Deborah Fellows

Dreaming in Chinese

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Deborah Fallows has spent much of her life learning languages and traveling around the world. But nothing prepared her for the surprises of learning Mandarin, China's most common language, or the intensity of living in Shanghai and Beijing. Over time, she realized that her struggles and triumphs in studying the language of her adopted home provided small clues to deciphering the behavior and habits of its people,and its culture's conundrums. As her skill with Mandarin increased, bits of the language-a word, a phrase, an oddity of grammar-became windows into understanding romance, humor, protocol, relationships, and the overflowing humanity of modern China.
Fallows learned, for example, that the abrupt, blunt way of speaking that Chinese people sometimes use isn't rudeness, but is, in fact, a way to acknowledge and honor the closeness between two friends. She learned that English speakers' trouble with hearing or saying tones-the variations in inflection that can change a word's meaning-is matched by Chinese speakers' inability not to hear tones, or to even take a guess at understanding what might have been meant when foreigners misuse them.
In sharing what she discovered about Mandarin, and how those discoveries helped her understand a culture that had at first seemed impenetrable, Deborah Fallows's Dreaming in Chinese opens up China to Westerners more completely, perhaps, than it has ever been before.
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259 printed pages
Publication year
2010
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Quotes

  • emeraldfleurhas quoted6 years ago
    When the Communists came to power in 1949, Mao stamped his own imprints on the language reform movement. He dealt with the writing system in ways that he said would make it more accessible to the masses, and which critics (from the safety of decades later!) have often labeled a dumbing down of the vaunted traditional linguistic system. These included a two-pronged approach. First, they shrank the vocabulary used in public media and official documents and propaganda, so ordinary people would have fewer characters to master in order to become literate. Second, they reduced the number of strokes needed to write thousands of the traditional complex characters (called fántǐzì), creating simplified characters ( jiǎntǐzì). In addition, they finally adopted a phonetic alphabet called Pīnyīn
  • emeraldfleurhas quoted6 years ago
    Mǎmahūhū = mǎ (horse) + hū (tiger) = horsehorsetiger-tiger, or “so-so,” as in “How are things going at work? Well, mǎmahūhū.” I heard a fable about the origin of this word. I usually shun folk etymologies for their lack of linguistic rigor and accountability, but this one is particularly charming: An artist was drawing an animal picture on the wall of his cave. His neighbors came along, saw the work, were impressed, and began arguing over whether the animal was a horse or a tiger. The arguments escalated until the village folk stepped back, got a grip and realized that if they could not agree on what the drawing represented, then perhaps it wasn’t actually so good after all. Hence, horsehorsetigertiger, or mǎmahūhū, became the shortcut way to describe the quality of something as so-so.
  • emeraldfleurhas quoted6 years ago
    When the Communists came to power in 1949, Mao stamped his own imprints on the language reform movement. He dealt with the writing system in ways that he said would make it more accessible to the masses, and which critics (from the safety of decades later!) have often labeled a dumbing down of the vaunted traditional linguistic system. These included a two-pronged approach. First, they shrank the vocabulary used in public media and official documents and propaganda, so ordinary people would have fewer characters to master in order to become literate. Second, they reduced the number of strokes needed to write thousands of the traditional complex characters (called fántǐzì), creating simplified characters ( jiǎntǐzì). In addition, they finally adopted a phonetic alphabet called Pīnyīn, which (more or less) spells out the sounds of Chinese characters using Roman letters. To this day, mainland China uses simplified characters and Pinyin. An unforeseen bonus of Pinyin is its great flexibility for use on computer keyboards and in texting on mobile phones.

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