  |
|
|
|
When I had been in Taiwan long enough to recover from jet-lag, I set about acquiring a 'survival' level of Chinese much as most travelers do. I had tried to learn a few phrases from the Berltiz tapes loaned me by a friend with no appreciable success. After all, even if I learned to flawlessly parrot, "Pardon me, but could you please be so good as to direct me to the location of the nearest reputable hostelry?" I still wouldn't be able to understand the answer unless the individual I asked had the patience to repeat the scripted response again and again, over and over. Or spoke English.
I needed basic phrases such as 'I want this' and 'I don't want that', 'How much is it?', 'What's your name?', 'Are you sure you're eighteen?', etc. None of these simple phrases came easy to me. It took me ages to get 'want' and 'have' straight, but that was more an ontological stumbling block than a linguistic one. Chinese is damned difficult to learn. My first teachers were the guy from Chicago, whom I had come to Taiwan to work for and his Taiwanese wife. I'd pester him about a word (a 'lex' item in the EFL/ESL trade) and he'd pester his wife for the Chinese. Then we'd drill it, forget it 5 minutes later and have to ask her again. One word which stumped her for the longest time was the word 'safety'. Days went by before we found somebody who knew the word in Chinese. It became a running joke. 'What's the Chinese word for 'safety'?' This was very revealing. What it revealed did not concern vocabulary per se. What it revealed was that the Chinese had little use for the word and therefore the concept of 'safety' in their daily lives. The whole place is an accident waiting to happen. That's what my grandpa used to say. I started to mentally note incidents of un-safety: low-hanging cables over walk-ways, jerry-rigged electrical wiring, mothers nonchalantly jay-walking across a busy boulevard with toddlers following in their erratic wake, five and six people on a single motorcycle, motor vehicles driven recklessly... on the sidewalks (ba-dum-bump), babies being dangled off of high balconies - oops, no, that was somebody else. Go To Page: 1 2
The copyright of the article Accidents Waiting to Happen in Living Abroad is owned by Douglas Charles Rapier. Permission to republish Accidents Waiting to Happen in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
|
|
|
|
