2012/09/26
Desert Adventure
What we thought would be 16 hours of travel ended up being 24. More stories later. For now some pictures from our trip.
a traditional Mongolian house.
James, putting his ranch up-bringing to work :)
James' new camel herder friend
Mongolian girl
Catherine playing in the sand. This picture was taken as the rest of our group were doing some kind of 15 km race/scavenger hunt through the desert. Thankfully, our hosts allowed us to opt out of hiking through sand dunes with a 13 month old. We instead got to actually enjoy the desert at our own pace.
Please ignore the fact that Catherine's clothes down't match. Our course she peed on her clothes the one time we didn't have a proper change of clothes for her :)
The oasis that marked the end of the race. There's a big, new, fancy hotel to your left that isn't pictured if you're looking for your next vacation spot.
A not-yet-finished monument of Genghis Khan.
2012/09/13
out and about with Catherine
big mistake
I’ll let James share his own language mistake stories, but
for today, here’s mine: A couple weeks ago, we went to the
other side of town to try to find a restaurant I knew. Not only did the restaurant not exist, but the entire street it was on no longer exists. We needed to find a place quickly so we could let Catherine eat (thankfully, we had brought food for her with us). We found a small noodle shop. I asked for a menu. They didn't have any, but she said they only had 3 kinds of noddles and rattled off the names for us to chose. James wanted the cold noodles. I knew I didn't want that and I didn't really want the beef noodles either. I chose the other option, although I wasn't certain what it was. As soon as it came out, I regretted not asking what it was. Intestines and noodles. That's what I ordered. excellent. It was a good thing we had also ordered an appetizer. I ate the appetizer while James enjoyed his noodles and the fact that I too make language mistakes.
2012/09/11
What is the hardest language to learn in the world?
What's the hardest language to learn in the world? Have you ever asked yourself that question? Perhaps you have heard it is Chinese, or maybe Russian. Others would say that Mongolian or maybe an African language such as Swahili would be the hardest.
Actually after a lot of research I have found the correct answer. There are a lot of factors that go into a language being hard to learn which I will go into more detail below. However, the answer is quite simple.
THE HARDEST LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD is:
Drum Roll, please....
"The hardest language in the world is whatever language you personally are learning that you didn't learn as a small child." -James Judd
As I am studying Chinese here there are days of extreme frustration. I would argue that the Chinese written language is THE hardest written language in the world. However, the spoken language can be picked up fairly quickly. Yes, there is still the problem of the 4 different tones, but they can be over come. (Did you know Cantonese has 12 tones?) Chinese grammar is not particularly difficult so in some ways for Americans it is easier to learn to speak.
I would argue that for an American Mongolian or Korean is harder to learn than Chinese. The real factor in determining how hard a language is to learn is how far removed it is from the language(s) you already know. For example, Mongolian grammar is really hard for Americans, but if you know Finnish it is almost an exact replica of their grammar structure. Korean and Japanese are also similar. For Americans Chinese grammar is simpler than English so that makes it easier.
However, all that being said here is my language learning story(s) for today.
So I am in my speaking class and we are all going around creating a sentence with one specific word or phrase in it. We are all using fairly similar words because we are all fairly new students. When it is my turn I say, "The city is really pretty, but the traffic is bad." Hu Shi hen piao liang, bu guo you du che. Du che meaning traffic jam. I say my sentence and the teacher just looks at me with a confused look on her face. I say it again. Still confusion. Finally one of my classmates says, "dU CHE" with the correct tones and AHH, the teacher gets it. Tones are the pits!
The other thing I'm enjoying is my reading class starts out each lesson with a funny story. So I memorized it (How to tell if a fly is a male or female. Post coming soon.) and tried it on one of the gate guards. He thought it was so funny and the proceeded to tell me learning Chinese was easy because you only needed to recognize 3,600 Chinese characters (that are usually in combinations of 2 to provide a word such as 明白 (ming bai). "Ming" meaning bright and "Bai" meaning white combined together mean "to understand".) then you can read a newspaper and most general reading. I was pretty glad the joke went over well. However, I tried it on a guard today and at the end just got a "I didn't understand your story" stare.
Oh well, you win some and you lose some.
-James
Actually after a lot of research I have found the correct answer. There are a lot of factors that go into a language being hard to learn which I will go into more detail below. However, the answer is quite simple.
THE HARDEST LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD is:
Drum Roll, please....
"The hardest language in the world is whatever language you personally are learning that you didn't learn as a small child." -James Judd
As I am studying Chinese here there are days of extreme frustration. I would argue that the Chinese written language is THE hardest written language in the world. However, the spoken language can be picked up fairly quickly. Yes, there is still the problem of the 4 different tones, but they can be over come. (Did you know Cantonese has 12 tones?) Chinese grammar is not particularly difficult so in some ways for Americans it is easier to learn to speak.
I would argue that for an American Mongolian or Korean is harder to learn than Chinese. The real factor in determining how hard a language is to learn is how far removed it is from the language(s) you already know. For example, Mongolian grammar is really hard for Americans, but if you know Finnish it is almost an exact replica of their grammar structure. Korean and Japanese are also similar. For Americans Chinese grammar is simpler than English so that makes it easier.
However, all that being said here is my language learning story(s) for today.
So I am in my speaking class and we are all going around creating a sentence with one specific word or phrase in it. We are all using fairly similar words because we are all fairly new students. When it is my turn I say, "The city is really pretty, but the traffic is bad." Hu Shi hen piao liang, bu guo you du che. Du che meaning traffic jam. I say my sentence and the teacher just looks at me with a confused look on her face. I say it again. Still confusion. Finally one of my classmates says, "dU CHE" with the correct tones and AHH, the teacher gets it. Tones are the pits!
The other thing I'm enjoying is my reading class starts out each lesson with a funny story. So I memorized it (How to tell if a fly is a male or female. Post coming soon.) and tried it on one of the gate guards. He thought it was so funny and the proceeded to tell me learning Chinese was easy because you only needed to recognize 3,600 Chinese characters (that are usually in combinations of 2 to provide a word such as 明白 (ming bai). "Ming" meaning bright and "Bai" meaning white combined together mean "to understand".) then you can read a newspaper and most general reading. I was pretty glad the joke went over well. However, I tried it on a guard today and at the end just got a "I didn't understand your story" stare.
Oh well, you win some and you lose some.
-James
2012/09/02
Throwing up Chinese
You know when you get here you just want to throw up Chinese. I don't mean in the literal sense, although I did that too the first few days I was here. Instead you want to throw up all the great stories about adjusting to China the things you see here. Everything seems like a new experience, or in our case sometimes a reminder of an old experience you had forgotten about.
They say in a lot of ways that is how Cultural shock works. The first phase is the honeymoon, where everything seems so new and exciting. Everything seems picture worthy, and everything looks like a great story.
Then comes the shock... Throwing up on day 3 didn't help it. This is where you find yourself stressed and irritable. You know you shouldn't be and yet you are. This is where I currently find myself, which is a much shorter honeymoon than I was hoping for. I am working on getting some things in place to help adjust better. They say the quicker you pick up the language the better. Also, finding a way to relieve some stress through exercise is good also. Then make sure you are still engaging the culture and not pulling back into just an expat community. (For us there aren't a lot here so that isn't as big of a problem.)
The good news is after that phase you start adjusting more and then the last stage is basically settling in.
-James
They say in a lot of ways that is how Cultural shock works. The first phase is the honeymoon, where everything seems so new and exciting. Everything seems picture worthy, and everything looks like a great story.
Then comes the shock... Throwing up on day 3 didn't help it. This is where you find yourself stressed and irritable. You know you shouldn't be and yet you are. This is where I currently find myself, which is a much shorter honeymoon than I was hoping for. I am working on getting some things in place to help adjust better. They say the quicker you pick up the language the better. Also, finding a way to relieve some stress through exercise is good also. Then make sure you are still engaging the culture and not pulling back into just an expat community. (For us there aren't a lot here so that isn't as big of a problem.)
The good news is after that phase you start adjusting more and then the last stage is basically settling in.
-James
How do you know when you are really tired?
So Jill and I took a trip to the capital city last week. As always, Catherine was a trooper and made the trip pretty well. However, the first night she woke up about 3 in the morning really hungry, which is not normal for her these days. Jill and I stumbled out of bed, made a bottle, changed her wet diaper, and immediately put her back to sleep.
Everything seemed normal until the next morning when I woke up and realized I had been so tired I forgot to fold up the diaper and throw it away. Instead I slept beside it all night.
-James
Everything seemed normal until the next morning when I woke up and realized I had been so tired I forgot to fold up the diaper and throw it away. Instead I slept beside it all night.
-James
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