Ting bu Dong

One of our reasons for travelling to China this year was for Lillia and me to practice our Chinese.  Both of us have learned a ton since our previous trip.  I made a big push to learn to read, and that really paid off.  I now know a little over a thousand characters, which may sound like a lot, but it’s nowhere near enough to, say, read a magazine article.  It is enough, though, to read a Chinese map, or a menu, or street signs, billboards, and business names.  I also learned a lot of new words, every day.  If you know how to pronounce one character of a two-character word, it makes it easy to look up that word.  I won’t go into the mechanics of this; just take my word for it.

Another thing that paid off was listening to Popup Chinese.  My one-year subscription was the best $99 I ever spent.  We watched a lot of movies on the long-distance buses, and it was amazing how many phrases turned up that I learned from Popup.  Mei shi, mei banfa, wu suo wei, zenme hui shi, all these everyday conversational phrases that elementary textbooks don’t seem to cover.

What I still lack, however, is listening comprehension in conversation.  So often, I would ask a question and then get an unexpected high-speed barrage of words back.  So, I would be left standing there like a deer in the headlights, synapses firing way too slowly as I struggled to decode what had just been said.  Lillia, however, would often get it right away.  “Mom!  She says there aren’t any more tickets for the 9:30 bus!  You have to take the 11:00 one!”  And I would give myself the “doh!” forehead slap, and think, yes, of course that’s what she said;  it just took me too long to process.  After a few situations like this, when I didn’t understand something, I’d ask Lillia, “did you get that?”  And, more often than not, she did.  I have no doubt that however hard I study, Lillia’s Chinese will far outstrip mine in a few short years.