Our China – Page 3

Our China: Slippers

April 25, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

If you’ve ever been to an Asian country, or even watched an Asian movie, you probably know that people here wear slippers inside the house. The Asian custom of wearing slippers actually differs from country to country. It’s much more strict and complicated in Korea, for example, where a different pair of slippers must be worn in different parts of a house or building.

But here in China, when entering a home, people are often offered a pair of slippers to wear in the house. Outside shoes are taken off at the door, and homes often have built-in cupboards or purchased shelving specifically for the storage of shoes, near the door.

There is a definite sense that the outdoors is dirty–particularly the ground. And no wonder. People spit on the ground. They allow their pets to urinate or defecate on the ground (and usually don’t poop-and-scoop). And it’s not unusual to see a young child or even an adult find a corner they think looks private and urinate outside. Add to that the fact that a lot of China is a big dustbowl due to deforestation, and you’ve got a really good case for thinking what you may have tracked in on your shoes isn’t so wholesome to be spreading around the house. New research actually strongly supports this notion.

But what’s the deal with the slippers, anyway? Why not just tramp around barefoot in the house? Or in your socks?

There is a widespread belief stemming from Chinese medicine that many diseases can be caught through your feet–that cold feet can cause the whole body to be ill. So wearing slippers protects you from the cold floors and keeps you healthy.

There is no one harder to keep in socks than my son. He prefers barefoot even when the floor is freezing cold (which is common here for at least six months of the year). So needless to say, he doesn’t wear slippers a lot either. But when visitors come to the house, I am constantly being scolded for letting him run around in bare feet. They are sure he will become ill. (He’s probably my healthiest kid, just for the record.)

As Canadians, we’re accustomed to removing our shoes at the door, anyway. It’s a Canadian thing. Now we’ve also become accustomed to wearing slippers also–well, most of us.

Our China: Spring

April 16, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

So here’s the thing about spring in China. They turn off the heat–whether, as the popular Facebook meme portrays, spring has “fully installed” or not. The heat is government-controlled, and shuts off April 1st. This year, April 1st was 3° Celsius (for you Fahrenheit folks, that’s not quite 38°).

So not exactly toasty.

But what we’ve noticed–this year anyway–is that everyone has decided it’s spring and stubbornly refuses to wear warmer layers. While the rest of the winter, we hardy Canadians are being scolded for not wearing enough layers, now, we’re walking around still sporting our winter attire while our Chinese friends are walking around without jackets–or very thin ones–no gloves, and shoving their hands in their pockets.

Part of the mystery might be solved by looking at the following images:

The first image is from my computer’s weather bug. The second one from the Weather Channel. Someone is lying. And my bet is most people think it’s a lot warmer out there than it really is. Add to that the fully-concrete-no-insulation construction of 99.9% of all China’s buildings, so that when it does warm up, it’s often warmer outside than in. All in all, it’s just not all that warm here. I’m wearing about the same thing inside as out.

And I’m about ready for spring. But wait, there’s hope!

Today, I spotted this right here in our apartment complex:

Our China: Learning Chinese

April 1, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

I already have a page dedicated to the subject of learning Chinese, and a whole website where my kids and I post language lessons, but continuing to learn a language means occasionally changing things up with the resources we use, so I thought it worthwhile to explain a little of what I’m using to learn Chinese these days. I learn along with our kids, of course, since I took over responsibility for their Chinese instruction at the beginning of the year when their tutor moved on to bigger and better things. That will be the subject of a future post.

In the meantime, there are a number of resources I’ve personally been using to boost my Chinese level.

At my current level of comprehension in Mandarin, I could stop right where I am and get along just fine. I’m capable of:

buying the groceries (or just about anything else, for that matter)
negotiating price
asking for directions
getting where I want to go on foot, by taxi or by bus
getting un-lost when misdirected
ordering the foods I like at restaurants

And I can understand more than I can speak, so my comprehension stretches much further than my production.

But I’m still stymied when I want to express something from my heart. Or even just common courtesies. A while back, a friend’s father died. I didn’t know what to say that was socially appropriate. “I’m sorry” doesn’t translate for that kind of event. And many times, I take the long way around to explain what I want to say. While my meaning gets across, it does so anything but gracefully. The same applies for my use of anything but the present tense. I’m inconsistent and lacking finesse there too.

Don’t get me wrong. For someone with no formal instruction in the language, I’m doing really well, and I rejoice at my successes. But I also know I’ve got a long way to go before I speak anything like a native speaker, and that is my goal. I long for the day I’ll be able to understand most or all of what I hear on the radio or in conversation I hear on the street.

While I know I need to work on my oral/aural Mandarin, these days, I’ve been focusing on character recognition. It’s truly weird being illiterate. Up until just a few months ago, I could still only recognize characters at a survival level:

the characters for “man” and “woman” that you might see on a bathroom door
some characters for food items, mainly meat, since I avoid pork
numbers
some very basic vocabulary: the verb “to be,” “very,” the basic pronouns (he, she, it, me, you), big, small, person, eye, ear…
a few random characters like “king” or “Lord” that we frequently encountered when we attended Mandarin church services while back in Canada in an effort to keep up our Chinese

I was initially really daunted by the idea of learning characters, but was challenged by my Chinese tutor to begin trying. It wasn’t until recently, however, when I stumbled on an amazing flashcard program called Memrise, that my learning in this area really began to take off. The program does incredible things for language learning, but there are other applications as well. Just take a look at course options (in the menu on the left).

If I ever finish the study of Mandarin language, there are sets of flashcards on Chinese history or the periodic table (not that I’m interested personally, but I may file that away when it becomes important for my kids in high school).

The Program Feeds the Learner Mnemonic Devices

What makes this program particularly brilliant for the study of Mandarin [simplified] characters is a wonderful little feature the program calls mems. First, let me explain the dilemma, so you’ll have a deeper appreciation.

I’ve used flashcard programs before. The trouble is, often you have to take the time to enter in all the flashcard information first. This is time-consuming, especially when you’re working with English for definitions, pinyin with marked tones for the pronunciation as well as the simplified characters for the content being learned.

I finally found a flashcard program that simply fed me the information, but then when I encountered a new character I didn’t recognize, I had to stop and try to figure out some sort of mnemonic device that would help me to remember it. Some characters are “pictographs”–that is, they resemble what they represent, like 人 for person, 大 for big, 女 for woman and 日 for sun. But others, like 教 for teach are much less obvious. And what do you do when you encounter 便 for convenient and 使 for to cause. How will you tell them apart?

Instead of requiring the learner to think up his or her own device for learning each and every character, the program calls up “mems” other learners have created that do that work for you. There are usually a number of choices of mems, but if you don’t like a particular mem or can’t find one for that character, you have the option of making up your own.

Here’s my choice for a character that means, “to change into.”

The program uses a growth metaphor for practising the new material: planting (learning new material), watering (review) and harvesting (the final “test”), and keeps track of when you should review or be tested. At the same time, however, the program allows “overwatering” or extra practice for a particular set of vocabulary that was difficult the first time around or for the entire list, if you so desire.

It’s also always possible to get a quick snapshot of how you’re doing in the overall course:

Because I’m focusing on characters right now, I’ve put my learning with Rosetta Stone (levels 4 and 5) on hold, but I do plan to get back to it. In the meantime, I’m enjoying ChinesePod in my iPod while I do dishes or cook meals. So far, I’ve managed to squeeze in the few minutes each day it takes to learn or review about 25 characters per day. Literacy, here I come!

Our China: Exercise

March 11, 2013 by Carey Jane Clark

Exercise is part of the culture here–from school children who line up every morning to march and do junior calisthenics, to the elderly who take a morning walk and/or one after dinner. In addition, until quite recently, the primary mode of transportation for everyone in China was by foot or bicycle (although in our city, bicycles are scarcer because it is quite hilly), so walking was a part of daily life in China. Elevators used to be reserved for buildings over five floors, and small “exercise parks” like the one pictured below are common–every park and apartment complex has at least one.

exercise_park — Seniors exercising at one of the many exercise parks

Exercise in China park ladies dance — Seniors do aerobics in our apartment complex

Groups of ladies like the ones pictured above meet every day to do aerobics together. Someone brings a radio or CD player and with a leader–usually an older lady who used to teach some kind of dance classes–they all dance together. When we lived in the south, a group of ladies met in our complex every night to dance holding beautiful red fans. From time to time, I’ve been tempted to join them, but have been held back by the certainty that my participation would not go unnoticed and a large crowd would gather.

kindergarten exercise — Our kids do morning exercises at their kindergarten, 2008

There is a proverb in Chinese that says, 饭后百步走活到九十九. “Walk 100 steps after dinner and you’ll live to be 99,” so it’s a way of thinking deeply engrained in the culture.

The car, however, is changing all this. Certainly, there are still people who exercise regularly, but the most visible group exercising are the elderly. Perhaps it is simply that they have more leisure time to do so, but I do believe this is a part of Chinese culture that is slowly disappearing.

This article shows just how much car ownership is pervading the new China as a status symbol, and changing this aspect of Chinese culture. We are sad to see it go.

So what are you doing after dinner this evening?

{Tomorrow I’ll be participating in 5 Days of Teaching Creatively along with other members of the Schoolhouse Review Crew. Don’t forget to enter the giveaway
for almost $1000 worth of homeschool and family-friendly products.}

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