Friday the 13th of June:
I am in Hong Kong again for a few days. I have to leave China every thirty days for visa reasons. Crazy, its already been almost a month that I have been in China. How time flies.
I am feeling very hopeful about my stay here. It keeps dawning on me what a blessing it is to have the opportunity to learn a third language and get to know such a vastly different culture. I feel like learning Chinese will also open up a whole new way of understanding languages.
The past few days I have been learning about radicals. Radicals are the components that make up the Chinese characters. There are 214 basic radicals that help to portray the meaning and pronunciation of the characters. It has been very exiting to start to learn them. It’s like picking away at a window covered in black plastic, each tiny piece removed reveals a little more of the whole picture. It’s like slowing deciphering a very complex code.
The streets are covered with unintelligible shapes and symbols that at first, kind of infuriated me. I couldn’t stand that I could not understand a single thing. Nothing made even a lick of sense to me. In all honesty, I resented the people that had allowed this complicated language to survive the test of time. Couldn’t they have traded this language out for something more convenient and more practical?
The computer went from taking up an entire house to fitting inside your pocket. Where’s the iChinese 5S addition? To their credit they have made a simplified version of the Chinese characters but somehow it doesn’t seem to compare with our 26 character alphabet.
Isn’t that just human nature though? We don’t appreciate what we don’t understand. We don’t appreciate what is different. We can see it all throughout society. Racism, sexism, religious wars, etc, etc.
I remember hating Portuguese as I was trying to learn Spanish because it confused me. I can remember thinking to myself when I would listen to people speaking Portuguese, can you just talk right? I can tell you are trying to talk Spanish but I can’t understand what you are saying. Quit playing games and start speaking correctly.
As I am sure you can see, Chinese was rubbing me the wrong way as well. It made no sense to me and therefore it must be flawed. Well, as I have been studying the building blocks of the Chinese characters it has instantly changed my perspective. I have gone from frustrated and angry to fascinated and intrigued. And go figure, Portuguese has become my favorite language to speak.
Wouldn’t that be something if humans stopped hating what they didn’t understand. Or what if humans spent more time trying to understand that which they hate. What a different world we would be in. The neat thing is, regardless of what the rest of the world choses to do, my reality changes, when I decide that my way isn’t necessarily the right way.
I am so excited to see a completely new way of understanding written language. The characters fit well with the fact that I am a visual learner. It is a picture language after all. The tonal aspect, on the other hand, is going to be difficult. Good times ahead!