I called Kinokuniya today (I have their number on speed dial…) and it turns out that the sea shipment of Suzuka Vol.10 just came in today! But it has yet to be processed and I’ll only be able to collect my order tomorrow. :(
That’s not what I want to rant about today.
Anyway, I had been reading two semi-biographies by Richard P. Feynman recently, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” and “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”. Mr. Feynman was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during the war and later won a Nobel prize for his personal work. His stories are full of humourous anecdotes that really given you an unique perspective of the world from the eyes of a genius in the real Einsteinian sense of the word.
So, there I was dozing off during Chinese lesson as lines of proverbs flickered in and out of my semi-conscious mind. I was suddenly reminded very strongly of a statement made by Mr. Feynman about his dislike for the compulsory English language courses at MIT back in his college years. He said that language, or rather the study of language, to him was too arbitary. Unlike the sciences, there is nothing physical about English and it is simply a set of standards decided based on usage.
I agreed with what he said but didn’t think much of it, until today. You see, Chinese education in my school is basically about forcing as much vocabulary down the students’ throats as possible year after year. We memorize hundreds and thousands of classical proverbs and sayings that are forgotten the nanosecond we recieve the graduation certificate. The 1% of the school population that actually learnt something ends up not getting to use them because those people would otherwise have a hard time communicating with the other 9%. I say 9% because the remaining 90% just sticks to English, but that’s beside the point.
My point is that these “high-level” proverbs that we are forced to memorize are useless fluff. It seems to me that a language should be a mean and not an end. We use words to convey ideas, we don’t create ideas so we can put them in words. Therefore, it seems quite foolish to me to place so much emphasis on vocabulary. Grammar is important because we need to a common foundation to base our information exchanges on, but vocabulary is only useful when it means something, either a concrete object or an abstract concept, to the speaker and the listener. And since the primary function of language is to facilitate communication, there is no reason why you would want to make its task more difficult by making the vocabulary unnecessarily complex. That is what proverbs do. Proverbs in Chinese are basically complicated anecdotes distilled into a few characters to have a meaning that is often completely unrelated to the words themselves. In order to understand their meanings, you have to either be born a few centuries earlier or memorize a good-size dictionary dedicated to nothing but proverbs. The worst part is that the ideas expressed by these overly-complicated phrases can usually be put into a single word without any loss of meaning, but a teacher will always prefer that you use the most complex expression available to show your l33t proverb skillz.
Proverbs are counter-productive by nature. Even if two parties can understand what the other is saying, proverbs still slow down communication unnecessarily by virtue of the fact that they are usually goddamn long. And there is always the chance that the listener does not understand the meaning of a particular proverb, slowing down the process even further.
If you ever asked any teacher why one should study proverbs, you would no doubt be told that the proper usage of proverbs makes one sound more cultured and refined. Some teacher might even add that you ought to be ashame of yourself for questioning your great heritage. Some would go mumbling on about the beauty of the language and how you ought to appreciate it like a work of art. But no one will ever, ever tell you that you need them to get your ideas across to other people, because you don’t. In fact, they might even prevent you from doing so.
My theory is that the learning and speaking of proverbs is one huge game of “one-upness”. It’s like those games that children play where they challenge one another to do silly things and the losers get ostracized. The rules involved in language are as arbitary as the ones in such games. So what if you finish first? It seems quite unfair to me for such a person to be given equal credit for mastering a bunch of rules built on nothing but air as compared to a person who excels in sciences based on the rules that govern the universe. I would personally place language on the same level as mathematical notations. It’s necessary for the exchange of ideas, but there’s no point making it overly complicated and it certainly should not be a whole subject by itself, as least not in any standards higher than elementary school.
Oh well, maybe I am just bitter that I’m going to fail today’s Chinese proverb test because I did not bother to revise for it.
Speaking of language studies, I have not been reading much Japanese lately. Ahhhh! I have a bad feeling about this year’s JLPT.
P.S. Fate/Stay Night episode 5 rocked! :)
I’ve read Feynman’s biographies as well. What struck me the most is that he gave up learning Japanese because of the concept of keigo and having to make yourself sound humble while showering praise on the party you are speaking to. I found this rather sad, as he apparently had a pretty good appreciation for the Japanese culture – and, if you think about it, keigo is more of a kind of built in politeness rather than any kind of self-degredation.
About Chinese proverbs: I’d always had the impression that they were supposed to compress a large amount of nuance and intent into a small number of words. Don’t you use them for conveying exact meaning in instances where explicit prose would seem to wordy? Correct me if I’m wrong, because I stopped studying Chinese before I was 10…
> Oh well, maybe I am just bitter that I’m going to fail today’s Chinese proverb test because I did not bother to revise for it.
I guess that’s it XD I never had to learn them, my parents wanted me to do it but since they weren’t very consequent about it, I never did. (I got a cassette with stories about chinese proverbs though, it was fun to listen and that’s why I remember most of those proverbs.) Which brings me to my point: I think the richness of chinese proverbs are really an interesting thing and shouldn’t be forgotten too easily. It’s just a pain that people are forced to learn them.
You probably can compare it with latin: Nobody uses it nowadays (even less than chinese proverbs), but it can enrich your comprehension of language and culture with it.
I see what you’re saying, and I mostly agree with you… though we usually just stick to vocabulary here in the ‘States, because we’re not cool enough to have proverbs. :(
I think that the more you learn about any language, the harder it is to actually communicate with. That is, you don’t become fluent in a language by studying it, but by using it. And even past fluency, learning more vocabulary just complicates things until you can work out how to use that vocabulary in regular speech. If you think about it, yeah, it’s awfully counter-productive, but I think it pays off in the end if you really want it to, even with proverbs.
I actually love Chinese proverbs. Being born and raised in Canada, it took a really long time for me (13 years of Chinese studying) to get it all down… so I totally understand why it would be hard. However, the funny thing is that I live in Japan and Hong Kong, and my Japanese seems to be better than my Chinese sometimes. Though, I think Chinese will become really important in the future since the economy is rising and thus Mandarin should become really useful. So, study hard, ganbare!
heh…I knew Suzuka vol. 10 would be in this week…but I will only pick it up later this week because of work and stuff…
anyways, I love your attitude towards chinese, my fellow chineseman, although I have to say you would probably want to show your 133t japanese language skills whether it is necessary to or not, am I rite? :D
p.s. Fate/Stay Night episode 5 didn’t rock; episode 6 WILL rock, on the other hand :P (5 was ok, but it didn’t warrant that level of elated outburst from you)
oh did I mention that vol. 10’s cover rocks, with suzuka and yamato together!! keehhhhhhhhh!
Ok, I see your point. But that doesn’t mean that proverbs are necessarily that useless.
This kind of experiences made me remind back to when I was watching Ghost In The Shell: Innocence back in April (Singapore Film Festival). I am still dumbstruck with most of its complexities. At least I got the joke when Batou said: “Even if the donkey travels thousands of miles, it would not return back a horse.” Or something along that line.
The point of proverbs is that sometimes, useful and can be used in “sarcastic” tones if you don’t want the intended party to “immediately understand your meaning.” I.e. you can toss a proverb or two to your boss/teacher/friend that means that you don’t like him/her.
Oh, yeah. 1 question: 1.) What’s with F/SN? I feared it being most overhyped series.
Good day.
LoL! Just wondering, what’s their number? I wanna place some orders too with my ang bao money! =)
Oh Yeah~ also wanna say… FATE/STAY NIGHT ROCKS!!
Saber Saber GO GO GO!
Update: I scored 35/50 for the test, so it wasn’t that bad.
The reason why Mr. Feynman dropped Japanese was he probably thought that it was a silly waste of time to change the verbs for no reason. But keigo isn’t completely useless because it often helps to clue you in on who is performing the action, something that is not very clear most of the time since Japanese tends to lack pronouns from its sentences. I guess the logical solution would be to make pronouns compulsory and then do away with keigo… but oh well…
Anyway, I have nothing against proverbs really. As TP mentioned, they can be interesting and subtle in their meanings. But so is painting. And yet similar forms of indirect artistic expressions are not given the same status in the education system.
Art, by its definition, should be something based on interest. If the course was Chinese Literature (and I was somehow fooled into taking it), then I would have no complains.
Anyway, I have yet to get my hands on Suzuka vol.10… NOOOOOOOOooooooooooo!
P.S. Mai-Otome 17 rocked too! :P
“Sex is to masturbation what physics is to maths”….Richard Feynman.
Just thoght I should enhance your knowledge of this genius professor who claimed to have visited topless bars 5 times a week. He later got the Nobel prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics. A cheerful eccentric genious, but of questionable behaviour