{"id":30921,"date":"2014-03-28T14:19:23","date_gmt":"2014-03-28T06:19:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tribune.ctsi-logistics.com\/?p=30921"},"modified":"2014-03-28T14:19:23","modified_gmt":"2014-03-28T06:19:23","slug":"noodle-level-survival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/noodle-level-survival\/","title":{"rendered":"Noodle-level survival"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the heels of last week\u2019s article about dealing with foreign languages in the tourism industry, one of my pals noticed that I\u2019ve gone all of 2014 without once sniveling about my Mandarin Chinese studies. I\u2019ve been asked if I\u2019ve finally given up on that gig, and whether or not my enthusiasm has been worn down by the years, the toil, and my very slow progress.\u00a0<\/span>
\nIf the subject were merely one of personal interest, I wouldn\u2019t bother to mention it. But the topic isn\u2019t going away. Many people I know are striving to catch up to the Chinese-speaking market, notably in the hotel, restaurant, transportation, real estate, auto sales, advertising, legal services, and banking industries. That\u2019s not just a Saipan or Guam situation. It\u2019s a global one.<\/p>\n

This language thing is really murky. For one thing, it\u2019s impossible to trust anyone\u2018s \u201cself reported\u201d ability in any language, so potential students who are surveying the landscape don\u2019t have a reliable index of the kind of progress they can expect to make. It\u2019s a shot in the dark.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll tell you what I\u2019ve told my pals about studying Mandarin Chinese, at least at the casual, amateur level at which I\u2019ve engaged it: This is one realm where setting goals might be problematic. You might want to consider jumping into the process without any expectations, with the one goal being to remain in the process without any goals.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t have any pals who bellied up to Mandarin classes with me. So my peer group, such as it was, consisted of the few other \u201cold people\u201d I met in my classes. I tally four of us from a total of three semesters. Our experience was consistent enough for me to draw some conclusions from it.<\/p>\n

We all sensed that our first two semesters were fruitful. But the third didn\u2019t seem to deliver much progress for the effort. This effort consisted of laborious amounts of handwriting. With the fourth semester looming ahead, and more mountains of handwriting towering over us, we had to decide if we were going to hang with the classroom routine or abandon it in favor of independent efforts.<\/p>\n

As we contemplated this, we did settle on a basic benchmark for our skill: lunch.<\/p>\n

This was a full-circle concept for me. One reason I wanted to study Chinese was because I got totally stymied in a Taiwanese noodle shop one day when I was really hungry. I vowed to prevent such problems in the future. I didn\u2019t aspire to elegance; I merely aspired to some basic, street-level (or noodle-level) survival abilities.<\/p>\n

So, lunch was my inspiration. And now lunch was our benchmark. How did we measure up?<\/p>\n

Not well, as it turns out. After three semesters we realized that none of us separately, or, for that matter, none of us working together, could competently navigate a basic lunch order at a Chinese restaurant. Sure, we could say a few things, but we were still pretty hopeless.<\/p>\n

When a waitress told us that we were pretty good for three days worth of study, and we told her we had studied for three semesters, not three days, she didn\u2019t believe us.<\/p>\n

Yikes.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure the classroom approach has advantages. I\u2019m not criticizing it. But those of us who had far lowlier standards and who just wanted street-level skills had to take our own paths. We had to come up with our own plans.<\/p>\n

For me, since lunch was my inspiration, and since lunch became our fateful benchmark, I decided there\u2019s no use messing with destiny. So I made lunch my strategy as well.<\/p>\n

I found a few friendly restaurants where the staff didn\u2019t mind helping me. I\u2019d always take a small note pad with me, and every time I had lunch I\u2019d emerge with a new word or maybe an important phrase, something relevant to the ordering process. That\u2019s all I wanted, just one word or phrase per visit. This took no more than a few seconds on any given day.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s small progress for small effort but it kept me in the game.<\/p>\n

Lunch, of course, isn\u2019t the only way to remain on the field. For example, one of my peers kept a simple journal (in Chinese) in which he\u2019d note several highlights of his daily routine. Once a week he\u2019d meet with a tutor who would review the journal with him.<\/p>\n

I might give this technique a shot, since the lunch thing has run its course and I\u2019d like to resume my native diet of bacon cheeseburgers.<\/p>\n

Overall, my experience studying Mandarin Chinese, and that of the few peers I dealt with, was this: It\u2019s fun. It\u2019s interesting. It\u2019s difficult. It\u2019s powerful. It\u2019s elusive.<\/p>\n

Visit Ed Stephens Jr. at\u00a0EdStephensJr.com<\/a>. His column runs every Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the heels of last week\u2019s article about dealing with foreign languages in the tourism…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[51,133,44],"class_list":["post-30921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-guam","tag-run","tag-study"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30921\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}