Dreaming in Chinese

Recently, I started reading a book called Dreaming in Chinese by Deborah Fallows. As I read it, it seems I have read it before. Maybe I read it last spring, but it’s still enjoyable the second time around. The first time is good but the second time is even better. The second time around I understand more. Kind of like learning Chinese. In the case of the book, I identify with the author more. She lived in Beijing and Shanghai, first in the later 1980’s then almost 20 years later when her husband was a foreign reporter and researcher. Deborah trained as a linguist so her perspective on living in Beijing comes from looking at life through the lenses of language learning.

Reading the book again makes me think of learning Mandarin. I listen to the text CDs, go to class, try to communicate in class, but it doesn’t seem to stick. On Thursdays we meet with a tutor. During that time, Mark brings last year’s books and goes over concepts, grammar, words that we have already studied. Poor tutor. I’m sure she wonders if we even learned anything the first time. I think: we have been over this so many times before. However, repetition is key to early learning. We try to use those words in multiple combinations, adding more words here and there, rearranging the word order, adding descriptive words.  Anything to make them stick.  Anything to master Mandarin, even if it’s bit by bit.

From the Amazon.com website: Deborah Fallows has spent a lot 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 learning the language of her adopted home provided small clues to deciphering 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.

...Dreaming in Chinese is the story of what Deborah Fallows discovered about the Chinese language, and how that helped her make sense of what had at first seemed like the chaos and contradiction of everyday life in China.