It may seem obvious, but why didn't anyone tell me?

As much as I hate hate hate exams and sitting for them, I have to admit the process of studying for them is an extremely useful exercise.  For one rather obvious reason, of course it consolidates the knowledge you do have, and it gives you a chance to pick up and understand things that may have gone past you a little fast the first time around.  Not to mention all the neurological / memory stuff about taking stuff and organising it in long term memory, retrieving it and reorganising, making additional links etc. etc.  So far so good.  I just turn into a jelly of nerves and blanking out when I'm expected to reproduce it all.  One of my class mates who does extra-ordinarily well in exams, although in class is just one of the 'guys' said to me, that the thing is he's just really really good at taking exams.  It's his thing. He can do it.  He goes into a zone when he's in an exam.  I remember reading an article in some newspaper somewhere from an expat who had returned to their home country after living in China for a while, and was saying how much they'd hated the kids having their weekly tests and dictations, and spelling lists at the time, but now back and without them were seeing the benefit it had had.

But yet another thing that I'm finding very interesting in this process, is that for some things, I really KNEW them, knew how to do them, would get them right (when I thought about it), but would get them wrong when I was put on a spot and had to for example say something quickly, so I'd not really internalised the logic.  The sentence order in Chinese is something that is notoriously difficult and counter-intuitive for native English speakers.  And despite that being a "known" the obvious is seldom pointed out to us.  Something about assumptions?  So today, after 2 years of getting things in the wrong order, I'm looking up the difference between co-verbs and prepositions on the internet (yes, Chinese famously doesn't really have a formal grammar, apparently what passes as grammar these days is western imperialism imposing a grammar on them....  so sometimes there are naming issues between what we think of as prepositions / coverbs and what functions similarly in Chinese - ditto what we call adjectives and they call stative verbs)** and I find this little nugget:
"In Chinese, when it comes to describing actions, sequence of actions is important. The first action should come first. For example, I went to China by airplane. You have to think that the action of 坐 sitting on the airplane happens before going to China, therefore 坐飞机 by airplane should be placed before 去中国went to China. If you want to say: I go to school by car, you must bear in mind that  in a Chinese person’s mind you have to sit in the car before you can reach school, therefore, 坐汽车 by car should be placed before去学校go to school."


I look at this, and have a huge "aha" moment.  I'm like, why didn't anyone tell me this about 2 years ago??


One of the commentaries to yesterday's blog was saying how she/he and their family were getting to grips with the Chinese language, but like me were also struggling with the cultural assumptions behind learning, and what was my opinion / were there resources / a book on this.  Well, not to my knowledge, and if anyone knows of one, please come out with it!  I know that Dr. Lin at Brown university has done a lot of research the other way (Chinese children's struggles with American assumptions about learning) but I don't know of research on western people's struggles with Chinese assumptions about learning, although if you get us all into a room I'm sure we could fill a book or a PhD thesis!


I had lunch yesterday with one of my ex-classmates, an English born and bred HK girl.  Who happily calls herself both Chinese and a "banana".  As we caught up with the gossip I could easily see that she had the same struggles with assumptions on the part of our lecturers as I did.  She was equally annoyed and outraged at the story of what had happened to my son as I was.  She was educated in a Western mindset so was more aligned with that than her Chinese heritage.  So it's a mine-field making sweeping statements about "them" or "us". 


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**28. S.V. (Stative Verb, Xíngróngcí 形容词). These entries are frequently translated into English as adjectives, even though they actually behave in Chinese as verbs. That is, the sense of 'to be' is already incorporated into these verbs, e.g. Zhèige hěn hǎo 'This is quite good.' In fact, it is simply ungrammatical to place the verb shì, 'to be', directly in front of a stative verb. Because stative verbs are actually verbs, they are directly negated by bù, e.g. bù hǎo 'not good', and can be further modified by adverbs of degree such as hěn 'quite', fēicháng 'extremely' and shífēn 'very; utterly'. One common function of stative verbs is that they may serve as adverbs to other actions, e.g. mànmàn in mànmàn chī 'Take your time (eating)' and rènzhēn in rènzhēn de xiě 'write carefully'.

not only ... but also ....

Conjunctions are a marvelous thing.  But so subject to abuse.  I'm feeling rather abused right now.  This morning our composition teacher - the red guard one, told us in no uncertain terms that research has shown that if you're no good in your native language you'll also be crap in any language you try to learn subsequently, and then with a huge leap of inversion of cause and effect stated that since one of the Japanese girl's chinese essay was so good, she therefore must be very good in Japanese (no kidding - she just happens to be a professor in Japanese in her prior life), and ergo sum, all of us whose essays are riddled with mistakes must be crap in our native languages.

On the way to the coffe shop to recharge on some sustenance, the guy I was walking with said "what a load of bollocks, she just happens to conveniently forget that Japanese has been influenced by Chinese forever and is therefore more closely aligned than other languages".  Phew, I thought I was the only one...

Quite apart from all the usual difficulties of learning chinese, the one thing that sticks out as being really hard is a huge attitudinal difference and cultural background of the teachers.  They are just so loaded with assumptions (as I guess English teachers trying to teach Chinese people English are ... I'm well aware it cuts both ways).  I remember my son coming home last term really upset.  Apparently he'd had a listening test in class and had done really well.  Instead of the teacher congratulating him, she'd assumed he'd cheated and had looked at the answers of someone else!  So she made him stay in at recess and retake the test.  He'd done equally well.  He was really dismayed.  He kept on telling me that he doesn't cheat and never has cheated, but he did need to guess some of the answers.  He asked if that was wrong if he guessed.  I just hugged him and bit my tongue and told him that I also had to guess a lot of the time and that there was nothing wrong with that. Just like there was nothing wrong with getting a poor result as long as it was all your own work, that was more admirable than a good result that was gained by cheating.

Now I have to put my mind to getting all my oral presentations and compositions to text-to-speech and trying to memorise them.  Another very specific way of teaching and learning that is inherent to learning Chinese....

Goal setting

 Inbetween studying, I'm planning various lunches and dinners with friends to say good-bye, the occasional run (wow, I've really stopped running for so long that I can no longer consider myself a runner), not to mention way to much time on Facebook and the internet.  And of course blogging, although all my regular commentators seem to be really quiet these days - where are you guys?  I need a bit of encouragement here on my own.


My sister, who holds down a full time job, with a one year old son, recently commented on her status that as she's on leave she's really enjoying spending a lot of time and not just "quality" time with her son.  To which I replied that I'm also enjoying some time on my own, having a mental and physical break from being with the kids 100%, with 7 million questions an hour from my son, while their dad is spending 100% quality time with them.  They're having a ball. Picking cherries, cycling everywhere, visiting the Hoge Veluwe, staying on a working farm.  I'm missing them like heck, but at the same time, both them and their dad needed this time together.  Dad is also extremely disciplined, only checking his blackberry 2x a day, and ignoring most demands being made on him.  It's a very special time for them.  Apparently you can't keep my son off his bicycle and he's insisting on hours and hours of bike treks through the park.  He's also happy and relaxed and even doing the maths I set him for the holidays (it's only 1/2 an hour a day and that is ALL, I promise, but he has to do it, it was a condition for acceptance at his new school) without a moan and much quicker than he ever did it at home.


As for me, I found a rather nice website - Hacking Chinese (while I was looking for a list of Chinese synonyms to help me study) which had a very good series of articles on goal setting.  This may sound a little strange, but when you're int the process of something, with all the immediate and urgent demands, it's sometimes hard to keep sight of the bigger picture (as many of you were reminding me when I failed the HSK exam). This is a rather handy view on goal setting specifically for Chinese learning.  And it's incredibly relevant for me now.  I have this HUGE overwhelming and terribly frightening amount to learn before exams start on Tuesday, and it is easy to be overwhelmed by it all and frightened into panic mode rushing from one thing to another.  So I've stepped back and I'm doing a little goal setting on a macro and micro level, and it's helping me stay focused.  So last night I wouldn't let myself go to bed until I'd corrected at least half of my oral presentations, in anticipation for transferring to text-to-speech to try and listen and memorise. I'm not allowed to go to lunch with my friend today until it's all been finished.  etc. etc.

Networking ...

I was chatting with one of my fellow students today.  For those of us who are not being flung across the ocean to nether shores, post study necessarily brings the prospect of gainful employment. So three of my closest friends in class are busily sharpening their CV's and going to interviews and seriously considering what it is that they want to spend the next few years doing.
Two of them seem to be 90% of the way to signing on to a good prospect, while the last has been receiving a few rejection letters too many.  Part of the problem in this case is while the person has considerable and valuable experience and could walk into an excellent job, they want to have a better work-life balance that doesn't involve working 20 hours per day in an environment where it's considered normal to have people senior to yourself shout at you (in public, and sometimes even in front of a client).
I suggested that instead of sending out CV's, the trick would be to get networking.  Ah, was the reply, you know so many people, you have such a good network, as I suggested a few people to talk to.  Actually I don't think of myself as a particularly good networker at all.  I've just lived here for a while, and have occasion to rub shoulders with many people from many walks of life.

I suggested joining one of the HK chambers of commerce and attending some of the lectures / breakfasts / lunches they have.   I know a friend of mine is a member of the HK chamber of commerce and the British Chamber of commerce and he speaks quite highly of them.

What would you suggest dear readers?  And are there any good organisations for women that you'd recommend? I know there are a few out there, but as I've never had the need to join any, I have no idea of their profiles / activity levels / professionalism.

my day gets worse ...

half of my back molar just suddenly broke off while I was having supper.  Not my day today!

a miss is as good as a mile...

and what ever the Chinese equivalent may be.  In fact I bet they've got half a dozen ways of saying the same thing.

Got my HSK 4 results today.  I missed passing by 1 point.  One, lousy point out of 300.  Needed 180 (60%) to pass and I managed to get 179.  Darn.  My daughter passed royally.  Liberally.  Extremely well.  I'm really proud of her and glad for her.
My classmate told me she's not looking at her result until after our exams, as she's also scared she fails and will go into a funk like I did, and, "now I look at you, I'm firming my resolve not to look" she said.  Good on her.  I knew I'd probably not pass, it was pretty hard, but there's a difference between REALLY not passing, and just missing it?  Or is there?  I guess one needs to pass with a comfortable margin and make sure you're prepared to do so, so there is no room for ambiguity.

Today is a wet wet wet day, pouring with rain again.  Had an awful listening class where I literally didn't understand more than 3 words of the text and the teacher had to explain what was going on 4 times before I got it.  I don't think I was the only one, hopefully I wasn't the only one.  If it's like that in the exam I'm a gonner.  Then the next hour was a Chinese dictation for a full hour of text and idioms.  I've kind of lost my oomph right now.

Trying to look on the bright side?  It may be raining, but I got home dry.  I may have failed, but I nearly passed.  And I took the exam.  And I bothered to invest 2 years in studying Chinese.   And my family sent me a gorgeous picture of them in the sunshine with blue skies, baskets full of cherries they'd been picking.  My husband reports that my son is a completely different and almost unrecognisable child now that the pressure is off him.

Did anyone else read that bit about anxiety and City Folk?

From THE ECONOMIST June 25th, Science and Technology:

Mental well-being

A New York state of mind

Urban brains behave differently from rural ones

Jun 23rd 2011 | from the print edition

Shelley contemplates urban decay

“HELL is a city much like London,” opined Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1819. Modern academics agree. Last year Dutch researchers showed that city dwellers have a 21% higher risk of developing anxiety disorders than do their calmer rural countrymen, and a 39% higher risk of developing mood disorders. But exactly how the inner workings of the urban and rural minds cause this difference has remained obscure—until now. A study just published in Nature by Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg of the University of Heidelberg and his colleagues has used a scanning technique called functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the brains of city dwellers and country bumpkins when they are under stress.

In Dr Meyer-Lindenberg’s first experiment, participants lying with their heads in a scanner took maths tests that they were doomed to fail (the researchers had designed success rates to be just 25-40%). To make the experience still more humiliating, the team provided negative feedback through headphones, all the while checking participants for indications of stress, such as high blood pressure.

The urbanites’ general mental health did not differ from that of their provincial counterparts. However, their brains dealt with the stress imposed by the experimenters in different ways. These differences were noticeable in two regions: the amygdalas and the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC). The amygdalas are a pair of structures, one in each cerebral hemisphere, that are found deep inside the brain and are responsible for assessing threats and generating the emotion of fear. The pACC is part of the cerebral cortex (again, found in both hemispheres) that regulates the amygdalas.

People living in the countryside had the lowest levels of activity in their amygdalas. Those living in towns had higher levels. City dwellers had the highest. Not that surprising, to those of a Shelleyesque disposition. In the case of the pACC, however, what mattered was not where someone was living now, but where he or she was brought up. The more urban a person’s childhood, the more active his pACC, regardless of where he was dwelling at the time of the experiment.

The amygdalas thus seem to respond to the here-and-now whereas the pACC is programmed early on, and does not react in the same, flexible way as the amygdalas. Second-to-second changes in its activity might, though, be expected to be correlated with changes in the amygdalas, because of its role in regulating them. fMRI allows such correlations to be measured.

In the cases of those brought up in the countryside, regardless of where they now live, the correlations were as expected. For those brought up in cities, however, these correlations broke down. The regulatory mechanism of the native urbanite, in other words, seems to be out of kilter. Further evidence, then, for Shelley’s point of view. Moreover, it is also known that the pACC-amygdala link is often out of kilter in schizophrenia, and that schizophrenia is more common among city dwellers than country folk. Dr Meyer-Lindenberg is careful not to claim that his results show the cause of this connection. But they might.

Dr Meyer-Lindenberg and his team conducted several subsequent experiments to check their findings. They asked participants to complete more maths tests—and also tests in which they mentally rotated an object—while investigators chided them about their performance. The results matched those of the first test. They also studied another group of volunteers, who were given stress-free tasks to complete. These experiments showed no activity in either the amygdalas or the pACC, suggesting that the earlier results were indeed the result of social stress rather than mental exertion.

As is usually the case in studies of this sort, the sample size was small (and therefore not as robust as might be desirable) and the result showed an association, rather than a definite, causal relationship. That association is, nevertheless, interesting. Living in cities brings many benefits, but Dr Meyer-Lindenberg’s work suggests that Shelley and his fellow Romantics had at least half a point.

The social side

I don't get it.  Honestly, honestly I don't.  For the second time in less than a week, I've had parents confessing to me that their daughters are having a hard time socially finding people to fit in with.  The first was last week.  Her daughter and mine "found" each other during the sailing camp they were doing, they did not know each other despite being at the same school as she's young for her year and my daughter is old for her year due to the birthday cut-off thing so they're in different grades.   The two of them spent most of the week in each others company and then sadly departed as my daughter left for Europe and her Singapore adventure.  Her mum sighed and wished it had happened earlier, as she's actually moving her daughter from school due to the fact that she's just not found like-minded kids to hang out with.

As you know, I've mentioned this a few times with respect to my daughter.  In contrast to my son who is extremely sociable and knows and is known by everyone from the headmaster to the oldest cleaner at school, she keeps a much lower profile.  She's a little shy, a little bashful.  She has a couple of friends in her class, who she socialises with when these girls' busy tutoring and extra-activity schedules allow for it, but they've never really been that close.  Her other friend here is a bit older than her, at another school and has a hugely busy social schedule which can't always fit her in.  Her last really close friend was in Spain and moved to Norway, and they occasionally email banal little messages to each other which is not the same (when they see each other they take up where they left off though).  Her idea of the ideal play date is the two of them sitting reading side by side, or playing a game, or creating a game, or painting or drawing, or digging into an atlas to find weird and wonderful and interesting places and things.

So today, I was having lunch with another couple, and they mentioned the same thing about their daughter.  Who is very similar in character to mine, albeit a few years down the line.  Her mum mentioned that although she's happy with the school, if she moved her daughter it wouldn't be about academics or anything other than having a bigger or different pool of kids for her daughter to choose from to be friends with.

I was really puzzling about this with them.  Suffice to say that the school attracts very intelligent and ambitious and competive kids.  Who have ditto parents.  We wondered if it was the fact that ability and intelligence was being measured as a function of shallow test results rather than anything deeper and more profound.  If kids with the "smarts" weren't enough for girls who were asking bigger questions, digging deeper into literature and dismissed Justin Bieber as not worth their ear time?  Is it the parents?  Perhaps further questioning and independence in thought and reading and attitude is not encouraged?  Maybe there is no time to be social?  With all the girls in question I am a 100% sure that there is no arrogance involved, rather an inability to understand where their lives and interests could coincide with those of their peers.  They seem to exist in a separate but parallel existence.

My son couldn't be more different.  He knows all the words to all the pop songs, even though they are never played at home.  He knows how every modern gadget and app works, even if we don't have them. He knows what clothes and shoes are cool and what not.  My daughter shrugs when I mention shopping and says she has enough. Or if you think so mum. 

What a luxury to have 2 kids to be able to compare and contrast.  And how lovely for them to add to the other and learn.  She supports him in the learning bit and the calmness, he supports her in getting out there and making introductions. Together they are strong.

Normally abnormal, or abnormally normal, or something

I'm supposed to be studying.  But I'm distracted.  Way distracted. This morning I've managed to study for part 1 of a 4 part dictation we're having on Tuesday.  It's taken me 3 hours to do 4 minutes and 19 seconds of dictation. Oh did I mention that in between I've managed to read the book "Buzz: a year of paying attention"?  It's probably the most helpful book I've read yet on the whole AD/HD thing.  Written as it is by a mother.  A mother who seems as distracted and trying to do her own thing while trying to do the best by her own kids as much as possible as I am.

Actually she really doesn't say anything I didn't know already, although the section on neuro-feedback was very interesting as I wasn't really up to speed with that.  But what she tells is the story of the day to day attrition that living with a kid with something like AD/HD can wear on a mother and a family.  Hence the title of normally abnormal.  In many ways our situation is WAY better than what she describes.  For one we don't have the ODD (oppositional defiance disorder). Or is it "yet", that if we continue(d) down certain paths it would come as my son is 8 and hers was 12.  Also we have the help of a helper who has been patient and loving and who will pick up the pieces when I stomp out in despair.  And, despite every and anything not being covered by medical insurance, we have enough of a financial buffer that I don't need to use the advances on writing a book, or (god forbid) writing a blog in order to pay for medical and/or other alternative treatment bills.

It does strengthen my resolve on a number of matters though.  To pursue the aerobic exercise link, the meditation link, the neuro-feedback link, the attention / Shamatha project link.  And most of all the link that says that even if just the behaviour of one person in the family is aided, it can benefit the whole.  And that one person need not be the child at risk.  If the mother works on herself, her patience, her acceptance, her behaviour, her way of coping, her stillness and being with the moment, the ripple effect can be immense.

Now back to my books.