我整天做梦 (a beginning exploration of Chinese language)

My first introduction to China was through language. I chose to start Chinese my sophomore year of university because I had studied German and a little Spanish and wanted to try something away from Europe, and farther historically, culturally, and linguistically from the US (Europe and the US have a lot of important differences, but many of our differences take place upon common assumptions and values).

Chinese is very different from English, and leaves many points in studying it that one can either be frustrated or enraptured with the language. You don't get many breaks-- there aren't the same familiar patterns to find as there are in Romance languages or German. Sometimes this makes things easier: you don't have to conjugate verbs, so there are fewer boundaries to expanding vocabulary. You don't have to spend hours memorizing different forms of a verb-- once you've learned it, you know it. The same goes for articles; there's none of this "der, die, das" or "el, la" business. Simple. Clean.

There are also two dimensions of language in Chinese that no European language has, and I'm guessing many people reading this can name them: Characters and Tones. The fact that one can see a Chinese word written in the Roman alphabet, for example "ni", and yet not know what it means or even how to pronounce it correctly is baffling at first. It's also invigorating.

Tones are an extra factor in Chinese sound. They multiply the number of meaningfully different sounds that can be made from a relatively small phonetic array. It's perhaps more confusing because English does use tones as well, but in English they are used as a factor of emotion or intention, not the simple meaning of a word. An English speaker's tone rises at the end of a question*, and can be used to put extra emphasis on key words. Quite a few native English speakers who visit China, especially if they haven't spent much time studying the language, feel like everyone is shouting angrily at each other. But they aren't. Tones just mean something very different in Chinese than they do in English. They are harmless and important indicators of meaning.

Characters are magic. They are a whole new dimension of meaning that we simply do not have in English. One of the things I spent the most time on at first was spending time with characters to get used to the fact that words must be represented by more than a sound-- if you don't know what a word looks like, you don't know what it means.

Some characters are very straightforward: 一, 二, and 三 mean 'one,' 'two,' and 'three' respectively. 上 means above and 下 means below. 凹 means sunken and 凸 means protruding (though neither are very commonly used. Thus far I haven't seen them outside of historical fiction). Some characters are a poignant description of the meaning of a word: the characters in 目前, or 'present' (as opposed to future or past-- do you see how we could use another clarifying layer of meaning in English sometimes?) mean first 'eye' and then 'in front of.'

The etymology of many Chinese characters is less than obvious, especially since the standard Mandarin taught in most schools in China and in the US is simplified (though other Chinese speaking countries and many Chinese speakers in the US use traditional characters)。漢字 (Han letters, or Chinese characters) became 汉字, for the sake of improved literacy rates. And they are indeed easier to learn and easier to write, but they are not always as clear about their meaning.

A linguist or psychologist would be able to more clearly analyze it, but I like to think about the different ways that Chinese and English are constructed. In my mind,  English words flow together more. Words can contract into each other, and concepts must be pinpointed by a squadron of "of"s "when"s "who"s "which"s, prepositions, and articles. I've heard Chinese described as more contextual, eg, the lack of verb conjugation: you know who the verb relates to from the rest of the sentence or conversation.

Chinese characters are stronger entities than English words; they pull in meaning and carry the ghosts of their neighbors into other words. The example sitting on the cover of the book next to me is its title: 藏地密码。西藏 [Xizang] is the Chinese name for Tibet, and 土地 [tudi] means land (土 means earth and 地 means place, though the word for 'place' in full is 地方). 藏 implies 西藏, 地 implies 土地 so that in two characters you can fully represent the meaning of four. Consequently, Chinese friends are always asking me what the "short way" to say something is. Do you really have to say all those words to get your meaning across? Yeah, you generally kinda do.

*as does, according to the members of Monty Python, a Welsh person's tone when they are upset, as opposed to British person whose tone goes down at the end of a sentence emphatically.

The title is from 我不是黄蓉 by 王蓉, and it means "I spend all day dreaming"