Mastering Language
Language eludes me. I hear it fall around me like powdery snowflakes precipitating out of a harshly cold but beautifully still, white atmosphere. When people speak, I listen intently. I prefer to listen because I fear that the myriads of amorphous thoughts in my head will rarely coalesce into constructions that even crudely communicate my meaning. Speaking, to me, is like attempting to shape a snowball from snow too dry to stick, momentarily forming the shape of a ball before falling apart to dust in my hand. So, when it is silent, I listen to the silence. I’m not introverted, but I fool most into thinking I am.
Something about how I’m wired seems to make language, even reading, elusive. Reading isn’t a leisurely pastime for me. In my fourth-grade year 71% of us performed below the Proficient level on the NAEP reading assessment (Nationsreportcard.gov). That is not for a lack of trying. Fortunately, I didn’t struggle as much as others. I never felt illiterate as a child. I hadn’t experienced that feeling until this year, 2003 — Heaven help me if I don’t learn to read Chinese.
It’s 6:30am. My 同伴 — my roommates and fellow missionaries — are just waking. We live on the 8th floor of an apartment building in Kaohsiung City’s ZuoYing District. When I first came to Taiwan — nearly 12 months ago — I was jaw-agape awed by the city. Having come from rural Southwest USA nothing was familiar to me. A dense, unending maze of high-rises towered over me with majesty not unlike the great ponderosa pine forests of the mountains I was familiar with. Most jarring of all, perhaps, was that I was now illiterate. Street signs, advertisements, marques, and billboards were all unrecognizable and unfamiliar — all but the ubiquitous corner convenience store 7–11.
The hours I devote to learning to read Chinese characters is my feeble attempt to compensate for my seemingly total inability to learn the language by ear. I get up every morning at 5:30am, 7 days a week, to go through my deck of flashcards for at least an hour before anyone else wakes up. Throughout the day I find more time to study, averaging around 3–4 hours per day, every day, for a year.
I haven’t previously been enamored by my mother tongue the way I now am by Chinese. The etymology preserved and laid out in Chinese writing gives new depth, denotative and connotative, to even mundane vocabulary of my mother tongue. I relish the language — the new, different, interesting, beautiful, and ancient ways of expressing those amorphous thoughts in my head. After constant immersion and seventy-two thousand eight hundred thirty-three minutes of study, give or take a few hours, only now — finally — at 6:30am — I’ve reached a milestone. 3,000 characters recognized. It’s a hard won battle, fought tirelessly.
Like snow in the Southwest, my accomplishment won’t be long lived. My brain just doesn’t seem to be wired for it. Without constant thrust my altitude decreases, characters are quickly forgotten, and language once learned sublimates into the warming air.
