Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

On YU Alternatives — anyone have recommendations?

Here’s a bit of the guest lecture today at YU:

[No sound? Click here]

sān jiā èr děngyú wǔ, yī jiā sān děngyú sì, sì jiā èr déngyú liù, wǔ jiā èr děngyú qī, sì jiā èr déngyú liù, yī jiā wǔ děngyú liù.
三加二等于五，一加三等于四， 四加二等于六，五加二等于七，四加二等于六，一加五等于六
3+2=5, 1+3=4, 4+2=6, 5+2=7, 4+2=6, 1+5=6

Rather elementary (first grade, in fact), but still a decent lecture, with extremely clear tones and a textbook example of 3rd-3rd tone sandhi (where the first of two consecutive third tones automatically becomes a second tone) on the last sum. Thereby

wǔ děngyú

becomes something that sounds like

wú děngyú

No doubt: I’m a YUniphile. But when reader Ellen writes in to ask for Mandarin study opportunities outside of YU…

I’ve been studying Mandarin for about 2 years as an adult learner in the States and am looking for an intensive summer program in China to focus on my speaking skills (my nightly prayer: dear any-power-that-is-listening, please, please help me with my tones). Do you have any to recommend to a middle-aged person determined to become marginally fluent? For business reasons, I’m inclined to look in Beijing but welcome suggestions in other places where there might be fewer English speakers.

… I have to admit I’m kind of at a loss, so she said I could pose the question to a wider audience. Does anyone out there have a recommendation?

Personally, my ideal program:

1. Forces communication. It should make the Zhonglish speaker get things done and get them done in Mandarin.

2. Involves Mandarin speakers who aren’t secretly trying to learn English. Common problem for native English speakers trying to learn any language — that their interlocutor is actually trying to use the opportunity to learn more English.

3. Emphasizes acquiring a reasonable level of competence in the spoken language before attempting to teach characters. Any curriculum teaching characters to beginners gets sent straight back to the dugout for some long, hard introspection.

Meeting these criteria is what makes YU so great — it certainly beats some of the alternatives cited earlier. However, some potential students may think the tuition is a bit steep.

Looking for ideas here, folks. Can anyone help?

On metaphors living and fossilized; YR Chao’s syllable-final M

If you’re a real-estate-free Minnesotan you might be feeling kind of self-righteous right now.

“That house I sold in June. Yeah, I sold it at a loss, but I took the blow and look at me now! Sitting in my rental, calling the manager the second the faucet threatens to drip and subscribing to every Sky-is-Falling economic blog I can put my mouse on.

More like schadenfreude, I suppose, and, yes, you are annoying but probably not as annoying as the Californian who sold his house in 2007.

Economics has a way of exacting its revenge one way or another. You come down off your fatuous high and start pissing and moaning about the bailout for Wall Street, feeding off of your Main Street money, and about the politicians who can’t seem to find another metaphor to save their political hides. Then you abuse a metaphor of your own, thinking about those fat cats…

Hey, but do you really think they’re fat? The people on Wall Street, that is. No, I mean: really, fat? Like, corpulent?

The Beijing Sounds theory of the month (BJS TOTM™) for October is that Beijingers (maybe just those over 60) really think bosses are fat. Truly. Literally. How else would you explain the following little incident? Read the rest of this entry »

Eterrrnally grrrateful to pinyin.info for bringing Talk Like a Pirate Day to the attention of the ever-unvigilant writing staff here at the Beijing Sounds studios, who apparently missed this well-known international holiday entirely. Having once been credited with (accused of?) promoting R-fulness in the speaking of Mandarin, the editor is happy to adopt the holiday as his own by giving the staff the afternoon off beyond 4:30, handing them leftover moon cakes and bottles of milk (with smiley stickers over the well-known local brand name) as they walk out the door. Read the rest of this entry »

On cooking your own shrimp YU style; free dinners in exchange for linguistic data; idiolects and other non-languages

If you could map a man’s acquired vocabulary to a human body, there is no doubt that in the case of your correspondent, for Mandarin, the representative human body would be that of a three-week-old infant, with the freakishly large head representing words associated with the kitchen. Grotesquely disproportionate to all other body parts, this head would have vocabulary for describing food that is salty, sweet, savory, rich, oily… meat that is overcooked, gamey, tender, lean, fatty… vegetables that are crisp, tough, boiled, steamed… And oh! the words of praise this precocious head would be able to conjure up for the cook at the stove.

Alas, the acquisition of this shelf-buckling vocabulary has been in no way proportional to an advance in the cooking ability of its owner. Read the rest of this entry »

Language correction as decoy

Those who think the sole purpose of language is communication are destined for disappointment and confusion. It’s not that language can’t serve that purpose, it’s just that it’s equally well suited to obfuscating, mollifying, incensing, distracting, humiliating… well, all those human activities so near to our hearts.

You’d hope this universal law of human behavior gets suspended when you’re speaking a second language. It’s hard enough to get your point across without worrying about ulterior motives of the person you’re speaking to.

You’d also hope that your affairs will prosper and your friends will be true. Read the rest of this entry »

On learning from elders — the core principles

The currency at Beijing Sounds is recordings of course. Youtube, Youku — they’re equally negotiable (and better than the sad sack USD these days). Or leave the recorder running and get candids on your friends, your relatives, your shopkeepers and taxi drivers. Money!

The truly gold-backed currency, though, is no mere sound file. It’s the special issue, hard-to-find back room recording. What makes the back room recording the gold standard is the observation that what people actually do is different from what they say they do, or what they believe they do, or what somebody remembers that they do, because these “reporting” activities are prone to egregious errors, willful misstatements and utter misapprehensions. So while it might seem easy enough to get a recording of real language, in fact it gets very hard to observe what people actually do in context because the contexts are behind the closed doors of the home, or in meetings at the workplace, or between close friends — places that are hard to get your ears into unless you have an inside track. Read the rest of this entry »