On Beijing Sounds’ first birthday, the year’s stats, wasting time, and the fastest recitation of 千字文 ever recorded
Like kids? It might be useful to triangulate the scene about three weeks after PBS was born at the end of 2001.
Corner 1: Grandma/YU has moved in, newly arrived from Beijing two weeks before the birth, bringing to our hopelessly undisciplined household a wealth of detailed plans for maintaining cleanliness and saving money.
Corner 2: The world’s most tenaciously goal-oriented woman this side of Joan of Arc (i.e. Mrs. Beijing Sounds) is loaded with more hormones than a Texas beef steer and engaged in full-pitched battle with zuò yuèzi (坐月子 = the traditional Chinese period of confinement for women who have just given birth), which YU is attempting to impose.
Corner 3: Your writer, syz, whose previously tolerable bumbling has disintegrated into full-blown and unforgivable incompetence on every front, finds himself taking a second drink from the plastic jug of whiskey, well before noon, seriously contemplating for the first time in his life the potential advantages of alcoholism.
Somewhere in the middle is a small person pooping and screaming.
Just a week later, though, all that strife has faded into the nostalgic past. We are on our first trip out of the house, ever. It’s a clear December Sunday afternoon and we’ve made it to the mall. PBS sucks idly on her fingers as we descend the escalator to the first floor of the department store .
Or rather: we float down. Every eye in Fine Jewelry turns to us as we gently drift towards the first floor. “What a beautiful child! Amazing! Gorgeous. What penetrating intelligence!”
Why? Because I — the same father who four weeks earlier had been guffawing about our friend who was so enamored of his flat-headed pimple-faced crotchfruit — now hold in my arms the most beautiful female child (”girl” is just too prosaic) ever to grace the snowy Midwestern plains. Naturally everyone recognizes that and comments accordingly.
At least — that’s how I heard it at the time. And I’ll probably stick to the story in the face of all evidence.
More recent progeny
Fortunately, the Beijing Sounds baby (BJS) has a more experienced and objective parental unit.
First, he recognizes that BJS started off a bit on the homely side. To quote one of the kinder emails about the layout and formatting:
Subject: Beijing Sounds mini-rant
…just wish 1) it wasn’t a black background which makes it much harder to read… and 2) that when I increase the text size, the word wrap would function so that text doesn’t get cut out of the right side of the window.
Hmm, sure would be nice if we had saved some screenshots from those early days. Come to think of it, it’s not that different from the baby with acne and a deformed skull.
Second, as much as you’d hate to admit it, sometimes your baby does lack certain graces. Here’s William’s gentle hint that Baby might be a little slow in the characters department — a problem with 一减一加五等于无
Nice joke embedded in the hanzi, which give the result of the calculation as 无 wu2 nothing instead of 五 wu3 five.
All right, smartass, Baby doesn’t know characters but he knows SOUNDS, right? And sometimes he very observantly notices interesting things happen in the varied world of Mandarin pronunciation, such as interesting phonetic substitutions as in the L=N post, right?
Or, wrong, if you listen to the comments:
Zou Dong says: He pronounced lěngshuǐ which is right, just like the host did, not “něngshuǐ”
Sima says: Listening, now, to the separate recording, I’m afraid I’m going to have to switch sides. It really is an ‘L’.
Trevelyan says: Joining the chorus, I hear the “L” here too….
(If you really care, there’s more L=N in this post as well.)
The usual top-10 lists
Ah, well, we all love our babies, and BJS is no exception. So indulge this love-blind father for a little birthday celebration of his favorite moments:
10. Honest taxi drivers — because there are plenty out there. Sure, it’s a big city with bad eggs. But get your nose out of the stench! The only freedom you have is what you choose to focus on.
9. A no-nonsense teacher — because I’m amused by the difference in tenor between what she says and what an American teacher would say.
8. A chance encounter with a bird trainer — because it was this walk with my friend, and the trainer’s patient persistence, that inspired me to buckle down and become semi-literate.
7. CCTV — because it’s just priceless.
6. Guest posts here and here — because all this weird linguistic obsession has led not only to Echoes of Manchu, but to friendships as well.
5. Mandarin learning videos — because no Beijing sound compares to “Tone 1 as foghorn”.
4. Bay-Jing / Beizzhing — because it’s evidence that a little knowledge can generate a LOT of righteous smuggery. Get over it, folks! (The followups are here and here.)
3. Zhonglish — because so many struggling speakers needed a word to call their own, and this one we’ve managed to backdate to 1963. (More Zhonglish here and here)
2. Chinese facts, such as “characters are hard” (as explained by both foreigners and taxi drivers) — because almost everything you hear about the language is a myth.
1. Tāng v. Tāngr — because it’s a minimal pair straight from the street. The PBS/YU classic
But who cares what I think. For a more comprehensive view, I had the BJS studio analyst tally up the visits since February, when the incompetent technical team finally managed to install Google Analytics, after several false starts. He reports the most visited posts as follows:
10. Zhonglish: ulterior motives
9. L=N, a sound you won’t hear in Beijing
8. Zhonglish — ups and downs of tones in combination
7. 1.3 billion people speak what as a mother tongue?!
6. Read & write Mandarin: no characters required?
5. Where NOT to look for beginning Mandarin lessons
4. Does the Beijing-R mean anything?
3. Zhonglish — revenge of the non-native speaker
2. Beizhing, Pekin, whatever
1. A structured approach to Chinglish pronunciation
The top sources of traffic (which are awarded a 20% discount on BJS ads for the entire month of November):
5. Chinese Pod
4. Laowai Chinese
3. Google Reader
2. Language Log
1. StumbleUpon
A random selection of keywords that led to BJS in a web search
5. “beijing hua dictionary english” [how do multiple people come up with this one?]
4. Chinglish pronunciation [naturally enough]
3. Beizhing [excellent!]
2. Super Female [a lot of disappointed folks here]
1. Zhonglish [Has the term entered the mainstream?!]
Countries* whose visitors spent the most time per visit get their own list as well. Although the US and China had by far the most visits in terms of sheer quantity, the analyst decided that time-per-visit was a better measure of the quality required under the Constitutional mandate to “secure the Blessings of a Pit of philosophers for ourselves and our Posterity.” By this standard, Iceland deserves an honorable mention. At only 19 visits, it missed the cutoff, but the average visit timed out at a whoppin’ 12:48.
5. Netherlands (3:50 per visit)
4. Norway (4:10)
3. Spain (4:26)
2. Sweden (5:00)
1. Germany (7:08)
*Only those with 100+ visits for the year
Wasting time
Recently PBS has been memorizing 千字文 (qiānzìwén), the “Thousand Character Essay” from the sixth century. This memorization of poetry is an activity popular with the Chinese parental crowd, especially when the poetry is old. The trend initially struck a friend of mine as “completely ridiculous” and a waste of time. Although he is now reconsidering, in light of the ubiquity of classical Chinese references in modern society, his point about wasting time struck a nerve.
This blog, by the usual American definition, is a waste of time, with a negative ROI and a heavy opportunity cost (if you grant that there’s something valuable I could be doing with my time, which might well be a stretch). Learning Mandarin as an adult is a waste of time too, as others have analytically pointed out
But pretty much everything important will get classified as a waste of time if you insist on valuing the wrong things. The mystics have been pointing this out for millenia, and their advice applies even if you have a hard time attaining the transcendent.
So here’s to another year of wasting time on Beijing Sounds, and I’ll close with an echo of that first post for which I had recorded a lot that I didn’t really understand. The following is a sound I may never understand, in a rendition of the first part of 千字文 that clocks at about Mach 3. I’m afraid it may lack the gravitas you’d expect from this Genesis-like beginning:
“The sky was black and earth yellow; space and time vast, limitless.”
[That translation comes from here, where you can see more explication as well. The writing below comes from here, which also has a full and slower audio version of the poem.]
In any case, it’s a sound, and it’s from Beijing.
[No sound? Click here]
天地玄黄 宇宙洪荒
日月盈昃 辰宿列张
寒来暑往 秋收冬藏
闰馀成岁 律吕调阳
云腾致雨 露结为霜
金生丽水 玉出昆冈
剑号巨阙 珠称夜光
果珍李柰 菜重芥姜
海咸河淡 鳞潜羽翔
龙师火帝 鸟官人皇
始制文字 乃服衣裳
推位让国 有虞陶唐
吊民伐罪 周发殷汤
坐朝问道 垂拱平章
爱育黎首 臣伏戎羌
repeats (爱育黎首 臣伏戎羌)
遐迩一体 率宾归王
鸣凤在竹 白驹食场
化被草木 赖及万方
盖此身发 __大五常
恭惟鞠养 岂敢毁伤
女慕贞洁 男效才良
知过必改 得能莫忘
罔谈彼短 靡恃己长
信使可复 器欲难量
墨悲丝染 诗赞羔羊
景行维贤 克念作圣…
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