The Misconception

When foreigners, or at least Americans from my personal experience, think of Germany, the first images that pop up in their minds are NAZIS, war, the military and a harsh, guttural and supposedly very unpleasant language.

In one of my classes where we recently discussed cultural symbols or stereotypes, one classmate said:

When I was young, my family lived in England for a few years and I went to primary school there. Even at that young age, one of the first questions all of the other kids asked me when they knew I was from Germany was, "Are you a Nazi?" We never were and never will be Nazis, and we have absolutely nothing to do with the Nazis. But I will never forget that memory.

One of the problems that is the root of stereotypes likes this is that the large majority of media, primarily films, released or made in other parts of the world outside of Germany portray and only portray scenes and events from World War II. Consequently, the majority of the public only gets to see the strict military codes, the cold, barked commands from officers (but what military doesn't bark and yell its commands?) and the cruel, merciless reality of war. And so, Germany gets less and less opportunities to elbow past the onslaught of black-and-white war films and show its true beauty to those who misconceive its image.

The taboo subject misconception. To clear this for many of you, once and for all, it is not taboo or forbidden to talk about Nazis, Hitler, the events surrounding World War II, etc. in Germany. To put this in a different perspective, it isn't taboo for Americans to talk about historical slavery or the extreme segregation in earlier centuries of the US. Nor do we want to be singly labeled as a country for those great, terrible years in which another major group of people was also treated poorly, to the point of deep shame. Talking and teaching about it helps those today understand the past mistakes and learn from them, and Germany does not censor the subject from its populations. You wouldn't want to be labeled for the mistakes of your parents, and you wouldn't want to be labeled for the mistakes of your precursors.

Germany is not all a hard, industrialized country of concrete jungles, but also miles and miles of beautiful natural land, and still and silent woods, and perfect balances of mountain and water, and breezy fields as far as the eye can see under endless blue skies. The German people may be naturally more guarded and distant on the outside, but are usually genuinely friendly and warm-spirited souls on the inside. The German language is not an ugly, churned out mash of discordant syllables, but a language with its own music, flow and timbre, as any other language, and beautiful and incredible in itself, as any other language.

You only need an open mind and open heart to see these things, and not only in the German culture, but in each and every culture in the world.

Po-ta-to, Po-tah-to

I say, "Ouch!" and you say, "Aua!"

Ouch! Aua!
Ouch! Aua!

I say, "Whoo-hoo!", you say, "Juhuu!"

Whoo-hoo! Juhuu!
Whoo-hoo! Juhuu!

(Let's call the whole thing off.)

Bobblehead Pigeons

(from The New York Times)

You know how when pigeons are on the ground walking, they invariably do the head-bob with each step, making you (me) wonder how they get by for so long without having mush for brains, worse than they already do?

Would you like to know what I have really wanted to do for a while now, especially being in yet another European city where they run rampant?

I want to do an experiment where one puts a small brace on a pigeon's head, and then see if it can keep walking or not. Nothing to hurt the poor, stupid beast, mind you. Just enough to see if the two factors are linked -- and if so, to what degree.

Oh, I've so been wanting to try.

'Burgweh - Daylight

As of today, 21 June, the first day of summer, the sun rises over Regensburg at 5:07 AM and sets in the evening at 9:20 PM. And that's not including the fact that there is still daylight fading away over the horizon at 10:15 PM.


As far as daylight goes, Nashville is pretty much the netherworld by around 8:00 PM, not even with fading light, regardless of how long the longest day of summer is supposed to be.

*sigh*.

Maybe if this city just wasn't so beautiful, I wouldn't miss it like this.

I Have My Sources...

A small revelation from the past year is that having capabilities in more than one language leads to the ability to extract more information on the same topic from multiple Wikipedia articles written in those different languages.

Notes on Jane's Math Comment

In continuing the answers to Jane's comment on the aforementioned post's aforementioned post,

How's chinese math different? I'm very curious...

There are many ways in the past in which I've tried math in both the methods taught to me by teachers in school, and the way they were taught to me by my family at home. The latter, I must say, was almost always faster or more efficient.

Let's take the multiplication table as one example. Children in America are taught to memorize:

Mult. Fact	Spoken Translation
4 x 7 = 28	"Four times seven is twenty-eight"
4 x 8 = 32	"Four times eight is thirty-two"
4 x 9 = 36	"Four times nine is thirty-six"

Anyone who is an English native-speaker can speak up if you learned your multiplication tables differently.

Children in China are taught to memorize:
(Note: It also literally takes less time to speak any Chinese number than its English counterpart. At least in my opinion.)

Mult. Fact	Spoken Translation
4 x 7 = 28	"Four seven twenty-eight" si-qi-ershiba
4 x 8 = 32	"Four eight twenty-four" si-ba-sanshisi
4 x 9 = 36	"Four nine thirty-six" si-jiu-sanshiliu

Fun fact: Shanghainese syllables are usually even shorter than Mandarin Chinese ones ;) .

Funner fact: All of the multiplication facts that have single-digit answers in Chinese are so short that the syllable "de" is added after the first two numbers as a placement "equals to" syllable, so as to remain consistent with the rhythm of the rest of the chart.

As for that, this form of memorization is designed to be very rhythmic and can almost be chanted. Considering the correlation between music and memory, I'd say that turns out to be a useful factor.


Let's take item counting now.

From personal observation alone, I generally see more people in Western countries who, when faced with a large number of the same item (basket of apples, dinner table of people, etc.), typically tend to point to every object individually and count by ones.

From personal observation alone, when I watched members of my family counting heads at a family reunion or whether there were enough leaf-wrapped rice cakes in the giant steamer to go around, everything was always counted by either 2's, 3's or even 4's. Often that involves pointing not with one finger, but with 2, 3 or the whole hand at once. That sounds confusing if you've never done that, but it comes remarkably naturally when you've done it since you were a child. When it comes to a mass of objects, it's illogical and completely inefficient to count by ones.

Even when it comes to small things in masses, where it becomes hard to eyeball groups, I instinctively separate them out by groups of 3's, and 4's if I can manage.


(Is this a really beautiful picture of M&M's or what?)
In addition, there are countless (haha) other methods regarding both basic and advanced math where the Chinese form is simply more... efficient. I always got some feeling like Western math was more based on rules in which one could come to a type of answer, whereas Asian math seems to assume more often that each kind of solution will naturally require its own fastest method, and therefore, it's stupid to try and waste time applying one thing's method to another, regardless of how fast it works in its natural element.

Anyone who speaks English at all can speak up if all that made no sense.

The Polyglot's Division - Further Notes

My friend Jane posted this comment on -this post- a few days ago:

I'm actually surprised you think in english more than chinese. I would've thought it was the other way around, but I guess after hearing your little brothers talk (when they were little :p) I should've realized it would at least be split evenly between the two.

I have thought a little about this. Here's what I think may be the case, at least partially.

I have an immensely good grasp of Shanghainese (the Chinese dialect that we speak at home, and the one Jane is referring to). But as often as we speak it, and as much as I love it, it is essentially the home-language. It's my family-language. I mean that not just in the sense of heritage, but specifically within my household of six people.

Everyone has their own family-language, used with close family and virtually no one else. The only big difference here is that your family-language and the language that you speak with others in your day to day life might be the same worldly language (say, English for most Americans, for example), whereas mine happen to be different.

I predict the reason I don't formulate many of my thoughts in Shanghainese is because the majority of my personal thoughts are things that I wouldn't share with my family. It's not that they are bad, taboo or secretive. It's that there are certain themes and topics that would fall on deaf ears if I ever brought them up at the dinner table. My parents have always adapted well but never related well to overall current American culture, or at least the modern culture that my brothers and I are growing up in. My brothers are too young to understand most of the theories and principles I would discuss (the oldest isn't even out of middle school). And if both my parents and brothers fall into this category of not being able to understand philisophical or creative ideas that run through my mind, you can imagine how much hope my grandmother has. (You're fabulous, Grandma, but the answer is none.)

In part, I might simply lack the vocabulary for these thoughts, because they are never brought up at home. In a greater part, my mind matches up every language to its corresponding culture without (and indeed, often ignoring) conscious effort, and when one culture has the wrong influence or none at all on another one, the languages consequently don't overlap or mix.

But don't worry, Shanghainese. English ain't got nothin' on a hella lot of what you can express.

Another Rainy Day Stranger

This will be a long post, but I try to limit the number of those, so I'm not too bothered.


Ha Tien is a tiny, Asian restaurant - and restaurant is a generously large term - merely down the street and 'round the corner from my dorm. I go there all the time when I'm in a hurry, low on refrigerator ingredients, or feel the need to get extra protein in my diet without spending the time or money on supermarket meat. Ha Tien is also a cheap but good eat, which means that my name is probably written somewhere on the outside of the restaurant. In bold.

As I am often wont to do, I planned to order a big bowl of noodles (big = dinner tonight + lunch tomorrow) and take the spoils of the kill back to my room to feast in the darkness of my cave. When I ordered, there was one other guy eating in near the opposite wall from the door. I glanced over as he munched a spring roll and I wondered about this other person who was eating alone on Friday night. I paid for my order and left, but as I got to my dorm, I had this sudden desire to reach out to someone else tonight. Someone I don't already know, I guess.

I went back in and tugged out a stool from the table he was sitting at. I set down my box of noodles and said hi. There's absolutely nothing to lose in these situations. He was likewise very nonchalant about it, and said hello back to me. I smiled back and bluntly said, Company, you know. He nodded and took another spoonful of his noodle soup. We asked each others names and began talking, talking about whatever.

Seba(stian) is fairly tall, probably near 6'4". He has a head of light brown, curly hair. Almost like a Jew-fro. But it looks nice, because it's not a careless, tousled mess of curly. He has some facial hair of the same color, scraggly but also neatly trimmed. I don't really know what color his eyes are. Seba is handsome in face, though lanky, and walks with a strange gait, like his legs are trying to reach a little further than his body can get to in one stride. Seba is not a big smiler, but he doesn't make you uncomfortable, and when he does laugh, it's a pleasure to see.

Seba works and lives about an hour outside of Regensburg, but at the end of the work week, he likes to spend the weekends here because it's more fun and there's more to do. Seba's from way south, near the German-Austrian border, in Oberbayern.

Seba and I agree to walk to the Jahninsel/island on the river and see if the music fest has started up in spite of the rain. We talk about accents while we are on the bridge. He asks if I've picked up any of the local accent (Baierisch!), and if I often do the accent from my home area for fun (American southern! No!) . Seba and I joke about the final essays that I have to write, that he wrote years ago. Seba looks around 28-34, but it's hard to say because people also stay in school much longer here (some of my friends at the Uni are that age). Seba and I walk around on the bridge and scope the festival going on below. A few scattered crowds huddle just in front of the stages or under the bridge's archways. The entry fee is €4 . We shrug and don't bother going in today.

We head back into the main city and eventually go our separate ways again. Seba says he'll follow the gradual stream of people in gaudy, plaid, baggy shin pants to what he predicts is a Bad Taste party. I laugh and wish him luck. We shake hands in parting, he asks my name once more, and wish each other a good evening. I turn down a side alley to go back home. Seba turns and continues down the street with his strange gait, presumably to arrive eventually at a party with many badly dressed people.

Shore to Shore

"Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides."

~ Rita Mae Brown

The Polyglot's Division

Since I both grew up multilingual and have learned additional languages as well, others have often asked me what language I think in. But as it were, this changes depending on the case.

To cover a few examples (in thought only, does not include conversation with others) --

English:

• frequently default
• primary language for speaking to myself, but not always
• expressing most concepts, ideas, principles, esp. philosophically, etc.
• my largest vocabulary is in English
• occasional counting, but not calculating

German:

• is not primary, but often takes over much personal thought - probably from being here
• though not default, used exclusively and heavily for phrases that are alien to the other languages

Chinese (Shanghainese):

• cooking - When thinking and planning as I cook, almost all ingredients, utensils and processes are in Shanghainese in my brain as long as I have the vocabulary, because virtually all of my cooking skills have been learned from my mother.
• (shopping for groceries)
• expressing thoughts that are easily understood by an Eastern mentality or perspective, but which are difficult or distorted for a Western one
• mathematics - Chinese numbers are very efficient. Due to a much higher focus on mathematics and faster calculation in East Asian education systems than in Western ones, the overall mental method that one is trained to use in Chinese education is also much more efficient. I was raised in America but coached on math homework by a Chinese family.
• Other personal thoughts generally not covered by English

Chinese (Mandarin):

• used infrequently or just for fun, because I can speak the dialect but did not grow up using it often

And in case you don't frequently read my blogs, I actively dream and sleep-talk in all of the above.

Thought of the Week - Change

"Man, I have all this change... it's making my wallet bulge. I should go get some more gela-- NO!! No! I will NOT spend my change on more gelato! No! Bad! I will not eat more gelato! I will go down to the post office and use change to buy stamps to send postcards that will NOT make me become one big, round, rolling gelato scoop! Buy stamps!!! Resist gelato!!!"

Venticello

Sometimes, if the wind is right and I happen to stick my head out the window, the wonderful smell of garlic, herbs and Italian cooking wafts up to me from the two Italian restaurants on the square just by my street.

Mmmmmm....

I Spy

Sometimes while I'm walking on the street, I don't feel as if I'm being watched, but rather, recognized. Regensburg is certainly big enough that you only may or may not run into people you actually know on the street, but it's also small enough that there are certain strangers in the population who I definitely recognize by face now. I predict that we simply have frequently crossing routes in our daily lives. In my mind, I say hello to the people who sometimes get on the same buses as me on some days of the week.

(On a side note, there are even several people I recognize now because I recognize their dogs. One of them, for example, is a lean, tan-orange dog whose front right paw sticks out at a funny angle and he limps a bit. Another is a mixed white dog with brown patches who has funny and almost bunny-like ears that I can recognize instantly. Very noticeable dogs. In my mind, they are named Lean Tan-Orange Funky Leg Dog and Mostly White Bunny Ears Dog, respectively. In my mind, I wave hello to them.)

I imagine, If I can recognize them, then what would keep anyone from recognizing me, too?

In addition, we will consider the fact that I am Asian, which already brings me out in the general crowd here. Unless you would like to use the stereotype that all people of one general race all look the same as your argument. (Yeah, thanks. I must admit that I don't feel so bad about it because to me, all white people with vaguely brown-ish hair look precisely the same to me. Damn, but how I hope for the day when I can finally tell them all apart.)

In addition to that, we will also consider that I frequently practice juggling and poi in certain locations around the main city when the weather is nice outside.

A non-tourist, juggling, striped-sock-spinning Asian.

... If I can recognize random people here, they have got to be recognizing me. Case rested.

Flop-Flip

Yesterday I changed my Google Mail and Calendar back into English because, unfortunately, some functions are not yet available in German.

Thus I find that I've actually felt a bit weirded out for the last two days, reading all of it in English. I've been so used to having it in German for over a year now.

(Words are so much shorter :P ! )