On Characters (文字)

For whatever reason, whenever I tell friends I moved out to Shanghai to improve my Mandarin the usual response I get is, "Oh, you must be fluent now."

No! There are so many characters and so many different combinations of characters that I really don't think anyone is fluent. In fact, I'm pretty sure there are still characters being discovered today by scholars that even they can't be fully fluent.

Granted, there are native speakers who can perfectly hold a conversation. But as anyone who started with CHI 101 can tell you, characters are all distinct and each represent something that together form a huge conglomerate of pictures.

That for me is the appeal of Mandarin. You always have to try to figure out what each character represents, and at the same time, try to figure out how one characters works with another.

Let me give some examples for those who have been asking me what Mandarin is like:

Take the word 'diplomacy'. In Chinese it's 外交. The first character 外 wai(4) means outside, or foreigner and the second is 交 jiao(1) meaning communication. This makes sense: foreign communication.

So does the word for 'foundation'. In Chinese it's 基础. The first character 基 ji(1) means basic, as in 基本 for basically, and 础 chu(3) ground.

Now, where things get funny are with characters like the following: 风花雪月. The first character means wind, the second flower, the third snow, and the fourth moon. Put together they mean empty speech.

I recently came across this phrase in a book called 'China is not happy' and when I asked how the above makes sense, the response was: it doesn't. That's how it is.

This is only one of many examples of how, if the literal meaning of each character is put together with others, you're left confused as to how the actual meaning works out.

But that's the puzzle behind the language and that's why given the huge number of characters that exists it's impossible to be truly fluent.

On a completely different note, the weekend was chill. Got to get lost in more parts in Puxi, had dinner with some Pton friends on Saturday, and went to this salsa/reggaeton night at Zapatas last night. I have never seen a more enthused crowd dancing to Don Omar, especially this song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFvedbMGbJo