The classroom is drab, nine feet square, has no air conditioning, and is lighted by a two-tube flourescent bulb. Mrs. Li has been going nearly non-stop for two hours, filling the tiny blackboard repeatedly with Chinese characters decidedly more balanced and beautiful in their construction than the scrawls on the student notebook open on the well-worn, rickety wooden desk. This is the fourth sweating student she has faced this late summer day. Whose plight is worse?
Easy to answer. In 36 minutes this class will be over. Mrs. Li will go home to husband, children, family, dinner, a black & white TV, and probably will tell a few quick stories to her family about what hilarious gaffs a couple of her charges made today in class. The student's routine is just as predictable: quick dinner with host family, a story about his biggest error of the day in class (told in Chinese butchered enough to conceal the full impact of the humor that in fact lies therein), then three hours of homework, maybe more. Mrs. Li has it easier: she grew up speaking Chinese, and the Peking dialect at that, with its crisp pronunciation, sure-fire tonal distinctions, and rapid-fire delivery.
One billion people now speak Chinese. In 1971, 90 of them were students at the Mandarin Training Center and barely literate in Chinese terms. Most of the foreign students of those early days before the MTC moved to its present high-rise quarters-complete with air conditioning, library, language lab, spacious lounges, support staff offices, and nearly 1,000 students—were working for M.A. or Ph.D. degrees. Their academic intensity was as thick as Taipei's summer humidity. Today, 17 years later, most of those students have left Chinese language study far behind them. It was a lark for some, a wrong career direction for many, but a lifetime.
Just ask Stanford Center director Dr. James Dew about "the lifers." The top-notch Center, active for 25 years in teaching Chinese and now also in new quarters, has two special summer programs for "retooling" senior American professors in the China field. It never ends, this work in Chinese. Hard-earned accomplishment may bring the foreign scholar to a new plateau of ability, but the plateau is often a bog into which the non-native speaker plunges face first. Sometimes it seems swimming through wet sand would be easier than the progress to yet the next level of language ability.
And it is more than tones, vocabulary lists, and sentence patterns. This is the complicated saving grace. As in any language learning, after the basics are fairly well in place, content takes expanding precedence. Culture and language learning are linked, actually tightly bound. Linguistic facility is tied to understanding history, literature, philosophy, and Chinese social complexities. Ignore these, and the best pronunciation of tones in town will only convey deeper ignorance.
The pleasures of Chinese are not easy to explain to people who have not taken the plunge. The initial rush of awed joy often comes in the first weeks. An old university textbook on Chinese history has a photograph of the "oracle bones," those 5,000-year-old essentials for divination; the brand new language student can read a dozen of the characters etched into bone! Months later, the names of Kang Hsi, Li Hung-chang, Yuan Shih-kai, Sun Yat-sen, and scores more no longer are strange "English" words: they are identifiable characters, rendered poorly into romanized form. The attractions—and advantages—of Chinese are crystallizing.
But enthusiasm for "things Chinese," including language study, can have its down side. Many foreign students, and it is a solid guess that most of these eventually fail, become so immersed in their Chinese studies that an unhappy attitude emerges. Language and cultural learning become a "replacement activity" in the mind rather than an expansion. They see the 5,000-year history of China, and the "tough language" itself (as it is called by the U.S. Government schools that teach foreign languages) as more significant than their own "shorter" histories. As a result, they "go Chinese," often going beyond dressing in traditional clothes and adopting non-verbal behavior identified with Chinese by turning to a more pernicious practice: downgrading their own country's culture in thought and conversation, while extolling the pristine virtues of their new environment. "The moon is brighter and rounder in Taipei than in Pittsburgh," for example.
People cannot understand a different culture, at least beyond superficialities, if they can so readily reject a lifetime's experience at home. "Double your world" for a time was the motto of foreign languages programs in the U.S. It is true. The mind is capable of expanding to embrace both languages and cultures radically different from each other. And the better students know their own cultural traditions and have the technical vocabularies to analyze and express them, the better they will be able to grasp those that are foreign.
People with these sorts of "expanded cultural minds" are unfortunately as rare proportionally as they were a century ago, and language remains the principal barrier. At least in Taiwan, the related hurdles for foreign students to this qualitative expansion of the mind and spirit have been lowered. Language school and university facilities are clean, modern, comprehensive, and efficient, and the on-the-street environment is equally conducive to positive reinforcement. The problem remains with the struggle itself—the long hours across the table from teachers, in the library, at home. But those who make the attempt, mind-wrenching as it can be, experience pleasures almost impossible to describe.