Or, more accurately, I have stopped learning any NEW Chinese. I’m spending a month or so on the Karate Kid method of language learning. I’m going to focus on the few things that I know, and I’m going to drill down on them until I know them with a nearly native fluency. I can’t say that I know how this is going to work, or if it rides contrary to all the scholarly thought on the matter, but I’m going to stick to my guns a bit and see what happens.

I’d love to hear from more advanced students on this matter. Did any of you just take a step back and review for a good long while? Inquiring minds want to know!

Here’s the man now:

One night, Aric and I went out with Amber and Clay (and a few other folks), and Aric shared a plan with us for an exposé on Bund  bars. He shared the details with Clay and I and together we hammered out a plan. The results of that plan can be found right here:

Social Experiment #1

And this is one of the things that I like about this guy. He’s not just a talker. He gets things done. He’s a wild card, to be sure. He’s a shot of tequila with your morning coffee and he’s dangerous. I miss that kind of unpredictability here at ChinesePod sometimes. He was always stirring the pot or poking a hornet’s nest. It’s hard to build a stable, multi-lingual, world-spanning corporation with a guy like that, but he’s rocket fuel on the launch pad. He’s a real gift to start-ups and I can’t wait to see what he does next.

I found the following phrase particularly challenging due to the time markers and I’d love to see other’s translations of the same thing. Anyone who can translate this AND tell me the movie it comes from gets a vintage Marvel No-Prize!

Here’s the quote:

“I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.”

Good luck!

Blasphemy, I know. How could I even suggest it? But there it is. I’m surrounded—SURROUNDED, I tell you—by non-Chinese-speaking people! All these years of practice… well, both of them… and for what? So I can order a Diet Coke one week a year when I go overseas?

Gah. What I really need to do, what we ALL need to do, is move to Shanghai. Who’s with me? Come on, we’ll start a ChinesePod commune. We’ll get one of those old houses with the courtyards and we’ll spend our days chatting in Mandarin. Poor tongue-tied expats will wander through our doors in desperate need of help after a solid linguistic thrashing by a native bully. We’ll train him like a kung fu fighter in a Jackie Chan film and send him back out there armed with useful phrases and a mastery of the dreaded 了. (It even LOOKS like a weapon! It reminds me of a kama.)

I keep trying to find places to use my limited skills. Just the other day I discovered that the independent auditor here at work is from China and I chatted her up but good. Of course, she’s still doing that thing where she tells me my Chinese is great… but she keeps talking to me in English.

I’ll wear her down. Just you wait and see. 我会！

I’ve been holding off on a major recap because there’s a secret I’ve been dying to share and I just don’t have the green light yet. It’s just going to have to wait a little longer. (Trust me, this hurts me more than it hurts you!)

So what do you want to know? Help me focus, people! Do you want to hear about the people at ChinesePod? How about the food I ate while I was there? I had a surprisingly good lunch over at the infamous BSR (Bad Service Restaurant) and helped Clay find his “Blue Steel” look.

OH! You know what I can tell you? Steve Williams (one of the CPod founders) and his wife just had a new baby! Congrats to them both!

What’s funny, and not a little strange for me, is that I’m finding words less useful since I started taking photos. There’s this saying about each one of them being worth a thousand words. Might be some truth there. Look at this one, for example:

There’s got to be some lingo-cultural explanation behind this whole “talking girl” thing. Best guess here? Anybody? I don’t know the answer myself, but I found that it tickled me when I saw it. It was just one of a million little moments that made it such a great trip.

However, if you’re one of the few folks who can’t access the Convo section on ChinesePod, or you just follow my Chinese language exploits through this here blog, I invite you to click on the picture above and see China through my eyes. I took over 3,000 photos while I was there, and I think these are the best of them. I hope you enjoy them.

But let’s talk language for a minute, shall we?

I spent entire days talking in Chinese. I sat in cabs and got where I wanted to go. I ordered food and drink. I chatted up waitresses and business men. I’m sure I sounded like a retarded fourth grader while I was doing these things, but I did it. I spoke and was understood. That’s nothing short of amazing, if you ask me, and I owe it all to the program here at ChinesePod. I’d rank myself as a low Intermediate learner at this point, but I felt an awful lot like a Newbie at times.

That being said, I’ll confess that I’ve spent too much time chatting with other users and not enough time digging into the lessons. Gotta change that, and fast!

How about you kids? How are you getting on out there?

Anyway, in the morning I depart for Shanghai! I’m not sure what the schedule will be like this week, what with it being Chinese New Year and all, but I’ll make sure to stop by the ChinesePod offices and remind them what I look like. (Poor bastards. Momma always said I had a great face for radio.)

I’ll make sure to pop back here while I’m away and leave periodic trip reports. There may even be pictures!

Stay tuned!

(Oh, and I haven’t had a single chance to, you know, study Chinese for weeks now. You may consider me officially nervous.)

Just about a year ago, I was in the ChinesePod offices for the first time. I happen to be there on Dave Lancanshire’s first day, in fact. (For those paying attention, that means Dave just had his one-year anniversary with the company. Look for a post in the Conversations section on this shortly.)

Anyway, Dave was trying to coax me into talking a bit to see how good (or bad) my tones were. Of course, I was terrified! This was a live test, people! This was not a drill! We were go for launch codes! Warning, warning! Danger Will Robinson!!!

Or… at least that’s what it sounded like in my head.

So I said the first thing that came into my head. It was a line from a recent lesson. I said, “我流血了!”

流血 • liú xuè • shed blood

And Dave’s eyes go WIDE. And I’m thinking… okay. My tones must REALLY suck. Damn, I thought I had that line pretty good! Oh, man, I’m in trouble! So I said it in English.

“I said, ‘I’m bleeding.’”

“I know what it means,” Dave said. “It just took me by surprise because that phrase can also mean that you’re… uh… menstruating. And since you didn’t have any visible wounds…”

Hehe.

You know that saying that “ignorance is bliss?” I’m not blissful. I’ve been studying Chinese for almost two years now (give or take a few months). I know just enough to be unhappy. I don’t yet know enough Chinese to be happy, either. I’m still experiencing my growing pains. But, gosh darn it, I want a Chinese name! When I get to Shanghai I want to have my name carved on the bottom of one of those little stampy things so I can sign my paintings with it!

Now… I’ve asked a few Chinese friends about this naming business and they always give me that feh-lan-ke thing that I can never remember how to type. It’s just a transliteration of my English name which, pardon me for saying so, but YAWN.

I want something that’s ME. Something that suits my personality, you know? I want something that tells a story. (Imagine that!)

So, let me show you where my thoughts have been running and tell you why.

First of all, my initials are FF. If you take that first F and flip it horizontally, you get something that looks a lot like a dragonfly. I like dragonflies a lot. That double-F/dragonfly image is actually how I sign my paintings. So when I stumbled across the character 非, I thought… HEY! That looks kind of close! And it’s even got that F sound! Maybe I’m onto something here!

非 - fēi - non-/not-/un-/

Hmmmm. Not sure how I feel about starting my name with a negative connotation like that. Unless… wait. Let me check some of the options for that second syllable.

克  - kè - gram/subdue/to restrain/to overcome/

Hey, now! That might be something! “Unrestrained.” Un-overcome. As in unstoppable. Yeah, I kind of like that! But, of course, when I put those two characters together, it doesn’t mean anything in any dictionary I try.

Still, that would be easy to remember, and not at all difficult to write. I’ll have to get a ruling on this.

But… isn’t this just the first name? Can I go around in China with just these two characters and not get confused with someone else? I mean… okay. Yes. The odds on another Italian-American who is both devilishly charming and absurdly reasonably handsome also being called 非克 are pretty slim. But there’s a lot of people in China! It could happen!

So what about surnames? Family names? The name Fradella is a slightly bastardized version of the word “fratello,” which means “brother” in Italian. Unfortunately, this is an utter nightmare in Chinese! They have a different word for every conceivable permutation of blood relation. I tried to find a word that just meant “brother.” Not older, not younger, not the brother of my sister-in-law’s husband. Just “brother.” Here’s what I came up with:

弟兄 - dì xiōng - brother

But, really… do I want to walk around being 弟兄非克？ Well… maybe!

Anyway, like I said — I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. What do you think?

It’s just the coolest little thing. I hear it more and more these days, and I’ve even begun injecting into my own conversations online and via Skype.

For those of you in the Great White North, this must be the most natural particle in the world. It’s roughly equivalent to your natural “eh?” I lived in Windsor, Ontario, for about six months and I became intimately acquainted with this expression. Though it’s not usually written down, the “eh?” particle in Canadian lingo usually falls at the end of a sentence that started with the companion particle, “Oh.”

For example:

“Oh, yeah, eh?”
or
“Oh,  let’s go get something to eat, eh?”

It softens the phrase a bit, making it more suggestive. Just like my beloved 吧。

To whit:

“啊，对吧?”
or
“我们去吃饭吧!”

Do pardon the lack of Pinyin, folks — I have no idea how to type it.

But how cool — and intuitive — is this particle?!