Tuesday, September 2, 2014
逆来顺受
When I took my first Chinese class, it was very strange to find me on a level I hadn't been on in 20 years. Not only was I learning very basic Chinese, but I was learning different linguistics. My teacher Chen Laoshi was an old woman and every other minute she would talk to us about "in ancient times". She would explain each character. There were some stand alones like 火 (fire), 口 (mouth), 人 (person), 心 (heart), and 山 (mountain). These characters on there own are simple enough. But when paired with another character, they create words. 水满则溢. This proverb says that "water surges only to overflow". 人 (ren or person) is until a house and suggested alone. This symbol means "only". Fire paired with heart means passion and a mountain with a house over it stands for limitation. Being use to how latin/germanic languages work made learning intermediate Chinese even harder and I noticed that even though I am older, it didn't mean my intelligence was above language. There are things that a child understands that I have never even heard of.While being a tutor for KSA, I noticed that sometimes they would have a hard time translating a specific phrase or saying and it wasn't because they didn't know enough english but because there was no words in the English language to translate it to. It baffled me to think that there are more words in the world that I don't even know about and that I may not ever understand since I wasn't attuned to that specific language first.
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I think that our minds have become very Eurocentric in a the last 200 years or so, because many of us today see the different ways to translate the same word over and over again into many of the languages that have a similar base to the one we speak. Those who are from an Asian countries are sometimes confused by our words because not only can three different words mean the exact same thing to us, but there are also quite a few words that have been made up over the years that do not have a real translation into another language, especially those who are of an Asian background. I could be wrong, but I think that the people who are of the Asian countries are a bit more succinct in the way that they express things compared to how flowery and fluffy we can get with languages like Spanish, English, or French.
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