用浪漫去款待 這個殘酷時代

[highways]

❦ I have started learning Taiwanese, which is a Chinese "dialect" that's actually a completely different language; they're probably as related as, hmm, English and German? Of course since all the printed materials I can find are actually written in Mandarin, the similarities here add another level of oh god why am I doing this to me why.

❦ It is pretty much impossible to describe in words the immense depths of my hate for Chinese calligraphy (書法). Seriously it's fucking awful and I have to take it until next July.

❦ I literally get up at around six every morning to study Chinese for about five hours before I have to go anywhere. I'm also probably going to see if I can add an additional two Chinese classes a week to my admittedly not very busy schedule, but that'll put me up to, hmm, sixteen hours of Chinese instruction a week? If I don't start seeing some serious progress soon I'm pretty sure it means I'm an idiot and this is hopeless.

❦ Not gonna lie, most of the time I think that I'm an idiot and this is hopeless.

Comments

[highways]

I SURVIVE ENTIRELY ON THE BENEVOLENCE OF OTHERS

A BENEVOLENCE WHICH ACTUALLY SEEMS TO BE ENDLESS, PRETTY MUCH, BUT STILL, THERE IS A PRINCIPLE HERE

[unicorn]

YOU CAN COMMUNICATE!

[highways]

SO CAN A MONKEY

[unicorn]

YOU COULD PROBABLY EXPLAIN WHY THAT IS A BAD COMPARISION WRT LANGUAGE BETTER THAN ME

[highways]

ACTUALLY I CAN USE MY MAD LINGUISTICS SKILLS TO TOTALLY MAKE MY OWN POINT, BY POINTING OUT THAT MOST DAYS IT FEELS LIKE A TON OF MY COMMUNICATION IS ACTUALLY NOT LANGUAGE BECAUSE I AM INSTEAD UTILIZING NON-LINGUISTIC SKILLS LIKE LOGIC AND EMPATHY WHICH I AM DRAWING FROM MY NOT INCONSIDERABLE EXPERIENCE IN BEING HUMAN

SO I GUESS THAT IS NOT EXACTLY LIKE A MONKEY

IT IS CLOSE THOUGH, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU CONSIDER THE FACT THAT A LOT OF THE CHINESE I AM UTTERING IS AGRAMMATICAL CONTENT WORDS, STRUNG TOGETHER IN THE ORDER THEY OCCUR TO ME, AND ANIMALS LIKE MONKEYS OR GORILLAS CAN IN FACT BE TAUGHT A LOT OF HUMAN LANGUAGE VOCABULARY (SEE: TEACHING PRIMATES SIGN LANGUAGE) BUT THE MAIN THING THAT SEPARATES OUR LANGUAGE FROM THEIR COMMUNICATIVE SKILLS IS THE FACT THAT ANIMALS SEEM INCAPABLE OF LEARNING COMPLEX SYNTAX, AND IN FACT ALL BUT A HANDFUL OF ANIMALS ARE INCAPABLE OF LEARNING ANY SYNTAX AT ALL

AREN'T YOU GLAD YOU ASKED

[unicorn]

I AM, THAT IS INTERESTING

I'M ALSO THINKING OF HOW YOU WERE ALL NOOOOO BEFORE ADAPTATION KICKED IN AND YOU STARED UNDERSTANDING MUCH MORE SPOKEN CHINESE SUDDENLY, THOUGH

[highways]

YEEEEEEAH BASED ON WHAT I KNOW ABOUT LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THAT'LL PROBABLY HAPPEN A FEW MORE TIMES BUT LESS DRAMATICALLY EACH TIME, AND ALSO okay in language learning there's basically a principle of diminishing return for your efforts as you progress—it's a math thing, basically, the first thousand words you learn tend to be super high frequency, the next thousand words are just as hard to learn and they're still common, the next thousand words are the same thing, but less common, and so on, until you're slaving over words like wizened and defenestrate which realistically you're probably going to encounter only a handful of times in casual conversation over the course of your whole life.

tbh I seem to learn languages in a way which is sort of similar to the way people acquire their first languages—I internalize the phonology and learn words in context very quickly, and sometimes just start spontaneously spitting out grammar forms after I've heard them repeatedly without really consciously knowing what I'm doing, which is why I tend to subscribe to theories which suggest that second language acquisition is not necessarily dramatically different from first language acquisition. This is probably a real advantage and a lot of people appear to be jealous of this but it also means that most of the formal instruction is not necessarily useful to me at all and I can't like, control the rate of my progress man. I don't even know what is happening. It's also why I fucking suck at translation.

In a sort of related topic, I feel like such a pretentious douchebag when I talk about linguistics, but since I learned all this stuff at university I don't know how to really talk about it without using all this annoying academic lingo.

[unicorn]

I AM IN A SCIENCE MAJOR I LOVE YOUR ACADEMIC LINGO

Do you think your method of second language acquisition is necessarily common? No one else I know picks up languages the way you do, no one

[highways]

I FEEL LIKE I'M SPEAKING ANOTHER LANGUAGE MAN, THIS IS NOT MY ~TRUE VOICE~

That is an extremely difficult question to answer, and one I can't really answer, tbh, because seriously if I knew the answer to How People Learn Language I'd be one of those extremely elusive FAMOUS AND RICH LINGUISTS. Nobody really knows man. I certainly don't feel like, all that special or unique or anything in this regard, and I bet you don't know a lot of people who are currently living in a foreign country and regularly spend hours watching Youtube videos of pop star bickering as a language exercise? There's actually a list of personality traits which they've found to vaguely correlate to successful language acquisition, and I have pretty much like all of them... So yeah, I think it's really likely that I'm not any better at this stuff than any other highly motivated extrovert?

[unicorn]

That makes sense! INTERESTING. Though you were always good at picking up language snippets while still in AMERICA, like Japanese.

[highways]

I watched a fuckton of anime, read a whole lot of comic books in Japanese and was roommates with a Japanese person for a year, and she then invited me to live with her for a whole summer in Japan. I HAD SOME ADVANTAGES.

It'd be awesome if I was some sort of super talented language learning person, it'd make it much more likely that I'll someday be able to get my Chinese to a high enough proficiency to be able to actually use it for something. But at this point such speculation is laughable, since I started Chinese like, the January before last? So almost two years ago, and I can't even order a pizza over the phone or say useful things like, "HELP, I AM CURRENTLY ON FIRE."

[unicorn]

LOOK THAT UP IMMEDIATELY

[highways]

ON REFLECTION I FEEL THAT THIS IS ONE SITUATION WHERE MY ACTIONS WILL DO MY SPEAKING FOR ME, AND I AM OKAY WITH THAT

[unicorn]

BUT COULDN'T MONKEYS GET ACROSS THAT THEY WERE ON FIRE ETC. ETC.?

[highways]

I DON'T REALLY EXCEPT TO BE MORE ARTICULATE THAN A MONKEY, YOU KNOW, IF I AM ON FIRE