The public fish is very quiet

Friend: “Dude, how can you spend your morning practicing Chinese writing when the entire Western economic structure is in meltdown?”

Me: “That question answers itself.”

Indeed, it does. You place your bets. I’ve placed mine. And, once again, I can offer you a bit of comic relief as I give you another update on my bungling, slapstick foray into the Chinese language. I’ve finished my second year of this mission. So I’ll give you a status report. But first, let me tell you about last week’s big presentation in class.

I was play-acting a landlord describing an apartment to a prospective tenant. Since it’s a big part of our grade, I put a lot of effort into preparing for the exercise.

I thought I aced that gig. I thought wrong.

Indeed, I screwed up the word “apartment” by pronouncing the second syllable in the second tone instead of the fourth tone. A minor transgression? Seemingly so. But, judge for yourself: By using the second tone instead of the fourth, I wasn’t really saying “apartment.”

No, I was inadvertently saying “public fish.”

And I said it over and over again, since the worse you are in a language, the more often you have to repeat the key nouns since you lack the skill to make more oblique references. (Nice of me to indict you as well by using the second-person reference there, eh?)

So, my big presentation went like so: The public fish has two bedrooms. The public fish is located east of the park. The public fish has a security deposit of just $500. The public fish is very quiet.

Well, that’s all well and good for the public fish. In fact, in the entire 4,000-year record of the Chinese language, I think I have delivered history’s best sales pitch for a public fish, especially of the quiet, two-bedroom variety. However, seemingly oblivious to historical milestones, my professor was not amused.

Oops. Did I mention it took me two years to get to this point?

Over this time I’ve met enough people in my situation to regard my status as typical. We’re not young, fresh-brained, full-time students. I think this is a common situation with mid-career professionals confronting Chinese. So, while I know that the world has many language prodigies in it, who like to regale the world with heroic tales of their exceptional linguistic and cross-cultural prowess, I don’t hang out with anyone who makes those claims.

So, reality check: None of us (colleagues and yours truly) can “speak Chinese.” Not even a little bit. We can, with great effort, try to order some common items at a restaurant if, and only if, the staff is willing to take pains to suffer us, and if, and only if, the transaction is very simple.

And I can, more or less, say a few polite things at business introductions. But this is a real risk: What if somebody says something back? That’s a linguistic boomerang with nails in it. Most responses that come my way either fly over my head entirely, or, worse yet, I think I understand something (but, of course, I don’t) and I respond in a totally irrelevant manner.

Or, consider this scenario:

“Mr. Stephens, welcome to Beijing. I trust your accommodations are satisfactory?”

“Yes, Mr. Wang. Thank you very much for providing me with such a big public fish.”

Well, so much for an anecdotal progress report. Let’s take a more quantitative inventory of things. I listed every word I’ve learned and every grammar rule I was supposed to learn. As for the grammar, oh, never mind the grammar, it’s a swirling nebula of self-opposing forces that we’ll explore some other time.

On the vocabulary side of things, by which I mean speaking and writing, I can give a raw tally for myself: 1,104 words. This is (naturally) below the benchmarks I often hear for two years of study, but there’s nothing I can do about that; my spreadsheets don’t lie. Well, unless they have a circular reference, that is.

Egads, come to think of it, there is a circular reference here. And a pretty big one at that. Chinese characters and words are mixed and matched to build other words, in sort of a modular approach to things. So a pure tally of the basic words can rocket to the upside if you want to count things that way. But I’m too lazy to put any extra wood on the pile like that.

Or maybe I’m just too nervous. After all, numbers, in Chinese, can have great significance. I can’t escape the progression here: (a) The indebted West is doing Fall of Rome 2.0, as (b) I’m entering my third year of Chinese, and (c) I’m still practicing the fourth tone, and you know why that is!