Chipanglish » Biographical http://www.chipanglish.com Blogging semi-coherently in Chinese, Japanese, and English Sat, 01 May 2010 01:46:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 About Peter http://www.chipanglish.com/biographical/peter-2/ http://www.chipanglish.com/biographical/peter-2/#comments Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:14:27 +0000 Peter http://www.chipanglish.com/?p=91 Ni3 de ma1 shi4 yi4 ge3 da4 wu1 gui1! "Your mother is a big fat turtle!" I proudly shouted at my third grade class, strangely, at the teacher's request. Weekly trips on Sundays to the local Chinese school were paying off. I've always been fascinated by language. I remember wondering aloud why certain sounds, when put together, created words while others did not. For example, why do we call the writing utensil made of wood and graphite a "pencil" and not a "globsprink"? ]]> Ni3 de ma1 shi4 yi4 ge3 da4 wu1 gui1! “Your mother is a big fat turtle!” I proudly shouted at my third grade class, strangely, at the teacher’s request. Weekly trips on Sundays to the local Chinese school were paying off.

I’ve always been fascinated by language. I remember wondering aloud why certain sounds, when put together, created words while others did not. For example, why do we call the writing utensil made of wood and graphite a “pencil” and not a “globsprink”? (Word Nerd Alert: The word pencil comes from the word peniculus, meaning “brush”. Peniculus is a diminutive of the root, penis, meaning “tail”.)

When offered the chance to take a language in middle school, I took to German. To most, the hacking phlegm of the German ch sounded revolting, but I found it beautiful.

In college, I discovered the wonderful world of linguistics: A world in which people did not give me funny looks when I contort my mouth to vocalize a voiced pharyngeal fricative. A world in which people found giddy joy in diagramming sentences. A world in in which language became a puzzle, rather than a string of seemingly random words.

I’m not just here for technical help, but also for pure fun.

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]]> http://www.chipanglish.com/biographical/peter-2/feed/ 0 About Elenita http://www.chipanglish.com/biographical/about_elenita/ http://www.chipanglish.com/biographical/about_elenita/#comments Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:58:39 +0000 Elenita http://www.chipanglish.com/?p=72 According to the family stories–I remember none of this–my immigrant parents dropped me off at preschool feeling optimistic but slightly nervous about my ability to cope with an English-only environment. They told me to soak up as many new words as possible, and follow the other kids’ lead.

Two weeks later, I came home singing a children’s song in Spanish. When my mom asked my teachers about it, they were as surprised as she. No, there was nothing on the curriculum involving Spanish, they said. So they poked around during they day and eventually realized that I’d picked it up playing with my best friend, Carmen, at recess.

My mom fretted that I was learning Spanish at the expense of English, and looked into sending me elsewhere. She didn’t stop until Carmen’s mother called my dad to ask if she knew this song her daughter had been singing nonstop for the last two days? It didn’t take Dad long to recognize the Korean lullaby he sang every night.

“Of course Carmen and I teach each other new songs,” I answered, when they asked me about it. “It’s fun.”

It’s been more than two decades since that conversation, and nearly as long since I taught anybody how to sing anything. But my attitude towards language–and languages–has essentially remained the same: they’re lots of fun. It’s interesting to play with them–to explore their components, to compare them, to pick them apart, to study their evolution, to analyze the politics surrounding them. I love them, and I think about them constantly.

I am not, however, a linguist. Though I’ve picked up a decent amount about the discipline over the years, my training is actually in international affairs with liberal doses of Spanish (which I had to relearn years after saying my goodbyes to Carmen) and German. I suspect my posts here will reflect that education, with discussions more centered around politics, history, culture(s), identity. and more. But never fear–I managed to survive eight years of Korean school and have plenty of funny stories, too.

Thanks for reading. Hope you enjoy the ride.

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]]> http://www.chipanglish.com/biographical/about_elenita/feed/ 1 About Me, About the Blog http://www.chipanglish.com/chinese/about/ http://www.chipanglish.com/chinese/about/#comments Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:43:48 +0000 Yvonne http://www.chipanglish.com/?p=10 Sesame Street. In the nearly three decades that have passed since I first proudly uttered those words, English has become, by far, my dominant language. The switch took place when I was around seven years old, much to my parents' chagrin. I remember being a small child on the playground, struggling to find an English retort to some bullies. Now I can sling English wisecracks like any native speaker, but my repertoire of Mandarin insults is sadly limited: pig, turtle, and various types of bad eggs. 笨蛋!—ben4 dan4!—stupid egg. ]]> The first complete English sentence I could speak was, “I am big, you are small.” The perils of letting your child learn the language of your adopted country via Sesame Street.

In the nearly three decades that have passed since I first proudly uttered those words, English has become, by far, my dominant language. The switch took place when I was around seven years old, much to my parents’ chagrin.

I remember being a small child on the playground, struggling to find an English retort to some bullies. Now I can sling English wisecracks like any native speaker, but my repertoire of Mandarin insults is sadly limited to pig, turtle, and various types of bad eggs. 笨蛋!—ben4 dan4!—stupid egg.

This blog is about my journey to re-claim my Mandarin proficiency and hopefully achieve native fluency. My spoken fluency is intermediate, I’d guess either 2+ or 3 on the ILR scale, but with native pronunciation. I can recognize several dozen Chinese characters and write even fewer, making me functionally illiterate.

This blog is also about my journey to learn Japanese. I married into a Japanese family and would like to communicate with my in-laws, beyond こんにちわ (konnichiwa—hello), ありがとうございます (arigato gozaimasu—thank you very much), 結婚式 (kekkonshiki—wedding), and 編み物 (amimono—knitting).

I’d like to take this moment to thank the computer for auto-converting romaji to hiragana to kanji and making me look way more advanced than I actually am (unless it did it wrong, in which case I’d like to thank it for helping me to get over the hump of the first Unintentional Multilingual Self-Humiliation). I can write/sound-out hiragana and katakana, but it’s pretty slow and painstaking.

And if I have time, I’ll even dust off my rusty ol’ Spanish! I’m better at speaking Spanish than speaking Japanese and reading Spanish than reading Chinese, which is to say that after six years of coursework and more years to forget, my Spanish is really, really lousy.

I hope that eventually I’ll be able to write entire non-English posts and mostly make sense. Hope you’ll come along for the ride!

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