好冷, 雨好大, 风好大: Bleak Days

Good cold, rain good big, wind good big: This more or less sums up the weather over the past week and a half in Shenzhen. My vacation has, of course, been relatively dull by most standards, but it seems my decision to celebrate the days off in the nerdiest way possible has been a profitable one. With China experiencing the worst winter in, some say, fifty years, transportation has been largely shut down--many routes northward from my southern province of Guangdong are either closed or too dangerous for travel. So, unlike many I know, my vacation plans carried through more or less exactly as planned, though colder, wetter and gloomier than I'd hoped.

My tutor and I met each day from the 2nd through to the 8th, and if I didn't get everything I wanted out of the 40+ hours of lessons, I at least got a great deal of practice in. My tutor, hired just for the week, had difficulty grasping the idea of forming new words from the hanzi I already know (now around 400 that I can use well) and her idea of "useful" language differs from mine rather significantly. Much of this is just due to a certain inflexibility built into the Chinese mindset. Their mindset is often incredibly immediate, and they can sometimes miss the forest for the trees. For example, she complained that she couldn't teach me 天气 (tian qi, or weather), since I couldn't write the character 冷 (leng, cold) by hand and since to her mind the only good, useful sentence to learn regarding the weather at the time really was, "The weather is too cold." That I might be able to use a sentence like "The weather is warmer this week" apparently didn't occur to her.

By the third day of classes, though, she did start giving me some new words and phrases, and she proved remarkably dedicated to the lessons, often going well over time to compensate for the time we spoke English. And the practice of just speaking constantly, going over the same sentence patterns again and again have made some formerly difficult constructions much more comfortable. In Mandarin, conditional statements almost always follow a "If . . . then . . . " form, and it used to be difficult for me to remember to say "then," but it's much easier to recall now. More importantly, I've finally gotten comfortable with the Mandarin version of our "Because . . . " sentence; in the Mandarin, you have to say both "because" and "so"--"Because I didn't sleep well, so I'm tired"--a construction I struggled with just two weeks ago.

The new phrases I did pick up seem remarkably useful ones. For instance, a set phrase "意想不到" is used to indicate something as surprising, so I can now say, "意想不到, 在中国我学习knitting" ("Surprisingly, in China, I study knitting."), though I still have to learn to word for knitting. I also picked up a new hanzi, 被, which I don't understand yet, but which is apparently the key to forming passive voice in Mandarin. So, though I may still speak like a five-year-old, I'm at least making some progress.

All around, then, the vacation has been good. I did get to celebrate a few nights and spend some time with friends, of which I'll write more later. Had the weather not been so absolutely miserable, or were Shenzhen apartments better constructed for cold weather, I might be able to say the vacation was fantastic. Six to ten degrees Celsius isn't that miserably cold, but when it's accompanied by a steady drizzle, wind, and no central heating, it makes for a rough time. I'm optmistically anticipating the day when I don't have to wear a jacket, scarf and two pairs of socks indoors, and the next day I can take a shower without seeing my own breath may well be the happiest day in my life.