or how / why you should learn Mandarin. Yes the title is gratuitous, but it will land me higher on google.

How to:

1. Learn Logograms: they aren’t as frightening as you might think. The easiest way to remember them is to make up a bogus story based upon etymology (much like remembering people’s names). The following book suggests just such an approach – though written for Japanese instruction, the book teaches only meanings, not pronounciation. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the method it’s easily ported to Mandarin:



I first read it when studying Japanese many years ago. The author advocates using character radicals to construct personalized meanings for hard to remember words, since the vast majority of Chinese logograms are combinations of three-dozen or so basic symbols. For exampled, I learned 洽谈 (qia4tan2; “hold talks / discussion”) as “flowing (water) contracts and fire.” Obviously, during all negotiations we want our contracts to be flexible, but also to get our way through fiery speech. Or it’s possible to simply do a visual association – when I first learned 高 (gao1, “high; up”) I decided that it looked like an alien sitting in a ufo that was high above the ground. Yes it is stupid, but it works.

2. Speak: tones aren’t so bad (they lie, there are actually at least 6 or 7 ‘tones’ in normal Mandarin, if you consider the idiosyncratic multi-word tone changes); I find the best way is to try to memorize them within each character, and try to divorce yourself from relying on Pinyin notation. That being said, if you speak *fast* enough, no one will really care, since context will usually carry the day. It’s at least a valid method of walking before running.

More importantly, speaking Chinese often will give your face an extensive workout. I find that this is underemphasized in language instruction – allow your mouth to take on unusual shapes. With Chinese, move your tongue back slightly as the starting point, and then find out how to produce the sounds properly.

But why would we want to learn Chinese?

1. To sell fake American antiques to our gullible Chinese overlords after the invasion and subsequent occupation.*

That’s the most compelling reason i can think of. Furthermore, Mandarin is only really spoken by a couple hundred million or so people in Northeast China – a really boring place, thanks to the cultural revolution. Down in the South, where the interesting stuff is they all speak some bumpkin-local-dialect, which bears about as much resemblance as to the mother tongue as French does to German. And even though Chinese is become important in business and academia, most of the people who will be willing to do business / academe with you probably already speak English. Go learn something useful, like mathematics or poetry.

* A more comprehensive analysis of geopolitical realities puts China’s rise ‘past’ the US well beyond 2040, blithely assuming no major roadblocks (of which there are potentially many).

Anyone want to work in China? The newspapers here are always looking for English ‘proofers’ of stories that are translated / created specifically for the foreign branches of state media. They are needed to avoid the following:

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It’s come to my attention (via that liberal rag) that there may yet live heirs of the Qing, the last Imperial Dynasty. Rather, there are still a few native Manchu speakers living somewhere in Heilongjiang province. Manchurian calligraphy is gorgeous, and their historical significance isn’t too shabby either – in that abstract cultural sense.

I’m going to find them. More to come.

You can make one here. I could start using it as an email sig – and flood everyone’s inbox with useless graphics. Excellent.

A very nice dictionary, featured at www.nciku.com – you can even use your mouse to draw and find characters, so long as you can reasonably approximate the stroke order. Combined with pinyin input and autocompletion of terms, it’s at least as useful as the more expensive electronic dictionaries.

It’s also interesting how amazingly simple it is to text using a ten-button input (the numbers on your phone) in Asian languages. There’s got to be a doctoral dissertation out there regarding combinatorics and inputs in different language families – paradoxically, it seems harder to program predictive algorithms for Western languages. In this circumstance there’s a large tradeoff between phonetic complexity given limited signals (Chinese) and average word usage (? English ?). More investigation required.

Anarcho-capitalism in Chinese: 无政资注意 (wu3zheng2zi1zhu3yi1). Maybe. It’s my best guess at an abbreviation right now. Try it out at your next cocktail party. If that fails, use:  自由放任注意 (zi4you2fang2ren4zhu3yi1) = laissez-faire. If you’re in infiltration mode, try 专家朱国 (zhuan1jia1zhu4guo2 (technocrat).

In my trade / finance course here, I’ve been learning vocabulary to describe why central planning largely failed (lack of incentives, hippies, etc etc). I don’t have the vocabulary yet to broach the Socialist Calculation Debate. I wonder if Chinese economists have had any major contributions. I suppose there’s an argument that they took the critique seriously, and created a big market to guide planning activity – though as far as I can tell, the motivation was much more pragmatic.