On the inability to write characters, maternal grandmothers, poop, pee
You spend most of your life cowering, trying to fit the whole, sloppy you into the veal crate of polite society, hiding the fact that your underwear is stained and you trim your nose hairs; ashamed to admit that your daughter crashed when you were teaching her to ride her bicycle with one hand; embarrassed that it’s possible for you to come to tears over sappy music; concealing the incident when…
Ineffable secrets is an old theme — passe, practically. With a little bit of pruning, certain former embarrassments can even be taken out of the back garden and displayed in front of the house. Maybe you choose to revel publicly in your ignorance about whether the Timberwolves play hockey or basketball, overcoming a youthful fear of being an uncool sports queer. Maybe Woody Allen confesses to the world a penchant for, as George Costanza’s mom might put it, self-abuse (quote below video if you don’t know it).
This kind of reveal has even become a shtick for comedian and jovial executive alike, in which the embarrassing moment is self-deprecatingly exposed for commercial gain. For the most part, though, it’s a superficial acknowledgment of imperfection. For every taboo the revealer breaks, 10 more lurk in recesses not even the spouse knows about.
Yes, there’s a lot of imperfection in the world — owned by no one apparently. Why? Because you’re always trying to get that next promotion. Or impress that next girl or even your own grandchildren. Or win that next election.
But what if you were running unopposed?
I mean: you have nothing to lose, right? You are going to win!
The sad thing is you’d probably still cower, not half as forthcoming as Robert Wexler, representative from Florida’s 19th district, speaking on Colbert after the good reporter reminded him that, running unopposed, he really could say things that would lose him the election in other circumstances:
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Wexler: I enjoy cocaine because it’s a fun thing to do.
Colbert: I enjoy the company of prostitutes for the following reasons…
Wexler: I enjoy the company of prostitutes for the following reasons… because it’s a fun thing to do.
Colbert: OK, much like cocaine.
Wexler: Much like cocaine. If you combine the two together it’s probably even more fun.
See, he warmed up a bit at the end.
Reveal 1 — character ignorance
Wexler wasn’t even being serious. But you get so boxed in by the constant running for office that even joking about life outside the veal crate becomes taboo.
Thirty-nine years on, you might not even realize the crate is there. Might not realize until you catch yourself, for example, discovering a dimension of your own ignorance that you think is at the same time interesting and embarrassing. Should you write about it? Is it something you dare to let the world know about?
Well geez, what is an anonymous blog if not the equivalent of running unopposed? None of your coworkers are going to look askance at you tomorrow morning. You didn’t print it in the GISC Times. Your family’s going to love you regardless. The few friends you have will probably continue to tolerate you. Are you afraid a couple of readers are going to be disappointed to find out you’re an idiot? (If they didn’t know that already, you should be taken to the regulators for deceptive advertising.) Or you’re afraid your revenues are going to take a dive with the drop in readership?!
Let it all hang out, for chrissake.
—————————–
Most likely today’s story is going to be a letdown after all that buildup. Rest assured it all felt embarrassing once upon a time.
Without further ado: once upon a time…
This post on Sinosplice mentioned a nifty new tool from Skritter for learning to write characters. Now as long-time readers will know, syz has a bit of a tolerate-hate relationship with characters. It took until 2007 for him to begrudgingly acquiesce to the mandatory educational program that the Beijing Sounds board of directors established for him. A clear goal of “functional literacy” was established, but as part of the compromise during negotiations, the board agreed that syz would not be required to write characters except by computer with pinyin input.
Nonetheless, he’s been forced to acquire some of the rudiments of character-writing just to be able to scratch new ones into that utterly indispensable tool, the (beautiful new 2.0!) Pleco dictionary.
With that background, and with the ability to recognize, at least in some contexts, maybe 1500 characters (a useless measure, as these pages have complained before, but what can you do) syz was sucked into testing his skills with Skritter’s free trial.
Like how it starts out? “yi”? Sure, we can do this…
And sure enough, it likes the stroke and makes it pretty!
OK, and then it follows with 二 and 三. Hey, this is working. Bring it on. What’s that, “ni”? Hmm, well, it’s got that person thingy on the left.
So far so good. and then on the right it’s got that 小 with the thing on top, right?
But every re-draw of the “thing on top” brings erasure and an invitation to try again. C’mon, what’s missing here?! Ah, yes, those annoying little hooks and slashes…
Final score?
Recognize: 1600
Write: 4
Repeat after me, class: “Recognition and production are two different skills. Recognition and production are two different skills. Recognition and production are two different skills. Recognition and production are two different skills…”
Maybe there’s nothing profound here, but there is controversy. Without a doubt it is much harder to (hand)write characters than to recognize characters, for native speakers and non-native alike. In this Language Log post, for example, Victor Mair notes:
Today, I made the students close their computers, electronic dictionaries, and all their books and papers, then asked them to write down on a piece of paper the simplified and traditional characters for Taiwan and beneath that what the meaning or origin of the name is. In the top right corner they indicated whether they were native speakers or how many years they had studied Chinese (I also should have asked them to indicate where they were from, but neglected to do so). The results:
- only 2 students could write both forms correctly
- only 4 students could write both forms partially correctly
- only 10 students could write one form correctly
- about 10 students could write one form partially correctly
- the remainder of the students could not write either form correctly, including a couple of the native speakers
- most students who had taken up to 6 years of Chinese couldn’t write either form correctly
Now clearly this isn’t is bad as 你! But the same fundamental question applies: how much does handwriting of Chinese characters matter, in the age of computers?
Reveal 2: Poop wiping
Warning: those with an idealized view of child-rearing might be better off skipping the following story.
Come to think of it, maybe this one speaks for itself, right from its perch on the porcelain throne. [warning: you might want to ratchet down the volume a bit]
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Lǎolao! Wǒ lā chòu lā wán le, sā niào yě sā wán le!
姥姥！ 我拉臭拉完了，撒尿也撒完了！
Grandma! I finished pooping and peeing!
Yes, PBS is still, now just turned 7, quite happy to get her backside wiped clean by the accompanying adult. And yes, she is going to be permanently traumatized that her father posted this for the whole world to hear.
But there’s more than just an interest in looking into other people’s bathroom cabinets here.
Pooping grammatically
First, what the Chomsky is going on with the grammar here?!
| 我 | 拉 | 臭 | 拉 | 完 | 了 |
| Wǒ |
lā | chòu | lā | wán | le |
| I | poop (verb) | poop (noun) | poop (verb) | particle indicating completion | past tense
[correction: more accurately, a particle indicating the past] |
In his “spoken grammar” book, YR Chao (see further BJS references here and here) mentions Subject-Predicate subjects (sec 2.8.6 if you have a copy), which seem promising:
A full sentence with subject and predicate can be the subject of another predicate, thus forming an S-P clause subject. For example: 猫比狗兇是会的。 Māo bǐ gǒu xiōng shì huì de*. ‘That a cat is fiercer than a dog is possible.’ 他不来也成。 Tā bù lái yě chéng. ‘That he will not (or may not) come is all right, too.’
But this doesn’t seem to be exactly what we were looking for. These (and the rest of the examples) are of the form, “That X is Adj.” whereas above there’s no adjective that could be used in that way.
Maybe if you could treat “lā chòu” as a noun and think of “wǒ lāchòu” as short for “wǒ(de) lāchòu”, so something like: “my pooping is pooped.” Or, well, maybe you could just go on to safer territory: vocabulary.
Vocab: Grandma, Poop & Pee
The ABC dictionary lists lǎolao (姥姥, maternal grandmother) as colloquial. Is it also regional? Around the BJS studios one never hears wàipó (外婆, also maternal grandmother) except in nursery rhymes.
Poop and pee are popular BJS subjects. Still, little is known about colloquial usage outside the studios. The above utterances are the common forms here. How does your favorite seven-year-old talk about bodily functions?
Revelatory reveals
The admittedly sad fact is that none of the reveals were very revealing, for a man running unopposed / blogging anonymously. Here it is — your pseudonymmed blog — and all you can talk about is your own ignorance and then confess that your daughter still likes to have someone else wipe her?!
Indeed, emergence from the veal crate is painful and halting. But given free range, you might find some bull in you yet.
———
*As usual, apologies to you GR fans, but this is switched to pinyin
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Comments 18
You really struck a chord in me with the topic of the relationship between learning to produce characters and learning to recognize characters. I teach piano, (and studied Chinese at community college), and learning to produce piano music with your own hands definitely has a complex, somewhat ineffable dependence on learning to recognize various auditory aspects of piano music. Based on my teaching experience (and on my own very imperfect attempt at Chinese study), I was very surprised to see that you recognize 1600 characters but can correctly write 4: it seems to me to be way too unbalanced a ratio. This is probably exaggeration on your part, no doubt: but I hope you post more about character study in general and the ratio of what is popularly termed “passive recognition” to “active” production in particular. How can one learn to recognize a character without at least some knowledge of how to write it? and what ratio of writing practice to recognition practice is necessary? and how much are the two skills mutually interdependent?
Posted 08 Dec 2008 at 3:35 am ¶Probably some enterprising grad student could squeeze a thesis out of this…
By the way, most of my students are Chinese-American children of various ages, and I can tell you that PBS, a seven-year old who is still wiped by adults in her family after pooping or peeing, is Way Not Alone In This Regard.
an hour ago as i was preparing to come home someone asked me about my chinese and if i could write characters. i said that, well, yes, if i really know a character, i ca write it, but that really what i mean is that my stroke order is good. i tried explaining the taiwan thing from language log that i’d read when it was originally posted, and while he agreed that he himself could read more than he could write even as a local, it didn’t do much to wipe clean the expectation that i should be able to write everything i can say. the problem is since i’m a foreigner living in china and not chinese, i don’t EVER need to write. i’m actively working on it anyway, but honestly it never comes up. i type or i txt and i have to read a lot every day, but writing is just something that is not at all required in my day to day life.
Posted 08 Dec 2008 at 9:48 pm ¶On pooping grammatically:
I have never heard 臭 used as a noun before, only an adjective. My kids say 拉㞎㞎 (lā bǎba). 㞎㞎 is a kid’s word, like poop.
There is a kind of lexical verb formation called a verb-object structure. In The Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (CCD) (现代汉语词典） this kind of structure is indicated with two slashes between the pinyin syllables, i.e. 睡//觉. This shows that you can put noun phrases in between the elements, like 睡我的甜美的觉 (sleep my sweet sleep). This is a major structure in Chinese.
One feature of this structure is that how it takes complements of degree. If a verb is followed by an object, it cannot then be followed by a complement of degree; the verb must be repeated. So in your example (using 臭 as a noun — which my Dongbeihua-speaking babysitter says she’s never heard), 臭 would be the object, so you have to repeat 拉 in order to add 完 as a complement.
Posted 08 Dec 2008 at 10:26 pm ¶Sorry — I meant that you can put modifiers between the two elements.
Posted 08 Dec 2008 at 10:33 pm ¶@dveej: absolutely the recognition/production divide is vast in many areas. Although I am exaggerating a bit, of course, it’s quite true that, without any assistance, I can handwrite very, very few characters accurately. That’s what was so interesting to me about the 你 example. Such a common character, yet I was unable to write it accurately! Although I like your piano analogy, it seems to break down in one key area: namely, that I still *can* write characters– I just need some sort of pinyin input system. As @Kellen notes, these are so ubiquitous as to make handwriting about as important as being able to tap out Morse code.
In fact, Kellen, I don’t know if you having fun with a bit of hyperbole, but I really do believe that I don’t EVER need to write by hand. Even in the rare instances when I have needed to take notes in Mandarin, I’ve simply written them in pinyin. Sure, it’s lovely to be able to write, but I’d rather spend that learning time trying to improve my unhappy reading skills.
dveej, you do make a good point about how the writing reinforces the recognition. Often, the first time I come across a new character, I will force myself to scratch it into my Pleco dictionary character recognizer, even if I could have easily used some online tool to look it up. But so far I’m not convinced that taking the extra time to write the character 100 times (more like 500 in my case) is necessary for learning to recognize it.
Randy: I just made a special call to YU just to make sure. She says the following sentence is perfectly grammatical: 我拉完臭了. What implications does that have your analysis? If I’m understanding it right, it seems to say that 拉臭 is not the 睡//觉 type of construction, but it’s quite possible I’m just not following.
Posted 09 Dec 2008 at 10:09 am ¶@syz: In 我拉完臭了, you are simply putting the complement between the elements. In other words you have V + Compl. + Obj. The limitation is that you can’t have V + Obj. + Compl. Instead you must have V + Obj. + V + Compl.
If the verb is directly followed by the object, and you want to add another complement of degree, you have to repeat the verb first.
If 拉臭 wasn’t 拉//臭, then you couldn’t say 拉完臭 (you wouldn’t be able to put things between the two elements. It is definitely 拉//臭, so to put 完 at the end, you must repeat the verb, just like PBS did: 拉臭拉完了.
Of course not all two syllable verbs are V+O. When you encounter a new V+O verb, you have to find out whether it is V+O or not. I wish there was a list of the most common 5000 or so verbs in Chinese, divided according to V+O and non-V+O.
Posted 09 Dec 2008 at 10:31 am ¶I just found this blog when it pinged my Skritter alert. I love it! Count me in on its throng.
I personally have no luck learning new Mandarin words by hearing them; I have to study the written form. But when I’m just reading them, I’m just using passive recall, so I can’t remember them very well then, either. I could read a word 100 times and not get it. If I write it, though, I can entrench it in maybe 10 repetitions (if they’re spaced out properly). It seems that our learning styles are opposite.
If you do ever decide to study handwriting in order to augment reading skills, I bet you could maul through the characters and put that to 1500 / 1600 in about 40 hours of practice on Skritter. I’m curious as to what people regard as “not worth it” vs. “efficient” in terms of time spent to learn each character.
Fairly on topic: American college students can write ~39% of characters studied (after one to three years at a couple liberal arts colleges, anyway).
Posted 12 Dec 2008 at 11:29 am ¶Hi Nick — you might have a point even if our learning styles are substantially different. I’m not (yet) dismissing the idea that I could remember characters more readily if I practiced writing them, but I’m doubtful enough that I’m reluctant to give up my current method: massive time spent reading.
Using this method I do seem to forget a lot of characters I once “knew”. But plenty of native Beijingers forget too… If it becomes a huge problem maybe I’ll try the path of handwriting, but probably not with Skritter until you guys get some alternate interface! I just can’t imagine doing that much mousing. Handheld, maybe? Team up with Pleco? That’d be cool — I’d probably pay money for your module even as I continue to rail against the obscene difficulty of the character system!
Posted 13 Dec 2008 at 9:16 pm ¶We’ll do an iPhone version when we get the time (or perhaps a generic mobile version, we’ll see), when the basics are in place and more polished. You could also get a cheap(ish) Wacom tablet, which is a more natural way to write, and it’d use the current interface, as it acts as a mouse cursor.
Pleco’s pretty awesome, but I don’t think the apps would mesh very easily. It would be good to get common flashcard data imports going between the two, though.
Posted 14 Dec 2008 at 5:08 am ¶Randy, I finally get your grammar explanation about the verb-object (we’ll say VO) structure. You said:
To restate for myself if for no one else, I’d paraphrase this as:
Does that sound right?
But now I’m starting to confuse myself. Is this true for all verbs and objects? Are there verbs that *don’t* follow this rule? This has gotta be easy to answer, but somehow I’m not seeing it right now.
Posted 15 Dec 2008 at 5:50 am ¶@syz The verbs all follow the same pattern, whether they are transitive (requires an object) or intransitiv (cannot be used with an object). In Chinese a complement or a verb particle (like 了 and 着) have to be placed right after the verb. So if you have a complement or a particle, you have to move the object so that the object/particle follows right after the verb.
Posted 16 Dec 2008 at 5:24 am ¶The last sentence should be “so that the complement/particle…”
No need to cause even more confusion
Posted 16 Dec 2008 at 5:28 am ¶You could maybe say that the complements and particles in Chinese are like the “endings” you get in European languages when you conjugate verbs. It wouldn’t make any sence to put them anywhere else then right after the verb.
Don’t know if that made sence to anyone, but ey, I tried..
Posted 16 Dec 2008 at 7:31 am ¶André: between you and Randy the fuzzy ideas are solidifying in my head. To summarize in rules again:
It might seem like (2) conflicts with (1) in the case that you have both a DO and C/P, e.g. “wǒ lā chòu wán le” is ungrammatical because the complement, wán=”finished”, doesn’t immediately follow the verb, lā=”squeeze out”, because of the intervening DO, chòu=”poop”.
But in this situation, it’s possible to use the structure Randy referred to, the Verb-Object Structure, which requires you to repeat the verb. Thus “wǒ lā chòu lā wán le” is grammatical because it obeys both rules one and two.
Sound right?
Posted 19 Dec 2008 at 9:01 pm ¶Sounds right to me.
Posted 19 Dec 2008 at 11:50 pm ¶You have it all figured out,syz.
The only reason why the verb isn’t repeated is that it’s often omitted when speaking, hence it looks like it doesn’t follow the rule, but it does, trust me.
Like so many things that are omitted when when you speak, it’s all about making it easier/faster to complete the sentence. This applies to any langauge of course, not just Chinese. That’s what’s makes it so hard sometimes when you don’t get how a sentence is contructed, even though you understand every single word. Bloody native speaker!
Posted 20 Dec 2008 at 5:41 am ¶I’m not following this, Andre
Which sentence are you saying “looks like it doesn’t follow the rule”? I thought we were all speaking the same language (pun apologies) but now I’m confused…
Posted 20 Dec 2008 at 8:52 pm ¶Sorry, my mistake.
I thought the original sentence was 我拉完臭了，but that was of course just a previous comment, where the main topic was something different.
My bad.
Posted 21 Dec 2008 at 3:22 am ¶