In my posts, I’ve touched before on how important it is to approach language as a structure, not as a laundry list. When you learn phrases and sentences, rather than piecemeal words, you learn faster, and better. The analogy I like best is a room full of marbles. It will take a while to pick them up one by one, but much less time if you scoop them up in bags. (Leaving open, of course, the question of why you’re trying to clean up a room full of marbles. Wild night?)

But below the level of grammar, there’s something deeper at work. This deeper level is the underlying metaphors of the language you’re approaching—the ideas and concepts that anchor its vocabulary. Native speakers take these for granted. Second-language learners don’t always have that luxury.

For example, most languages tend to associate warmth with emotion, particularly affection. You can meet with a warm welcome (热烈欢迎 rèliè huānyíng) or a cold reception (冷遇 lěngyù). Indifference is cold, frigid, 冷漠 (lěngmò). When we get angry, we get steamed, hot under the collar (生气 shēngqì).

Looking at the two languages in terms of their shared figurative language makes it much easier to remember grammar and vocabulary. Rather than memorize thousands of individual phrases, you only need to recognize a few dozen underlying patterns. For example:

• We also tend to associate weight with importance. In English we ponder weighty matters, or worry over a grave (see: gravity) situation. So too the Chinese words 重要 (zhòngyào)、重点 (zhòngdiǎn)、重视 (zhòngshì), etc., associate what’s heavy with what deserves attention.

• Both languages tend to see the past as something behind us—it’s 过去的 (guòqu de)—and the future as something ahead of us—前景 (qiánjǐng). Progress, too, steps forward: we 推进 (tuījìn) new initiatives, and 进一步 (jìn yí bù) when we’re making strides.

Noticing these patterns can also help English speakers make sense of directional complements, a notoriously tricky business. As Perry Link notes in his indispensable Anatomy of Chinese, both languages see more as up, less as down. So inflation soars (通货膨胀上去了 tōnghuò péngzhàng shàngqù le) and temperatures rise (温度降了 wēndù jiàng le).

So take heart! At a deep level, English and Chinese are profoundly similar. Of course, there are also significant differences. And when you notice these differences, you can begin to avoid gaffes and errors. To name just a few:

• In English we fall asleep and wake up; in Chinese, we sleep away (睡过去 shuì guòqu) and wake towards (醒过来 xǐng guòlai). So English sees consciousness as vertical, while Chinese sees it as horizontal, a line that we step across.

• Light is associated with knowledge; when we understand, we are enlightened (明白 míngbai) and the situation is made clear (表明 biǎomíng). On the other hand, difficult or abstract things are dark: obscure, 晦涩 (huìsè).But there’s a key difference here. In English, seeing is understanding (I see your point), but not in Chinese: 我看你的意思 (wǒ kàn nǐ de yìsi) is not acceptable.

• As crucial as music may be to English metaphor, its place in Chinese culture is much more deeply rooted. Particularly when it comes to politics. Consider the old idiom 礼乐崩坏 (lǐ yuè bēng huài): literally “rites and music are in ruins,” it refers to a society in disarray. And, of course, a stable society is in harmony (协和 xiéhé).When it comes to political theater, Chinese draws extensively from opera. When a politician begins her career, she gets on stage上台 (shàngtái). If she falls from grace, she gets down from the stage (下台 xiàtái), or even falls off the stage altogether (倒台 dǎotái). When she announces a new policy, she puts it onstage (出台 chūtái). She probably has plenty of behind-the-scenes help (后台 hòutái). If she dissents, she may sing a different tune (唱反调 chàng fǎndiào) or put on a rival show (唱对台戏 chàng duì tái xì).

As you advance as a language learner, you’ll notice more and more of the metaphorical language that draws Chinese together. Try to notice broad patterns. Rejoice in similarities, but also in differences. You’ll start to look at the world with a refreshed, inquisitive eye.

The post The Marvelous World of Chinese Metaphor — When you can’t see the point, and all compasses point north appeared first on .

I’ll be very glad to write one for you. You need not worry about your speaking. Since you have built up your body (characters, vocabulary and grammar), now it’s time to throw yourself into the swimming pool, I’m pretty sure you’ll be like a fish in about three months.

– Hu laoshi

This reply—a very kind response from a very kind man—typifies the gap between the Chinese and English conception of idioms (成语 chéngyǔ). For Hu laoshi, always anxious to improve his English, idioms were an opportunity to demonstrate culture and refinement. For us, they’re clichés. We don’t know what to do with them; Chinese speakers don’t know what they’d do without them.

No, seriously, we don’t know what to do with them. Back in 2009, this almost got Hillary Clinton into what Hu laoshi might call “hot water.” Even once you get over the initial hurdles and select an appropriate chéngyǔ (more on this later), it can be extremely difficult to figure out how to use it. To English speakers, most of these bad boys look like full sentences. Can you just throw one out there like a fully formed sentence? Can you use it as a noun? An adjective? A verb?

If you don’t have a native speaker ready to consult, the only way to figure this out is by resorting to a corpus (I recommend Jukuu, but remember that while the Chinese here is excellent, the English translations here are not always reliable) or entering the idiom into a regular search engine and paying careful attention to how the idiom is used.

Let’s look at two examples: two randomly selected idioms relating to burning,

炙手可热 (zhì shǒu kě rè, lit. broil hand feel heat) for example, is used most frequently as an adjective:

创新在今日中国是个炙手可热的词。Innovation is the buzzword in China these days.

While 死灰复燃 (sǐ huī fù rán, lit. dead ash burns again) is sometimes an adjective, but usually a verb:

他担心德国国家主义会死灰复燃。 He feared the revival of German nationalism.

While we’re on the topic of frequency, notice that idioms actually comprise a very small percentage of written Chinese, and an even smaller percentage of the spoken language. Check out newspapers. I’ve been reading BBC Chinese regularly over the past ten months, making flashcards of 20-40 terms per article, and in all that time, I don’t think that more than 20 of those flashcards have been idioms.

So for all the fun of impressing native speakers with your cultural familiarity, it’s easiest to have a passive understanding of idioms. This is somewhat akin to the relationship between English speakers and Latin: Because of shared history, I can decode a Latin phrase or two, even if I can’t produce one myself. (Apparently lol would be MC, mango cacchino)

Similarly, idioms in Chinese are delectable, antiquated nuggets of a dead language. They have been done much disservice by the term idiom, which suggests something much more casual. Real idioms are a cross between the classical allusion, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible verse. And I can’t really imagine an ESOL class that begins by suggesting students bone up on their Greek mythology and New Testament parables. Useful, yes, but essential, no.

(Confession/Disclaimer/Shameless Promotion for Classical Chinese: I was once voted Student Most Likely to Understand Any Idiom. Was this a deliberate effort on my part? No. It was the result of studying a few semesters of Classical Chinese. Which I recommend anyway, since it helps you decode more formal language.)

Idioms pose special risks for Chinese learners, since we tend to be self-motivated, up-by-our-own-bootstraps learners. When we look up idioms without cross-checking them in a corpus, and we’re likely to pick wrong. Then we come out sounding like revivified classics scholars. Oh Minerva! Alas, King of Chu! The results can be deeply inappropriate or embarrassing.

In this spirit, I’ll close with a well-meaning student’s response to Hu laoshi’s letter:

Thank so much for writing my recommendation. As they say, Wherefore art thou Romeo?

Sincerely,

Jamie[/cs_quote]

The post Why Chinese Idioms Are a Waste of Time appeared first on .

Call it “Doorknobgate.” The idea had its immediate detractors. As you might guess, I’m one of them. Regardless of your political affiliation, you have to hate what followed: “I would bet that those people who know how to say doorknob in Farsi almost invariably oppose a military strike on Iran.”

For one thing, it assumes that all words are created equal—that it’s as important to know 大男子主义(dà nán zǐ zhǔ yì) as it is to know 动作(dòng zuò). At a minimum, that’s not how the HSK is structured; more importantly, that’s not how language acquisition works. Certain words are simply used more frequently than others, and you’re more likely to remember what you come across, and use, in daily life. I can’t remember the last time I asked someone to turn the doorknob, but I do remember the last time I asked someone to open the door.

But here’s the bigger problem: The Doorknob Theory of Language assumes fluency increases as vocabulary increases, which is entirely untrue. My own vocabulary is full of white elephants—I know, and will probably never get to use, the Classical term for the kind of wispy hair that grows on your temples (鬓 bìn) and the verb 馘 (guó), which means to cut off the left ear of the slain—but can fall disappointingly flat when communicating nuanced emotions, or choosing the right verb to narrate a geopolitical upheaval (经过jīng guò? 通过tōng guò? 遭遇zāo yù?)

Fluency increases as you acquire vocabulary intelligently. That means knowing the context. It’s part of a shift in second-language learning that’s been happening over the past few decades: a movement from structural learning, which relies on memorizing lists (parts of speech, Latin declensions, all that jazz) to functional and interactive learning, which treat language as your means to an end. Are you learning Chinese to speak with family? Read the classics? Bone up on foreign policy? Learn it like you’ll use it.

That’s true of every language. But for the Chinese learner, there are special challenges: which verbs and objects to use in collocations, which verbs of motion and which verb complements, and how to handle the fossilized little pools of Classical Chinese that you find in 成语 (idiom). If all you have is a lengthy mental list of nouns and verbs, with little ability to spontaneously use them, that’s not fluency. That’s a party trick.

The key, then, is to memorize contexts. That means phrases, sentences, songs. It means reading and listening to the news, noticing which verbs appear over and over with the same nouns, and not really with anything else. Every time you learn a new word, make sure you jot down a few examples of how and when to use it. Otherwise, you may be lucky enough to know doorknob, but that doesn’t mean you know how to say open the door. (For added support when you’re writing essays or deliberating over a word choice, check out a corpus site like Jukuu.)

In fact, vocabulary can often be a hindrance to language acquisition. How long have you been studying Chinese? How long did it take you to start reading real-people material—what’s written for actual native speakers, not cooked up for a stilted dialogue about shopping for fruit or marveling at socialist advances? When it comes to Chinese, you can easily spend hours on four or five pages. When you’re done, chances are you remember the new words you’ve been forced to look up, but not necessarily the context, the story, or new expressions.

That’s where a site like Foreigncy comes in. We find relevant news articles and translate the key words, but also the doorknobs that would normally send you scrambling to a dictionary. By making flashcards from news articles for you before you read them, you can focus on what’s actually happening in the story, and move on to learning contexts. That’s how you start opening doors.

Oh yeah. Which verb do you use to turn a doorknob? It’s 拧 (nǐng). Let’s see Nicholas Kristof try that with Farsi.

The post The Doorknob Theory of Chinese appeared first on .