I meant to take International Relations of East Asia, but was troubled by the lack of oratory skills of the professor. I opted for the more interesting, more grounded class (for IR talks about countries practically as sentient beings whereas Humanity in Globalization talks about individual people in relation to the world.

So far, we’ve talked about modern-day slavery (which most people don’t know about) with one source claiming that there are more slaves today than there have ever been before. (Though I wonder if you cast that data as a percent of the population whether the numbers would seem less dire.)

My last class is Phonetics, which at first I was really excited about, but now I’m questioning the content. With my second major being a specialization in linguistics, Phonetics is a core class for me, and deciding to take it here I thought would be a good experience.

At UCSD, Phonetics is taught in light of English, introducing anatomical features of producing speech, and focusing hardly at all at the International Phonetic Alphabet Chart. Regarding linguistics, I actually prefer phonetics and phonology over semantics and morphology because there is a quantifiable reality to the study. Semantics for me seemed a little soft because it seemed less logical than other linguistics sub-disciplines.

At HKU, Phonetics is taught much the same, with the exception that we go over sounds of Mandarin and Cantonese in addition to American English (I don’t know why we don’t go over British Received Pronunciation). It sounded good and all, but for the second lecture, we went over sounds of American English, and being that many local students (most all local students) don’t speak American English, he taught it more like a let’s-learn-how-to-speak-properly class.

This was problematic in my head because at UCSD a resounding message in my linguistics classes is that linguists (and social scientists) for that matter, being researchers, work to the effect of description and not prescription. That means that Linguists don’t dictate how we should speak, they just analyze how we do speak.

Being a native American English speaker, I had no problem, but as we have to go over that again in Mandarin and Cantonese, I hope he doesn’t continue in the same manner.

To make matters worse, the TA for the class makes all the announcements in Cantonese. I always end up raising my hand to request her to repeat what she said in English.

Though I hoped to write this post after I settled into a routine, I figured that I should get out my sentiments about my classes and reveal the results of my shopping before going any further.

Loss of Life, Limb, or Language

A major component of most study abroad experiences is the foreign language aspect. On one hand, the prospect of going to a place where no one speaks your language can be daunting. On the other hand, going overseas has the potential to provide the practice necessary for foreign-language learners as studying in that language (as opposed to just studying the language) improves the depth of practice, necessitating increased fluency on a higher register than mere conversational speech.

In my opinion, a major problem with American students is the lack of motivation to learn other languages, and according to the British Broadcasting Company, many British students feel similarly toward the discipline. (“A Point of View” by Lisa Jardine, May 9, 2006) Yeah, it makes rational sense. English is spoken by much of the world population, and some estimates put it in front of Mandarin as the most spoken language when counting second-language learners in addition to native speakers. A boatload of people spread over a good chunk of the world speak English, which is what I speak, so why should I learn a separate language? Before I entered high school, this was my opinion, so I guess I was not so different.

When I was little, I detested the idea of having to learn another language, and now I’m not so sure that I understood the concept of different languages and multilingualism back then. For me, English just seemed the natural way of communication because I came out my mouth so easily and so easily for those speaking to me as well. Other languages may have seemed just weird sound to me, odd and bizarre, containing sounds that I did not believe I could pronounce myself. Now I know better.

Chinese school was a burden, a waste of Saturday mornings. The program (teaching Mandarin) was largely ill structured and the teachers bored me dearly. Chinese confused me by notion of tones and quantifiers, and having left the program early, I came out confused about Chinese and thought the process of second language acquisition was boring and pointless.

In third grade, I picked up an American Sign Language book that I could not and did not put down for months. I learned to sign the English alphabet (which I still know) and independently learned some words. My teacher thought I had a knack for it and told my mother.

Today, learning languages is something of an addiction. I took Spanish 1 freshman year of high school and found acquiring it so easy that I studied to skip Spanish 2. I passed the final for Spanish 2 with flying colors, with the Foreign Language Department chair touting my abilities to inflect reflexive verbs with little direct experience. The following year I entered Spanish 3 and blew my teacher’s socks off with my near-native accent (I chose Colombian) that convinced some of my friends that I was half-Mexican.

The following year I continued in Spanish, as well as picking up college-level French and college-level Japanese, which I found fascinating, but the pace a little lackluster. My senior year of high school, I continued my French studies and maintained my Spanish competence, also picking up Latin and trying again at Mandarin in Chinese 2, after skipping Chinese 1 by studying (for the same reasons as why I skipped Spanish 2). That year, I also decided to start picking up Italian, and now I continue my efforts to become as fluent as possible in all aforementioned languages.

Many people, including my mother, believe I have a natural propensity for learning languages, which, while not necessarily untrue, is not the entire basis for my success. I’d rather think it was because of my effort and passion for language learning.

As I plan to discuss in a later post, my love of language, and consequently culture, has brought me to where I am today. With my Linguistics major, I get to study the principles of language and the role that it plays in society (my concentration in Language and Society). My interest in culture has brought me to find interest in international relations, a subset of political science, which brings me to my other major. While there is an International Relations major offered by the Political Science Department, I chose to study political science through the International Studies department because the interdisciplinary nature of the program allowed me to choose a secondary track that improved upon the breadth of my discipline.

Now, I believe that everybody should learn a second language because it is hypothesized that the nature of a particular language allows us to develop different ways of analyzing a situation that a rigid, monolingual mind would theoretically otherwise find incomprehensible. A basic and well-known example of this, though not analyzed as such, is the fact that when expressing age, English speakers are the age, whereas some other language speakers possess the age. “I am 18 years old” in English would be expressed as “J’ai 18 ans” in French or “Tengo 18 años” in Spanish—both of which literally mean “I have 18 years.” In short, my French professor Marie Agel at Moorpark Community College said, “Learning another language just makes us smarter and people who know more than one language are just smarter.”

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my knowledge of Cantonese and Mandarin is minimal at best. I know that I need to concentrate on my learning Cantonese because it’s the primary language of communication there. Whereas what little Mandarin I know was acquired formally, the way I acquired Cantonese is a different story.

Whereas Mandarin can be written down word for word, Cantonese does not have the formal ability to be formally written down exactly as uttered, with the exception of some common informalities, or Written Colloquial Cantonese, which is a recent advent. This confused me a lot. As an example of this, a phrase like “Why am I your friend?” would be uttered like “dinggai ngo hai neige pengyao” in spoken Cantonese, with proper tones of course, and written as “为什么我是你底朋友?” Now with Chinese having monosyllabic orthography, the discrepancy is clear that you just used nine characters to write down eight syllables. It’s like writing down in Latin what you say in Spanish. As such, when a Cantonese speaker would read that sentence, it would come out as “waiswomwo ngo si nei ge pengyao” with nine syllables and appropriate tones. As such, this means that there are effectively two kinds of Cantonese (and many other Chinese dialect-languages as well)—one for spoken speech and one for reading, which, as I understand, is basically Mandarin with Cantonese phonology.

This created a problem for me because a big key to learning language for me personally is the ability to write it down and study it independently. This is not the natural way of learning language, as evidenced by the facts that most languages are unwritten, and that children learn to speak before they learn (and most often must be taught) to write. This is compounded by the fact that the only person who I really learn Cantonese from is my mother. Both of our primary languages are English, so it’s difficult, at least for me, to not take the easy way out and just reply to her in English, which I inevitably end up doing to her dismay. In addition, my mother left Hong Kong when she was 11, and since Cantonese is a modern language, with the definition of a modern language being one that is changing as it is currently in use, the language changed without her, and as a result the Cantonese that I learn from her has a retro twist. Isn’t that groovy?

On the surface, this should not be a problem, because HKU, which I will be attending, officially teaches in English, as do most universities and colleges in Hong Kong, but after watching a documentary about codeswitching among university students and other Hong Kongers, I wonder how far English has permeated into daily life, and whether it is gaining or losing ground and how I will be treated if I try to hold on to my language in the face of another.

The documentary is titled Multilingual Hong Kong Present 一个 Project, and it is, in essence, a case study of several of my anthropology and linguistics classes. In INTL 101 Languages in Competition (for which I actually wrote a 4,700-word paper about the bilingual/trilingual government of Hong Kong), we focused a great deal on codeswitching, which is basically shifting between languages in certain situations among bilinguals. In LIGN 101 Introduction to Linguistics, we spent a little bit of time on bilingualism/multilingualism and phonotactic constraints. In ANSC 122 Language and Society and ANSC 162 Language, Identity, and Community, we focused on codeswitching as a sociological force in creating personal and community identity.

The main feature of the documentary was the simple-yet-revealing sentence, “Today, I must present a project.” As a foray into the linguistic nature of Hong Kong, not a single subject on camera was able to say the complete sentence in Cantonese. The problem lied in the word “project,” for which many Hong Kongers could not find a Cantonese equivalent. When it was brought to their attention (for many fluent bilinguals do not realize that they codeswitch) they tried again, pausing before “project,” but inevitably finding that the most effective word in their vocabularies to express that which is a “project” was the English word “project.”

Certain English phrases were simply imbedded in Hong Kong Cantonese speech, and there was little that could be done to undo it. Not to say that codeswitching is a bad thing, but many “purists” believe that we must be pure of (a single) language in our speech and use one language or another and not switch mid-situation, or (oh my!) mid-sentence. People who have not consciously investigated and studied this phenomenon, including those who do it, often have this opinion.

Unfortunately for this school of thought, history is not on their side. English in its purist form is a prototypical mutt of a language. It is estimated that Modern English (existing sometime before Shakespeare on) consists of a full two thirds Latin largely via French, which is more than its namesake in Middle English (with an estimated less than one thirds contributing in some way to Modern English), itself with Germanic heritage. As a result of this heritage, in English we have many pairs of words that mean exactly the same thing, just with different connotations. Oversee and supervise, build and construct, deadly and fatal, eat and dine, forbid and prohibit, and mistake and error are just a few pairs. In general, the Latin-based words are more formal than their Germanic-based counterparts.

To compound this hybridity, there are borrowings from many other languages. Algebra comes from Arabic, yacht from Dutch, bungalow from Hindi, and brainwash from a direct translation of Chinese, to name a few.  These words are so integrated that no speaker thinks about keeping English a pure language when speaking it. In addition, historical attempts by scholars to purify English by bringing it back to its Germanic roots proved ineffective.

In short, codeswitching and the borrowing of words is not a problem—rather it enhances the expressiveness of the speakers, serving as an innovative force. As with everything human, such phenomena have much deeper meaning than just the phenomena themselves (ergo anthropology!). Therein lies my issue. I know it seems like these past four posts, I haven’t been doing anything but whining, and I’m sorry. If you want to reconsider Rhinesmith, I’m still in the first stage, so bear with me, for I have knowledge to drop!

As we have examined in INTL 101 Languages in Competition and again in depth in ANSC 162 Language, Identity, and Community, codeswitching serves as an identity-creating force, and the choice of language, often a subconscious decision, is used effectively to this point.

I understand that a large part of the study abroad experience is the foreign language aspect—don’t get me wrong, I do. But with Hong Kong’s history as a British Crown Colony and the fact that more than a third of the population has receptive competence of English, I would be lying to you and myself if I were to say that I am not going to take advantage of this. I’ll try not to, but I hardly think I’ll be able not to, at least in the first couple weeks if not the entire first month or more.

I have to admit that as a native English speaker, I thought I would be revered in a city full of aspiring English speakers who feel that their main connection to the world is through English. While I know that English is respected, people codeswitching with too much English in Hong Kong are often thought of arrogant as demonstrated in the documentary, and it’s not clear whether this applies equally to foreigners and locals. Being a foreigner, I would like to think that I will receive some acceptance in speaking English from the locals, but I also know that my heritage gives me the ability to look like a local, so I might not receive the same cushion that a white American might receive, per se.

This documentary, having used many university students as subjects of interviews, has brought about language as an object of contention in my mind. Most of the subjects of conversation were spoken in Cantonese, with an English word inserted here or there, which disrupts the preconception that I had that since the classes are in English, it would make sense that the students would speak English regularly as well. Since this documentary has brought to light the fact that this may very well not be true, I wonder if codeswitching goes on in class, because it seems that it is difficult to stick to one language or the other in Hong Kong.

All I can say is I can try to acquire Cantonese and use it to my advantage for “social profit.” Until then, I hope I can be given the benefit of the doubt in the intentions of my actions like an unseasoned beginner. I’ll be sure to practice ahead of time and see what comes of it.

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