My interesting language observations (and more!)

3/6/10 6:50 PM

These are my notes from the first English class on which I sat in. (Avoiding that dangling preposition is a little tough there, isn’t it?) They’re exactly what I wrote down as I went, occasionally quoting some things as they popped up. I bracket in things that deserve a little more discussion.

Eating disorders, cosmetic surgery, society’s expectations, beauty, “thin waists,” “forced by society to endure such considerable pain and suffering” [there was a good chunk of the lesson concerned with the use of “considerable”]
“10 years younger” “millions of women alter their bodies”
pronounce: horrendous
“silly”
“horrendous things to their body”
“have their bottom lips removed”

mian fei – free
country side is free of pollution

he/she mix-ups [in spoken Mandarin, the word for “he” and “she” – “ta” – is the same. It’s written differently, and the two written characters are considered different words, but the spoken words are identical, and “ta” essentially a genderless term. Because of this, many of the people, when speaking English, confuse their “he’s” and “she’s.” They rarely catch themselves, and even switch back and forth between the two as they speak.], no big distinction between cars/bikes [The word for “car” can basically be used to refer to bikes as well, and this is another translation error that pops up sometimes, but not often.]

“Taiwan Issue” [Used as an example for the use of the word “issue,” which they had previously been pronouncing iss-yoo] 2 nouns, verb [this is me realizing that the English language is tremendously confusing. The word “issue” has two separate noun forms and a verb form. I would never have realized this on my own.]

Our language is complicated
Partial inversion
Complete inversion
“seldom do people think about the real dangers of this obsession with looks.” [which is I think some sort of inversion, but again, I would not have come up with this on my own, and even now I can’t work out which inversion it might be.]

[someone was asked to define “quaint” in class, and Briggs and I leaned over and instantly agreed that few of NHS’s students could define such a term.]

Our language is hard, their language is hard. It’s all very hard. My Chinese sounds far worse to them than their English does to me, I’m sure.

Now back to your miscellany, already in progress.

I just played a rousing game of Badminton with Naiyi’s father, who is really excellent at the game. I’m glad I had the unit of Badminton in gym class, but nothing could have prepared me for his and his friends’ level of play. The sort of things I couldn’t begin to imagine, or analyze, or, it seemed, even witness. Which may be a slight exaggeration, but it’s only to get you to begin to imagine that which I previously couldn’t imagine. The hyperboles are, generally, in your best interest.

He had 3 friends from work, and he is their manager, I think. And they all played extremely well. You wouldn’t think it, looking at him (you wouldn’t not think it either), but he’s an athlete. By our standards. But not, it seems, by the Chinese standards. (I always flinch at declaring something “Chinese,” by its very nature, or belonging to the Chinese, as a whole, but again, the hyperboles are to impress upon you the seemingly unbroken chain of athletic people I meet. Naiyi is tremendous at ping-pong, and I suspect he’s very good at basketball, because he says he wants to practice for a competition at the school next week, either Tuesday or Friday, and a friend, Jason, who I spoke about briefly in a few earlier posts, is scary good at basketball, which I can tell, although I’ve only seen him take a single [beautiful, far away] shot at a basket. I’m always half expecting the teachers to start racing along the walls.)

The gym itself was part of a really big school, which I think was quite the exception when it comes to Shanghai schools. Naiyi said that many schools like ping-pong because it requires little space to have it played, and that sports like baseball and football and soccer need too much space dedicated to them. Which makes a lot of sense. Which is to say, I’ve become mildly disgusted by the layout of our school, which has very many tennis courts, a football field (which doubles as a soccer field), a baseball field, very large indoor gyms, which can fit two full basketball courts. All on our school grounds. They have a ping-pong room with 7 tables, 2 basketball courts, and a small room generally used for Badminton. And they use everything far more often, and far better, than we use our space. This sort of gripe can be applied to tons of different areas of life; food, money, free time, and education all seem to be misused in America and more efficiently, more sensibly used here.

Umm.

Ooh we saw Avatar today. It was quite good. They translated the Na’vi language into Mandarin subtitles, though, rather than English, so I think I missed out on a good bit of the dialogue. Naiyi said he liked the message of the movie, that we should not be “conceited,” and realize that everything we have comes from nature.

I’m watching something on the news about affordable housing and the (I think?) government policies on it all. There is a stimulus package (in the works? Or maybe it’s happening now) that encourages housing growth, which is a very good thing, I think. The apartment complexes are pretty tremendous. They remind me of the buildings from Akira, for those of you who know what I’m talking about.

This guy, Evol, does a lot of great work that captures the beautiful grime of the place.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/evoldaily/3667256575/in/photostream/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/evoldaily/3866478999/in/set-72157605620529280/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/evoldaily/2645461289/in/set-72157605620529280/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/evoldaily/3867252528/in/set-72157605620529280/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/evoldaily/3357587493/in/set-72157605620529280/

Some Lays just showed up in my room, which was interesting and nice. The tube-format of the Lays is the same, but inside of the tube is a tray, which makes a lot more sense. So you sort of slide the tray out from the tube, and go from there.

Do they “get” Project Runway? Do I?

I’ve always found that a non-American’s perceptions of America are a lot more accurate than American’s perceptions of other countries. A lot more. We’re conceited, as Naiyi would say.