TV
Satellite dish atop a pile of bricks and wood.
My accent was coming along nicely. Davy was pleased. “You should study hard!” he encouraged. “You could become a newscaster.”
“Shut up.”
“No, really.” He told me about a white Canadian college student who’d traveled to China to learn Mandarin, and had mastered it so well a TV station recruited him as a novelty newscaster. Actors trained him to mimic Chinese facial expressions and mannerisms that, combined with his already precise accent, gave viewers the bizarre spectacle of a white person who appeared more properly Chinese than they were.
That winter I took in hours of TV every day, hoping to improve my inflections and mannerisms.
It was a bit odd, watching show after show I couldn’t understand. My first breakthrough occurred with a soap opera set in ancient times. Two lovers were quarrelling, and the shogun-clad warrior proclaimed to his silken maiden, “Wo ai ni! Wo ai ni!” I jolted. Unlike the bare tidbits I gleaned elsewhere, these lines were crystal clear, dripping with meaning: I love you!
They watched a lot of TV, the Chinese. They seemed to live for it. I visited a few students’ families and typically ended up watching TV with them – news, movies and football (soccer), mainly. Some of humbler-looking hutongs around Lin Da, the ones with thin glass panes and charcoal bricks stacked outside for winter heat, sported satellite dishes.
At first this addiction to TV struck me as foreign, unusual. But the more I thought about it, America was just the same.
April 17, 2008 at 8:49 am
TV really helped me learn Croatian/Bosnian. Though, it did have lots of help in that American shows were broadcast in English, with subtitles. Turns out I’m a visual learner, so seeing all the casual conversation and slang translated right before me helped me learn a whole lot. Hearing it from the mouths of my friends later was just the bonus reinforcement I needed. However, it was a Croatian TV news broadcast which helped me realize that I had broken through my language learning plateau - I realized “Wow! Even though I didn’t know every single word that that guy just said, I understood exactly what he was talking about!” That was a good day.