My Sinophilia Never Seems To Wane

[sword_and_face]

Although I'm still not sure exactly what I want to do in China, I remain ridiculously enthusiastic about going. Part of me thinks that initially teaching English for a while would be putting off studying Chinese intensley. On the other hand, not being in school (except for Chinese class) and making money, teaching kids, are so appealing. So, that's

Comments

[17aurelianos]

I was listening to 'radiolab' last night on my drive home and part of their program dealt with perfect pitch people. THey did a study and found that the chinese, since pitch is an integral part of their spoken language, were several times more likely to be perfect pitch folks than Western Europeans and Yanks. It was real interesting- I think that would be real frustrating when trying to learn the language to also have to be conscious of one's pitch at the same time thinking of verb conjugations and vocabulary etc. Hopefully it becomes more natural.

[sword_and_face]

Yeah thats interesting, and not so surprising I guess. There are 4 'tones' in Chinese and every word has one. I'm still so far from natural at it, but it starts to rub off a little when that's the only way you hear the words pronounced. You would assume too that it would be easy to mix up meanings becuase so many words are so similiar, like 'ma' in all four tones is four completey different words. But, becuase they are so different in meaning, context seems to take care of that nicely. Trying to tell somebody the name of something like a specific place though, that gets rough. If the tones are messed up, they just won't understand you.

[17aurelianos]

yeah they used 'ma' as the example.