Anyway, the following item struck me as serious enough to read to Auntie when I visited her this morning. Unfortunately, as soon as I reached the part about the Canadian, she stuck her fingers in her ears and began mumbling something unprintable. Shortly afterwards, the doctor had to come and administer her medication.
Dear Auntie Sinoglot,
I used to like fish; the tasty, succulent morsels; flakes that fall from the bone. Then I learned to snick a chunk with my chopsticks, roll it around my mouth and sick the bones onto the tablecloth. Perhaps, these could have been my oracle bones, but I no longer enjoyed fish as once I had.
They say that fish enhances brain function. But then they say so much.
Once upon a time, way back when, I studied hard. No, really, I did. I could always find time to grapple with grammar, root around in dictionaries and make cards, lots and lots of little cards.
Chinese pronunciation tried me. I retreated into mindless activities whenever things got too tough. If I wanted to avoid hard work, I always had the trusty cards, flashcards, each cut by my own kitchen-scissor hand from sheets of coloured card, individually bought from an increasingly amused stationer. At least the stationer became a regular, if mocking, conversation partner.
Flashcards punctuated my day, but never did they become study itself.
At the same time, I would collect interesting expressions, often scribbled for me on sheets of the then still unpronounceable, quarter-folded, slightly quilted paper provided by every downmarket restaurant. Idioms which came up in conversation, bon mots and, more often than not, the names of fish on which I’d nibbled, all found their way onto such notes.
Most of these pieces of paper ended up in a dusty old drawer between HSK certificates and one yuan notes inscribed with possibly incendiary, but still indecipherable, messages. The rest were soaked in tea to line the ashtray.
I don’t think I ever paused to consider the phenomenon but, “Would you write that down for me?” might stand for, “Would you remember that for me.”
I had the memory of a goldfish.
I wonder how I ever learnt anything. But often enough I’d turn to that trusty companion; my dear old dictionary. My first. It still sits on the shelf, rarely touched these days, now just one of a long line of reference books; some well-thumbed, some as new. But that thrice-bound friend still smiles down on my desk.
Sometimes, in the name of study, I would watch television. I thought it might open my mind. I might absorb language by staring at furniture. I knew it wasn’t really meant for clever people like me, but at least I needn’t fear being brainwashed.
Between the bizarre advertisements for stretching your child, whether intellectually or vertically, and other implausible claims, I glimpsed the grinning Canadian.
There he stood, in all his strangely proportioned glory; a halibut in a mandarin collar. In his raised hand a gadget. One cannot describe this action as holding; desirable products must never be handled. But he displayed, complemented, commended an electronic dictionary-cum-study aid. The answer to all my prayers. Though I’d prayed for nothing.
Who’d a thought it? A dapper gent selling hand-held gizmos to credulous kids. And I fell for it; hook, line and sinker.
The device itself, of course, was rubbish. It’s name punned on having a good memory, but it was stuffed to the gills with things every school child wishes he needn’t remember, and quickly forgets.
Occasionally I would slide it out of its little velcro sleeve and look up a word which would otherwise have been felt-penned on napkin. The wobbly little stick would produce petrol rainbows on the screen and passable definitions for simple expressions. But I had bigger fish to fry.
One day, between chuckling over the writings of some PR thief, and reading the lurid fantasies of a sex-crazed Englishman hell bent on baiting the, still only mildly indignant, Chinese youth, I stumbled upon an innocent enough comment on a blog about learning Chinese.
Apparently, everyone had a kind of electronic dictionary.
You know; everyone.
I’d been hooked, and would slowly be reeled in.
The dictionary was named after a frequently mis-pronounced fish. It cost a bit. And then there was the hardware – one of those swanky gadgets that only my uncle Bob had. But now I had a reason, an excuse even, to haul myself into the digital age.
I couldn’t make a purchase like this on the spur of the moment. Options were carefully weighed. Windows Mobile or Palm. You remember Palm, don’t you? Either way it looked a complicated business. The software would work on some machines and not others. Sometimes there were little work arounds. Some of the machines could even make telephone calls. That seemed somewhat excessive. I simply wanted a little device to enhance my study, and maybe to allow me to carry around my calendar and addresses.
One Sunday, I bought a Palm. I synched the device with my laptop. It wiped my contacts book and doubled all the entries in my diary.
Then I downloaded my saviour. No grinning Canadian had persuaded me to buy this. It was all function. You get what you pay for. And I got the fish.
I marvelled at the possibilites. I cross-checked entries in different dictionaries, scratched characters by hand and realised how smart the fish was, checked radical lists and assured myself that I’d still be able to grind through the same sort of look-up tables which had occupied so much of my earlier studies. Then the flashcards. No more scissors and felt-tip pens! It even remembered what I’d looked up in the dictionary, and allowed me to go back and add these words to the packs of flashcards I’d created…well, downloaded, if truth be told.
It did everything I could have prayed for.
And then I stopped learning stuff.
I’m not sure when I realised this. For a long time, I kept putting new expressions into flashcard lists, going through routines much like my old routines. I was free to study wherever I went. And never was I lost. My memory was in my pocket. It was like a linguistic GPS.
Flashcards were still sorted into decks, but I could no longer drop them all over the floor. I needn’t even count or stack them. Three dimensions had become two.
Vocabulary acquisition became more like kleptomania. Even now, I catch myself looking up words, just checking, you know, in mid-conversation. I feel like one of those poor cretins who film pop concerts on their mobile phones.
Auntie, I’ve taken the ritual out of study. How can I put it back?
Yours, floundering,
NAME AND ADDRESS WITHHELD
I wonder whether an any of our readers could offer guidance to this poor soul.
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