Beverly Cleary - Binge Reading on my Morning Commute

I have been binging on Beverly Cleary books in the last week or two. It has been extremely rewarding and very fun.

After finishing listening to The Coddling of the American Mind, and What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, I found on Scribd a collection of the Ramona and Beezus series all in the form of audiobooks. There were:

Beezus and Ramona
Ramona the Pest
Ramona and Her Father
Ramona and Her Mother
Ramona Quimby Age 8
Ramona Forever, and
Ramona's World (not necessarily in this order)

This series was a lot of fun to listen to because nobody in the story is perfect, everyone has their struggles, and it portrays the challenges of a child growing up and trying to match up to the maturity of her older sister, often messing something up when trying her very best, and so on. Even Ramona's parents have your common, real-life struggles. There is one part where the family has had an exceptionally long day so much so that even Mr. and Mrs. Quimby are unreasonable and cross like they always tell their daughters not to be. They get into a silly argument over something very pointless and their daughters go to bed worried that their parents will divorce or something. The next morning when all is well, the girls ask their parents about it and it is explained to them that even parents have bad days, it doesn't mean it's the end of the world. It is this way that Ramona and Beezus realize that even parents cannot be perfect all the time.

I then began to read (read, not listen to) Fifteen which is one of Beverly Cleary's first love series. It was really cute. I finished reading it, amazingly, while riding the bus standing up. I didn't even get car sick, which is potentially a great victory in itself.

One of the most remarkable scenes from Fifteen involves Jane eating at a Chinese restaurant for the first time, not knowing what any of the food is in front of her while being teased about things like beetle juice (which was actually soy sauce), and trying to use chopsticks and successfully spilling much of her dinner on her clothes.

I like the story in that Jane realizes that if any boy is going to like her, he had better like her for who she truly is and not because she was acting like someone else in order to win favor. She also realizes that her crush is still a normal person, not some high and mighty thing that needs to be constantly impressed. The story is cute, and so well portrays Jane's character and agonizing over whether she is really the kind of person that Stan would like.

Learning a Local Rather Than Standardized Language

As much as I complain about the difficulty of reading and writing here in Taiwan, I'm beginning to feel like I'm actually on the road towards literate fluency. I can recognize parts within Chinese characters, even if I don't know what the word is, and that makes looking up a word much easier. I even got a 98 on a Chinese writing test yesterday. No characters were written the wrong way!

I also feel that I am learning a plethora of useful terms, phrases, and vocabulary mostly from hearing teachers explain concepts that I'm already somewhat familiar with. They drop in words such as other, choose, answer, question, begin, finish, test, quiz, and so much more. So often I'm trying to get the point of something that is being said that relates to the here and now or near future plans, but I have fewer explanations from family and friends about grammar, sentence structures, sentence patterns, proper usage, etc. Now I have teachers who are paid to fill in those gaps.

I had a revelation today. I may have been learning Chinese over the course of the past three years, but the reasons I am not further along include:

1)     I have been focusing on getting married, graduating, and moving three times in one year (once internationally)

2)     While in the States I gave up on trying to use apps, Google Translate, or Chinese curriculum in general because they have simplified Chinese characters rather than the traditional characters used in Taiwan as well as a Mainland China pronunciation, accent, and usage of vocabulary that is not consistent with the Taiwanese way of saying things.

3)     I gave up on using Chinese curriculum in general because they seemed to all start at the very beginning with concepts I already know and were too easy or too boring for me to follow for very long. Since I already know greetings and some conversational Chinese it is hard to find a curriculum that is actually at my level.

4)     Since there can potentially be a wide variety of words that have the exact same pronunciation, or same pronunciation with a different tone, there is just too much room for error when trying to use Google Translate to figure things out on my own. I decided it would be better to learn more in person that virtually.

I've heard of people learning Arabic have similar issues when wanting to learn a particular local dialect. They were advised to wait until they were in the country they were heading to to learn the language in order to bypass the issues of learning a variety of a language that will not be useful for every day life.

Now that I am spending a year in Taiwan and it is the perfect opportunity to bypass all these problems I have previously experienced. I can make language learning my part-time, if not full-time, work. It feels rewarding to be mounting the obstacles which previously have been leaving me so forlorn!

The Bootcamp Episode

Rex left for bootcamp on Monday of last week. Day after day went by, the first two days had no calls, and the third day of his absence I had to share a fifteen minute phone call with other family members. By the time the weekend came, his absence was quite noticeable. During the weekend I was camping with my in-laws. There were brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, and parents with a slough of small people running around underfoot at the campsite.

Recently I mentioned what conversation is like in a Chinese world. Basically, I find extensive social scenarios that are primarily in Chinese to be quite exhausting and there's only so much I can endure before I go find a quiet place apart from everyone else. I have nothing against the people I'm with, I even find them to be quite enjoyable and supportive, but my mind trails off and spaces out in this context.

My mind had extensive empty space over the weekend; it was almost too relaxing, especially in light of Rex being gone. An absent husband and an empty mind are really a bad combination! By the time the weekend was over I found myself exhausted and emotionally a bit unstable. The emotions made the exhaustion worse.

Monday and the return to class was really what the doctor called for. A return to class, a return to work, a return to using my mind extensively, and a return to sanity. Less opportunity to think about the fact that Rex is gone for another week, more opportunity to explore and tend to responsibilities.

I'll be glad when he's back from bootcamp.

A Glimpse into the Every Day

I walked to a nearby restaurant to get dinner for about $3 (if counted in USD). The meal I had in mind was that milkfish soup. That's a safe bet because I like milkfish with its fresh and somewhat tangy flavor, and usually it doesn't have any bones in it. It really doesn't taste fishy, so it's a rather refreshing dish to eat.

As I approach the restaurant I come to a large intersection where I have the option to wait at a light, or climb up some stairs to cross above the traffic. I opt for the stairs and as I get to the other corner I realize it probably would have taken just as much time to wait for the light and would have involved less climbing. Well, conserving steps isn't really a concern for me.

At the restaurant one of the ladies asks me what I want. I say, there's a soup and it has that white fish in it. The lady says something back to me and I just say yes. I then ask about leafy vegetables (always a good way to make the meal more nutritious). She says you can find the types of leafy vegetables on the sign above you. The only word I recognize on all three signs is the "tsai" or vegetable part of it. I ask her to repeat her sentence because the place is noisy and she was talking fast. I caught what sounded like what I remember to be spinach from the past, so she makes a couple of marks on the menu, I see the price, and I count out some cash.

When I get my food I realize that the fish didn't seem to be the kind I had in mind, but still tasty. The vegetables turned out to be cooked cabbage, not cooked spinach. The soup also turned out to be mostly broth with a few pieces of fish in it and plenty of ginger. Less substance than I was hoping for, but still not a bad meal.

I took it to a park to eat.

In the park a group of middle-aged to elderly citizens gathered without my realizing it and started swinging arms back and forth, over and over, to the rhythm of a recorded lady counting higher and higher. At one point I hear her say what sounded like "disgusting" and realize instead she must have been saying "twenty seven" because the voice was really doing noting but counting. (Twenty seven is erqi and disgusting is erxing, and the tones are similar.) Passers-by seem to start swinging their arms as well as they listen to the rhythmic counting from the speaker.

As I finish consuming the meal before me, I check my watch, 7:47. My phone is dying and Rex has been calling at about 8:15 every evening from boot camp, so I hurry home so as not to miss his call with no cell phone battery. 

Reading in Chinese Part 2

I forgot to mention before those moments when I can recognize all the individual parts of a character and therefore feel like I should be able to read it, but I can't. Or the times where I find a character I've written or learned before, but can't remember what it is. Or the times I see a character that looks almost exactly as another word I know, but one or two small details is different. That happens all the time.

Last but not least are the moments I can tell you what a character means, but I have no idea how it's said in Chinese. I always wonder how this is possible.

I guess it's better than understanding nothing.

Reading in Chinese

I was riding in the car with my husband's mom, dad, and sister yesterday. My sister-in-law said to me, read to me what you are able to off of the signs around us. So I did.

"Very xx xx xx xx" from one sign. Were those last four characters representative of "Jesus" and "Church?" It turns out they were.

"Today" from one enormous sign with lots of words, "device" and "car" from another which together - it turns out - means motorcycle, "noodles" "xx xx four people" on the side of a taxi cab. But what about four people? I wouldn't have known unless she told me, "that says the car can seat four people."

You get the idea.

In a very large sign full of mysteries of the Chinese language I read two characters from one part, not recognizing any characters in a long sequence I skip ahead to the next one I know. I'm corrected, of course, because I'm told the next word is a different word that I didn't say. Well, I knew that, but I wasn't reading the whole sign, just the parts I know how to read.

And of course, my Chinese lessons are full of repeating vocabulary about the school being behind the swimming pool and where are you going and when and for how long. So the impressive length of the paragraphs I read in Chinese from my textbook are a little misleading because of how often expressions are repeated within the text: "Today I will go to class, tomorrow I will go to the library from 10-12 to read a book. Does your mom cook food? Yes, but not well. My dad cooks good food." It really is not like what you would find naturally occurring in people's speech. But it's still helpful because the repetition helps concrete the grammatical form and make the ideas flow off my tongue readily as needed.

I wonder how Chinese ever are able to read and write and speak in their own language! More and more I am truly impressed by the ability to read a long document and understand it in a glance.

Enter the Life of a Toddler

Do you remember those moments as a kid when your parents were in a long, dull conversation with their friends and you got bored and either egged your parents on to get a move on, or found some more interesting, exciting play to engage in?

We all have known some mom or dad who complains about their young child just learning to grasp language, but not yet able to make themselves fully understood, throws tantrums and fits because they can't make themselves truly understood.

I feel like I'm living the life of one of those small children. I'm a slightly more competent toddler, though, because I can hop on a bus and get myself to the university every morning for Chinese class. When I'm in a social setting my mind blanks out quite quickly because I can only keep up with a minimal amount of the information being exchanged. When I engage in conversation (and I've been avoiding simply reverting to English although I could generally get by with it) the interaction requires 2-5 times the energy because I have to stop the speaker to ask the meaning of a word, or I have to get at an idea in a round about way or try to ask how an idea or word is expressed in Chinese.

I am listening to the Ramona and Beezus books on my phone right now and I found that I can empathize with Ramona when she is learning to read. When she was just beginning to learn to read words, she would read books by inserting a buzzing sound for each word she did not know. "The boy zzzz the zzzz on the ball and zzzz zzzz into a zzzz. How fun!"

This is me when I listen to Chinese, and it's even more exaggerated when I read.

Sometimes when Rex is driving the motorcycle and he wants to find some food for dinner, he'll ask me to keep my eyes open and tell me what I can see. I don't really like that suggestion, so I do what I can realistically do. In a sign full of what may as well be nonsense, I recognize a few sparse words, "hand" and "beef noodles" and "coffee" amid long lists of menus with some mysterious foods listed.

I tell Rex, "Let's go to the place where we can eat hands!" Because I can't actually offer anything useful in this scenario.

Teach English, Learn Chinese

This year one of my main goals is to learn Chinese. In order to make sufficient income I will also be teaching English. I feel like my brain will go through the ringer in order to create lesson plans and transfer information to students as well as to collect information in order to perform up to class expectations and my personal goals for the year. Reading and writing in Chinese is really my biggest challenge in this area. Because every character has to be learned one by one, and you can't simply read something by "sounding it out" as we are accustomed to doing in English from the time we were in Kindergarten.

The purpose of learning Chinese, of course, is primarily for building relationships and opening up opportunities for the future. I don't want a language barrier to exist between me and my in-laws.

Another opportunity has opened up as well for Rex to improve his Taiwanese. There is a church in Taipei that has a Bible study in the Taiwanese language. Rex's Taiwanese is a little broken, which makes communicating with his grandma more troublesome. If he attends this Bible study he can improve his speaking, understanding, and even reading of the language. Even most Taiwanese who have spoken Taiwanese at home with their families don't read the language because in school they primarily just learn Mandarin. This is, of course, because of the Nationalists bringing and enforcing the use of Mandarin in Taiwan when they came after World War 2 to Taiwan.

What I realize is an easy pitfall is the possibility of forgetting my Romanian language. I don't want that to happen, so one of my goals is to listen to things in Romanian and keep up relationships with my friends in Romania.

Maybe my expectations of myself are too high. I guess we'll see.

Travelling Around the Island

Recently I returned home to Taipei from a trip of a lifetime. My husband and I got to take my parents on a loop around Taiwan and see some of the incredible scenery here. Taiwan is an island of which about 70% is mountainous. So while there are some plains, they are largely limited to the Western side of the island and are filled with large cities and farms. As Taiwan is an island about the size of Lake Michigan, the ocean is never terribly far away. In practice this results in the people consuming probably more seafood than land animals in their diet.

Because of the presence of mountains and ocean there are always beautiful sights within easy access. The mountains are full of tropical plants and flowering trees this time of year, including the famous Sakura Japanese cherry blossoms. Since the Japanese colonized Taiwan for 50 years, there are places they lived and planted this beloved tree.

Probably one of the highlights of the trip for me was seeing Taroko Gorge. I have wanted to visit Taroko Gorge since before I ever came to Taiwan. Taroko Gorge is basically an enormous crevice in the mountains with the rock foundation of the mountains carved out and exposed to view. There is a river flowing through at the bottom and it has a blue hue to it, unlike the brown rivers we're accustomed to in Wisconsin. I believe the color is caused by the presence of algae or minerals in the water. Sometime when I'm able to access the photos from my laptop I might share some of them with you.

We also got to see surfers out on the ocean, drink coffee grown in Taiwan (which is not exported because the quantity is only enough to consume locally), see how salt was gathered from ocean water in ancient times, eat Aboriginal food, and much more. But the truth is, we only touched the tip of the ice berg.