The weather has turned sunny and warm and Shanghai is as bustling as ever. I’ve met some people now who speak English, though they are from other countries and English is not their original language. (One is from Sweden and another from Moldova and each speak several other languages too). One woman has lived here for 14 months and is studying Chinese (Mandarin). She speaks the language very well, which has come in handy for ordering things from menus. She’s also been very helpful in explaining some of the culture here.
I’m learning a few words and phrases, but have realized that it is a very difficult language to learn. There is no Chinese Alphabet, just symbols. "Our [western] alphabets consist of symbols or letters which have no meaning on their own. Instead, Alphabets are phonetic systems where the individual sounds of the language are represented with letters. Chinese, by contrast, uses pictographs or ideographs. Here, each chinese symbol represents an object, concept or idea.
There are probably 40-50,000 characters, but only about 6,000 are essential in everyday use and Chinese students acquire these in the course of several years. It is thought that a person should know at least 3,000 characters to be able to understand newspapers.
http://www.logoi.com/notes/chinese_alphabet.html - very good web site
http://www.chinese-tools.com/characters/alphabet.html
http://www.chinese-symbols.com/chinese-alphabet-symbols.html
I doubt I’ll ever be able to read or write the language using the Chinese symbols without doing some intensive studying. I will buy a phrase book once I get to Guangzhou to be able to speak the most important words and phrases. (Luckily, I don’t need to know Chinese to teach English as I’m not to be translating/interpreting, but using conversational English.)
In the meantime to help me learn the language, I am writing down the words using the western alphabet with my own system of pronunciation. The key is to speak the words quickly and they understand what you say. If I take me time over the words in an attempt to pronounce them right, they don’t have a clue what I’ve said; best to kind of mumble quickly.
I’m getting used to the squatting toilets now and after what I was told about people actually
standing on the seats of the sitting ones, they may be the most sanitary. Using them makes me feel like I'm out in the countryside squatting behind a bush. One has to carry toilet tissue or Kleenex with them at all times though, and flushing tissues in public places in not done (put into a wastebakset instead), which means bathrooms/toilets can stink to high heaven. Squatting toilets come in many styles, some narrower than others so the aim has to be good. I like my hygienic sitting toilet in my hotel room.I’m finding myself quite disconcerted by not being able to access a great many web sites due to government protective firewalls. I can’t even access my own blogs, so I respectfully ask that no one make comments to me on my blogsites as I can’t read them. I welcome e-mails though to my usual address: jsilverthorne@sasktel.net I also welcome news from home as I can’t access any news sites, and especially not the CBC.
Tomorrow (Friday) afternoon I hope to take a tour of Shanghai to see a little more of the city (the touristy part, I guess that shows up in most of the photos about Shanghai) before I leave on Saturday afternoon.
Zai jian (good-bye – literally ‘again’ and ‘to meet’) for now!
