English is hard
I learned three new words from reading this Economist article about the political situation in Bangladesh: begum, factotum, and rusticated. I was pretty sure from context what rusticated meant, but as for the other two I had no idea. (For the record, a begum is a Muslim woman of high status, and a factotum is essentially a right-hand man or all-purpose servant).
What this illustrates, in case you're wondering, is that learning languages really is a never-ending process. After twenty years, there are still thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of words in the English language which I do not know and probably will never even hear spoken. Chinese almost certainly isn't as burdensome as far as wordage goes, but begum just goes to show that there is no such thing as complete mastery. English may be spoken by you and me, but it isn't controlled by us. Language is a thing bigger than any one person, and the best we can hope is to use it well, if not perfectly. As a note, there are more than 500,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, even excluding a further half million scientific and specialty terms.
I'm obviously not quite so advanced in Chinese, but I am beginning to be able to read the Taiwanese equivalent of Time. I'm pretty slow and there are obviously some judgements to be made by context, but I am almost at the point where I can seriously consume news in this society. I am planning on buying up all the textbooks at ICLP and taking them back with me to the United States, because from now on the material becomes actually interesting. The lessons are on topics which I would be excited to think about in any language, and that makes a big difference. I can see myself reading that stuff for fun (is that a good thing?)
I can hear birds outside my room right now, and a few people walking down the street. It's pretty quiet, though, because it's Saturday. In about a week, it ought to be even more quiet. Chinese Lunar New Year is coming up soon, and apparently most people travel down south for the holidays. I guess it's similar to how people might travel to the big city for work, but when the time comes to celebrate Christmas, everyone really wants to be back home with the family. Taipei is supposed to be pretty dead that time of year, although somehow I don't really believe it'll be as dead as all the cabbies claim. I guess I'll find out. New Year's in Taiwan is a pretty strange situation for most of the foreigners, as a lot of them don't have anyone local to eat with and are also burdened by the fact that most shops and restaurants close for the holidays. So there's nothing to do, except hang out with other foreigners and complain. I still haven't exactly decided what I will do, although I think I'm going to try and do something very traditional, e.g. find a large Taiwanese family and go get stuffed with awesome food.
Right now, however, I'm just glad I can sit in my room and do nothing but read and listen to music. And then I'm going to watch some X Files.
(X檔案, if you're curious. And x-rays are X光).
EDIT: I found a passage in an article about the idea of copyright in modern society which very elegantly describes the idea I touched on earlier about language's place as something which no one person controls and yet remains under everyone's influence:
"The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn't mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole."
This selection is from "Influence" by Jonathan Lethem in the February 2007 edition of Harper's Bazaar. He happens to have written "Gun, with Occasional Music," an unusual scifi novel a friend lent me in high school.
What this illustrates, in case you're wondering, is that learning languages really is a never-ending process. After twenty years, there are still thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of words in the English language which I do not know and probably will never even hear spoken. Chinese almost certainly isn't as burdensome as far as wordage goes, but begum just goes to show that there is no such thing as complete mastery. English may be spoken by you and me, but it isn't controlled by us. Language is a thing bigger than any one person, and the best we can hope is to use it well, if not perfectly. As a note, there are more than 500,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, even excluding a further half million scientific and specialty terms.
I'm obviously not quite so advanced in Chinese, but I am beginning to be able to read the Taiwanese equivalent of Time. I'm pretty slow and there are obviously some judgements to be made by context, but I am almost at the point where I can seriously consume news in this society. I am planning on buying up all the textbooks at ICLP and taking them back with me to the United States, because from now on the material becomes actually interesting. The lessons are on topics which I would be excited to think about in any language, and that makes a big difference. I can see myself reading that stuff for fun (is that a good thing?)
I can hear birds outside my room right now, and a few people walking down the street. It's pretty quiet, though, because it's Saturday. In about a week, it ought to be even more quiet. Chinese Lunar New Year is coming up soon, and apparently most people travel down south for the holidays. I guess it's similar to how people might travel to the big city for work, but when the time comes to celebrate Christmas, everyone really wants to be back home with the family. Taipei is supposed to be pretty dead that time of year, although somehow I don't really believe it'll be as dead as all the cabbies claim. I guess I'll find out. New Year's in Taiwan is a pretty strange situation for most of the foreigners, as a lot of them don't have anyone local to eat with and are also burdened by the fact that most shops and restaurants close for the holidays. So there's nothing to do, except hang out with other foreigners and complain. I still haven't exactly decided what I will do, although I think I'm going to try and do something very traditional, e.g. find a large Taiwanese family and go get stuffed with awesome food.
Right now, however, I'm just glad I can sit in my room and do nothing but read and listen to music. And then I'm going to watch some X Files.
(X檔案, if you're curious. And x-rays are X光).
EDIT: I found a passage in an article about the idea of copyright in modern society which very elegantly describes the idea I touched on earlier about language's place as something which no one person controls and yet remains under everyone's influence:
"The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn't mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole."
This selection is from "Influence" by Jonathan Lethem in the February 2007 edition of Harper's Bazaar. He happens to have written "Gun, with Occasional Music," an unusual scifi novel a friend lent me in high school.
posted by Andrew at
2:55 PM
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