High in the Chinese Hills...

This is my favourite Chinese poem, "To Tan-Ch'iu" by Li Po aka Li Bai 李白 † 762. Translated by Arthur Whaley:


My friend is lodging high in the Eastern Range,

Dearly loving the beauty of valleys and hills.

At green Spring he lies in the empty woods,

And is still asleep when the sun shines on high.

A pine-tree wind dusts his sleeves and coat;

A pebbly stream cleans his heart and ears.

I envy you, who far from strife and talk

Are high-propped on a pillow of blue cloud.


A little film. Highly Chinese. Highly entertaining. Worth a look if you've 10 mins to spare. Chinese, English subtitles. Includes more of Li Bai's poetry:



Incidentally the "star of Venus" 白星, after which Li Bai was named, literally means "white star" so the poet's given name, Bai (Li being the surname) really means white or clear. A lot of his poems are "celestial" in theme.

Anyone who speaks fluent Mandarin might like to watch a 40-minute documentary on my random blog, here. I think it will be quite some time before I have any hope of following this link ;-)

Here's a Burmese Poem, The Emerald Lake:
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Burmese/literature/Poetry/Mrakan.htm

Burmese Poem: Emerald Lake:
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Burmese/literature/Poetry/Mrakan.htm

Burmese short story (also in English): http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Burmese/literature/Short_Stories/Ma_Le

我学会说中文

FOR £35 I obtained the best budget book+CDs language course I have encountered in all my years of linguistic dabbling. And best of all, she teaches characters along with the pinyin Europeanized text, so I'm writing Chinese right from the word go (去).

The author, Liz Scurfield, has 40 years' experieince teaching Chinese and is full of the kind of tips a westerner, who's slogged away at the language would be full of, but a native speaker who learned Chinese from the cradle would have a hard time explaining. E.g. to get the high rising tone, just raise your eyebrows as you speak. Works every time.

So I'm now very happy. Fun without drugs. Well... with fewer drugs, if the truth be told.

But hey, I'm au fait with Chinese computer imput already.

The following is my efforts at replicating lesson one's dialogue into simplified characters. I tapped it all in myself, from scratch, without highlighting and lifting texts from elsewhere, as I was limited to doing in Japanese. (I've not the faintest idea how the Japanese manage to input their language...)

This is a dialogue between Mr Li 李先生 and Mr Wang, 王先生. Wang means King, and it's the same motif inside the box which means "kingdom" 囯。Isn't that funky. There's plenty of rhyme and reason behind Chinese (especially rhyme).

李：王先生你好？ How are you Mr Wang?
王：李先生你好？ How are you Mr Li?
李：请坐。 Do sit down.
王：谢谢。 Many thanks.
李：请喝咖啡。 Do have some coffee.
王：谢谢，我不喝咖啡。 Thank you. I don't drink coffee.
李：那么中国茶行不行？ Well would Chinese tea be OK with you?
王：行谢谢你。我很喜欢喝中国茶。Yes thank you. I'm exceedingly fond of China tea.

If I can't get into that course in Germany I wanted to do, and provided I sell over ten million books (you need an eight-figure bank account to pay UK tuition fees, thanks to our kindly Tory government). I could opt instead to get a double first in Chinese and Japanese from Cambridge or Oxford. This could well cost me £30,000 in tuition fees alone (as opposed to about £3000 in Germany.) Cambridge only allow study of two Oriental tongues if you can demonstrate a high level of competency in at least one when you apply. I am nothing if not ambitious, so if I want to do this, I shall. The great thing about Oxbridge uni courses is you get to read loads and loads of lovely literary and historical texts. Unlike the more modern degree where you spend all day in a language lab pretending to give a presentation on Honda cars...

...If me and ambitious seem as congruous as Pope and Buddhist, by the way, then you certainly don't know me! You only know my depressed self. And all too many people ~ even some fairly close friends, unfortunately fall into that category ...

I must run. The local Greek shop has mysterious melted cheese-stuffed loaves and I must grab one before the local babushkas get 'em all...

Wasted Monday...

... NOT THAT THAT WASN'T UTTERLY FORSEEABLE.

My Friend in Need (and a "friend in need is a friend indeed") came round yet again and scuppered my plans for the entire day.

I made my displeasure very clear by ranting for about an hour and a half. I told him I had no interest in heroin whatsoever and was only into disappearing into town on my own with no drugs.

He wanted heroin (and crack). I told him all the heroin was rubbish. Crack is always rubbish because it's cocaine and cocaine is inherently crap. Like many drug addicts I used coke as pharmaceutical sugar to sweeten up my heroin. On its own ~ to me at least ~ it is and was an almighty waste of time. But he wanted to smoke crack in my house as well.

I said I wasn't doing this unless he bought me two £20 deals. In the end I backed down and settled for one £20 of crack and bought half a gram of heroin. The gram cost £40, which is over the odds, was at least 20% short (but I sold my old scales to a dealer ~ I so enjoyed weighing things on them. Not just drugs (which, surprisingly weren't underweight as often as I had previously supposed) but anything tiny and cute I could get my hands on ~ dead ladybirds, paperclips... drug wrappers... (when my late friend Lucky bought an ounce of "B" some years ago, the wrapping alone (cut-off black binbag plastic) weighed 0.3g) etc etc. These were the ordinary digital scales used for silver and gold, which weigh down to a tenth of a gram (one "point") ~ not diamond scales, which would go down at least to 2mg (a hundredth of a carat, which is also called a point).

Anyway anyway I didn't go into town. Didn't get my whizzy Mandarin (but I did purchase a tangerine from the corner shop instead ~ ho-ho!).

Also just to annoy me, I checked and re-checked the prospectus I was looking at in Deutschland and Chinese isn't in all editions. I cannot tell which edition it's in, as I'm limited to online versions with no copyright dates. So I was forced to email their office lamenting how "verwirrt" (confused) I was, though I'm not sure I selected quite the appropriate word under the circumstances... and would they please clarify the matter. I've yet to receive any reply, which shocked me as I believed the Germans had an unrivalled reputation for efficiency.

Anyway I SHALL speak fluent Chinese whether higher education comes into the question or not. Plus Russian, because I am now determined to read Dead Souls (not as gruesome as it sounds, the dead souls refer to a kind of 19th century identity theft) and Anna Karenina in their original русский.

In readiness for all this I've already set my computer to type in Cyrillic (which will involve learning to type from scratch as the Russian letters don't sit on keys corresponding to their Latin equivalents (unlike, eg, the Greek keyboard). Instead of QWERTY my whizzy Russian keypad goes ЙЦУКЕН (Y, TS, U, K, E N) ~ highly confusing. A "Russian phonetic" layout does exist, which corresponds to qwerty (so Д (D) is on the D-key). But Windows 7 doesn't support it.

The Pinyin Chinese is lots of fun. E.g. if I tap in feng I get 风 (the character I wanted, it's the (simplified) feng of fēng shuǐ 风水, which says "wind-water"...) ... other fengs are: 封 逢 缝 蜂 丰 冯 枫 or 疯! It's actually dead easy to use so I'm looking forward to lots of fun with Chinese.

With heroin I am more seethingly furious than ever before. I am not particularly happy with my "friend in need" either...

I must ping into London today to get these books as a tube strike kicks in at 7pm tonight, after which the entire town shall plunge into chaos...

Eating eating eating me alive!

STUPIDLY I went and downloaded the most up-to-date PDF Broschüre for the course I have set my heart on.
I hate setting my heart on anything, because I might not get it. But I've set my heart on this. The desire to do it is eating me up inside. In fact I feel like I'm festooned with army ants and being eaten alive. I feel like a hydrogen bomb inside me is about to detonate at any moment.

This is what they say about the languages on offer, re the application process:

3.2 Zulassungsvoraussetzungen
Für das Bachelorstudium besteht in den Sprachen Englisch, Französisch, Spanisch eine Zulassungsbeschränkung (Numerus clausus). Der NC-Wert ergibt sich für jedes Semester neu aufgrund der freien Studienplätze, der Abiturnoten, der Wartezeiten und der Anzahl der BewerberInnen. Eine Vorhersage über die für das jeweilige Zulassungsverfahren geltenden Grenzwerte kann daher nicht getroffen werden.
Als Zugangsvoraussetzungen für das Studium am FTSK sind neben der allgemeinen Hochschulreife oder einem äquivalenten ausländischen Abschluss fundierte Kenntnisse in Deutsch als Fremdsprache, Englisch, Französisch und Spanisch und Grundkenntnisse in Chinesisch erforderlich, falls diese Sprachen als Fächer gewählt werden.
Genaue Informationen zu den Eingangsvoraussetzungen für alle Sprachen entnehmen Sie bitte den Merkblättern der einzelnen Sprachen, die Sie auf der Seite http://www.fb06.uni-mainz.de/261.php finden.

Well I have to read it in German ~ so can you!!

To summarize, English, French and Spanish ~being so highly popular, are subject to entry restrictions in numbers. Being as English is my mother tongue and the only language over which I feel I have some genuine mastery, I don't have much choice in the matter. But I can avoid French by not applying for it, and doing Russian instead, as I've already decided. Some basic knowledge of Chinese is required. So I'm determined to trounce the other students by achieving A Level standard (or higher) before I even start.
As you cannot fail to have noticed, I have a genuine fascination for Chinese characters. I already know about 2-300. If I could multiply this by a factor of ten, I'd have a pretty good basic reading knowledge in Chinese.

I couldn't find any entry restrictions or requirements for Russian, but would feel compelled to reach at least GCSE (lower school certificate) level, simply to underline my interest (and distinguish myself from the vulgar hoardes I'll be up against in the application process). The greatest novelists of all time wrote in Russian ~ Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Turgenyev, Pasternak... imagine how amazing it would be to read those in the original?!

My biggest worry of all doesn't concern waiting lists because I'm English or beating others at Chinese: it's the German language test to which I'll be subjected. I tried on before on the Goethe Institut website (admittedly when my German was clagged up with 18-years of unpractised rust) and got a dreadful score.

As I shall point out, not having a teacher here, I have focused my energies on acquiring a passive reading vocabulary. And it's working amazingly. The novel I'm reading, Seegrund, which means Lake-Bed is a thriller about a dead body found... you guessed it. In a pool of blood in the snow on the banks of a frozen lake. I was astonished to comprehend the words for river-bank (das Ufer) and corpse (die Leiche) ~ both of which I've picked up and remembered in the past couple of months. So you see reading books and keeping my amateurish German blog has got me somewhere after all. There are many expressions for which I know two or three words in German, just as I do in English. I get a real sense of achievement from this. Especially as I DROPPED OUT of a languages degree in the early 90s in disgrace and despair, convinced I would never achieve any degree of mastery over German, let alone any other tongue. Somehow, amazingly, the magic has happened.

I think my turning point came one night as I listened to BBC World Service radio. I realized that across the world there are millions of people who have never set foot on Anglophone soil, who have learned to speak our language fluently by following radio broadcasts and slogging their way through English literature, dictionary in hand, referring and re-referring constantly to every word they're not entirely sure about. So I did this and look! I'm seriously considering applying to uni in Deutschland. How amazing is that. Six months ago I wouldn't even have been able to read the prospectus...
Well enough of my babbles.

It's 5:34. The clocks went back last night, meaning darkness now falls not long after 4pm. It's dead romantic ~ like a Siberian goods train yard full of onion-picking babushkas, with immigrant workers hiding in the cattle trucks smoking Cyrillic cigarettes and babbling away in Chinese. (I must fit the two new languages into this silly fantasy.) German, Russian and Chinese are also, of course languages of the former Communist Block. Life behind the Iron
Curtain has long held an enduring fascination for me. That was a big reason why I so loved German doing at school. When I started the A-level course Germany was separated by 200 yards of watch-towers, searchlights and tripwired minefields. By the time I actually sat the exams the wall had come tumbling down and a new world order was upon us.

What the future world order shall bring, I shudder to think. It's capitalism capitalism capitalism everywhere. I'm a capitalist, but I see excesses everywhere. And greed is not always good, despite what Gordon Gecko would have us believe.
Anyway I must ping. I wonder if anyone actually read this post to the end? If so, I commend you with a 金奖章 jīn jiǎngzhāng ~ a gold medal!



PS Here's an entertainment for you: the oldest recording JRR Tolkien, author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, et al... he appears in this early English Linguaphone course in units 13 "the wireless" and 20 "at the tobacconist's"! What a blast from the past. (He was well into his "pipe-weed" as anyone who's seen the films will know...)

Link: Sprache, Kultur und Translation - Chinesisch

中文明天 Chinese Tomorrow

WHY OH WHY OH WHY is the desire to speak Chinese eating me alive?
I can tell you why: because I'm obsessive-compulsive anyhow + I'm an addict + I'm desperately fixating on this because I can tell you from experience that immersing myself in foreign language is the only brain-switching off technique I've found so far that in any way compares to heroin. I get a high off writing fiction, too, but that's more like crack. A switching on, rather than switching off. And I don't want heroin. Or crack. I wanna educate myself. I've followed BBC Chinese classes on late night television and had no problem with the language. It is far, far easier than German ~ which might sound counter-intuitive. But you have to bear in mind German is an inflexional language, which means lots of information that can only be presented in tabular form. Asian languages require no such grammar tables, because words never change. (E.g. you never have to conjugate a verb.) Once you know the right words, and know the word-order, you just slam them together and hey-presto, you're communicating.
I've looked all over the internet for free Mandarin lessons, but what's there is very scrappy. I'm after an in-depth immersive course. I am willing to spend £60 or more on books and CDs. That £60 would only get blown on heroin if I didn't buy books, so I'm not being quite as extravagant as I might sound.
Mr "I want some heroin" DID indeed show up today and the stuff was such rubbish I injected half a gram in one go and was still walking. Half a gram of decent heroin would have most people blue in the face and not breathing if you injected it direct in a vein in 10 seconds. I am utterly fed up of this drug. Even when it's "strong" I can't really feel it. I have overdosed several times and even an overdose I would rate as 4/10 on a scale of how strong drugs can feel. On this scale crack would score an 8 or 9, ketamine a 9 and LSD (in brain-frying doses) a 10. Ketamine and acid are literally so strong that on a full-on trip you don't know who you are, where you are, cannot understand what anybody is saying, cannot perform the simplest of tasks (e.g. getting a key in a door). I once visited a 24 hour garage on acid to buy food and beverages for other assorted tripheads. The shop was fully open and for some reason the guy working there had decided to tip all the biscuits off the shelves and on the floor. Literally all I could see was custard creams and chocolate digestives in psychedelic peaks and valleys kaleidescoping on for ever and ever. I returned home with something pink, something yellow and something green. I had no idea what they were (drinks, biscuits, something...), but the colours looked amazing.
I can't believe I'm actually sharing this information with the world. I can't believe I ever got into drugs of any type. I can't believe I've had conversations with my own family about needle exchanges and hepatitis testing.
Sometimes I still can't believe I'm a heroin addict at all. How on earth did I end up in this ridiculous situation? Drugs are ridiculous. I am ridiculous. I am also very fed up. On Monday morning first thing I'm fleeing to the bookshops of central London where I shall indulge this alternative new fixation of mine. I don't care how sad anyone thinks it is. Nothing is as sad as being hooked on heroin.

I can't read aloud any of those characters 中文明天 I put up top, but am already familiar with all four from Japanese. The last one means the sky 天国 says "tengoku", which means "the Kingdom of Heaven" or "paradise" in Japanese. For some reason that was my favourite word ...





PS 中文明天 says "Chinese (language) tomorrow" (zhōngwén míngtiān) in Chinese; the same phrase in Japanese is 中国語明日 (chūgokugo ashita) though you'd actually say something more like 明日の中国語 (ashita-no chūgokugo) "the Chinese language of tomorrow) or 明日に中国語 (ashita-ni chūgokugo) "tomorrow-in Chinese language" (Japanese love putting things the wrong way round) ~ all of which throws to the four winds the notion that the Chinese and Japanese express like ideas in the same characters ~ because they obviously don't!

PPS if you want to read an article that chimes in with most of my own views on the German language, expressing them better than I ever could, click here

Where there's a will there's a way...

I AM STILL DEAD SET on doing this uni course. The prospectus says you can choose an A-language (your mother tongue, in my case English); the B-language would automatically be German. These two languages you learn to translate into and out of (written translation; interpreting the spoken word is another skill entirely and you can't do it at home in pajamas, so I'm not into that...). Translating INTO a foreign language is a tall order, so I need to get as far beyond my A-level German as possible. They say they have 800 students with mother tongue English on these courses (Bachelor and Masters), so to get in I will need to distinguish myself as much as I possibly can. The C-language can be any one of: Chinese, French, Italian, Modern Greek, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish. This language you translate out of, into your mother tongue ie Chinese to English. I would luuurve to speak Chinese, it's one of my life goals (as well as Japanese, which isn't on the syllabus). The D-language, which is entirely optional you don't learn to translate, you just learn it. The choices are: French, Italian, Modern Greek, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish (note Chinese isn't there). Originally I would have gone for French, which I already have A-level (higher school certificate) in.

Having banged on ~ quite truthfully, of course ~ about WHERE THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A WAY in my previous post, I realized I was limiting myself by present circumstance and convenience. If I could have a magic wand waved over my head and speak fluent French, Italian, Greek, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish or Russian ~ I'd actually choose Russian.

So Chinese and Russian it is. And I don't see why I should compromise.

So I'm on a hunt for Linguaphone courses in Russian and Chinese. I need to get as fluent as I possibly can before applying. If learning those two from scratch simultaneously sounds a tall order, just bear in mind it's what I'd be doing at uni anyhow ~ if I can prove I've done it myself, at home with no teacher, just CDs and books, and if I can get my German as fluent as I possibly can, this will stand hugely in my favour when I apply.

I'm not too worried about having to account for my lost years. Nobody is owed an explanation for my life and I can justifiably claim ill-health.

You see I'm working to convince myself here, not you, but if you have any comments I'd be glad to hear them.

I wouldn't expect even to apply until this time next year at the absolutely earliest. Interviews for college places are generally held the following spring (2011). And I wouldn't be able to start until October 2011. This feels very fast. I cannot really envisage myself commencing until the year 2012. And as I say, for a course like this, which is obviously going to attract the crème de la crème (nobody leaving the British educational system at 18 would have German good enough to go straight to a course like this, unless they had German family or some other advantage ~ the standard of language tuition in this country is abysmally low...

... so these are my thoughts for today. Hope I haven't bored y'all too much ...!


PS My apologies for having visited NONE of you for AGES. Until my goblin-nibbled cable replacement comes I'm limited to half-hour dashes at the local internet café...

I want to get qualified

DO ANY OF YOU REMEMBER the language course I found in Germany that I was banging on about some months ago? It's the only course on the face of the earth that I actually want to do, because unlike a straight language degree it's actually a course in TRANSLATION, so it would qualify me to do something I know I'd be good at.

Plus I could study German and two other languages.

If you're reading this on American soil, you need to bear in mind that European university courses are always specialist honours degrees. There's no "major" as such. You do a degree in English or law or physiology or whatever with little scope to "read" much else. Which was part of my problem before. I had too many interests...

Last year's prospectus annoyed me because there's an undergraduate version (for me: I don't have a bachelor degree) plus a postgraduate version for those already in posession of a BA. The only difference so far as I could discern was that the postgraduate offered Chinese in the list of available "C" languages, whereas the undergraduate version didn't. Which really annoyed me, as I'd love to do Chinese. It's not that difficult, I never had trouble with tones when I learned holiday Thai some years ago, plus I have a good memory for characters. You might have noticed over time that I have a thing about foreign scripts. I think most of them look really funky.

Anyway I just checked and they've CHANGED THE PROSPECTUS so I could now do exactly what I wanted to: English-German/German-English Chinese-English (translation) + French (not to translate, just to speak it). I already have A levels in German and French.

Also I just found out that those German ICE trains, due to depart London-Frankfurt within a couple of years would take me to within an hour of Mainz, which is where that course is... is this a sign?

I have already started and dropped out of TWO uni courses... perhaps as the saying goes "third time lucky". I don't know how on earth I would fund this, though we ARE in the EU for the time being, so I ought to be eligable for local as well as European funding, especially as I would be studying two European languages. German tuition fees are a fraction of those in Britain (which are about to skyrocket). The only way I can think of paying my way through without ending up in huge debt would be to write a bestseller.

If this course is so unsuitable, I don't understand why I keep coming back to it in my mind. I've not found one like it anywhere else.

As the saying goes WHERE THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A WAY. And you're supposed to keep your eyes on the goal, not the obstacles.

My legs are almost healed now. Valium Marilyn whose eyes are up the wall has STILL not seen a doctor. I told her to go to her own, who knows her, knows she hasn't got a "lazy eye" and will see straight away what's wrong, and probably know what it's likely to be.

Sprache, Kultur und Translation Brochure (sorry only in German) http://www.fb06.uni-mainz.de/fbpubl/brosch/FTSK-Broschuere.pdf

Chinese Proverb of the day!

當一個人內心能容納兩樣相互衝突的東西，這個人便開始變得有價值了。

It actually came from a piece of spam left at Addicted Rantings's blog by somebody named 韋于倫成 on 27 May this year at 1:18pm and it means:


When a person's heart can hold different conflicting things, this man started to become worthwhile.

Cool, huh?

Broiling hot

YES it's very hot indeed... I believe "broiling" is the word some of you Americans use when you mean you're putting something under the grill... and that's how hot it is today. I'm sweating like an amphibious swine, it's terrible. If I were going to be like a swine I would want to be something like a Japanese pig-dog, a buta-inu 豚犬 like those trotter Norfolk and Glen of Imaal terriers from the other day, who look like a wild boar, minus the little trotter tusks.
In all this heat I've been reading Grimms Märchen ~ meine Familie sent me a charming antique volume in the original German, so I've been reading that. It's from the early 20th century, printed in the curly blackletter type with the kind of Edwardian colour illustrations I really like (they remind me of my own childhood, reading handmedowns from my grandparents' era) ... nearly all German books were printed in Gothick type prior to World War II. I think it looks really funky. Why SHOULD everything look sanseriph and crap just because we're in 2010?
I've been trying to dig out youtube screens that teach Japanese for my language blog. There's plenty about, it's just a question of pasting up the good ones. I actually had better luck with Chinese, because the BBC ~ who usually do this stuff well ~ made some excellent teach yourself Mandarin videos for late night TV. I do want to learn Chinese as well, but don't want to overburden and lose my thread... Confucius, he say: he who chase two rabbits catch neither one...

This song reminds me of doing GCSE French at school... here in the UK it got to number 5 in 1988... in much of continental Europe, including the Soviet Union, it got to number one the previous year...

DESIRELESS: VOYAGE VOYAGE



And finally ~ how could I drop the dogs theme? ~ we have CARKIES ~~
Doggies who are Yorkshire-Cairn Terrorizer Cross




Did I say very much? Did I say what I wanted to say? Did I remember? My brainbox is too well broiled to know..!

PS I didn't think I was that fussy, but the two major doggie rescue centres I consulted had only one small mop mutt each: Eddie at Battersea Dogs' Home, South London and Scruffy (as mentioned the other day) at the Wood Green Animal Shelter, North London. I couldn't take either one as both have been rehomed, the lucky 豚犬 butas! Eddie is only about one and a half, but Scruffy is seven... I wonder what happened to them?... do you think their old owners died? Poor little swines. I hope they are happy now ... poor little furries :-)