Amy Adoyzie

One of the suckiness with my internet downage is that I'm unable to download the latest podcasts from ChinesePod. I've been boning up on my Mando (cause I ain't bonin' up on anything else that's Chinese… Oh! Bada-bing!), because it would be a shame for me to return to the States and disappoint my mama with my ineptitude.
If I wanna learn Mando, I need to be proactive about it because I can definitely get away with living in Huarong for a year and not have improved my vocab because they're all about dialect. There's the local Huaronghua and a more regional Nanbianhua (Southside dialect), both of with are completely undecipherable to my untrained ear (I can barely make out Mando, for goodness sakes!).
Dialects totally floor me, and they flourish in south China. It's astonishing that a Chinese can travel across this country and not be able to communicate with their fellow country(wo)men. Mandarin, the common language, is taught at all Chinese schools- but that doesn't mean that they actually speak it. Whenever my kids chatter in class, they do it in Huaronghua. Even if they're talking about me, I'd prefer they do it in Mando so at least maybe I can learn some new words like boring, useless, uppity, She makes me wanna die.
Some of the classes even taught me useful Huaronghua phrases like, “Hao dou qian?” (How much?). In Mando it's pronounced, phonetically, like “How doh chee-yan?” but with the Huaronghua accent it becomes “How da cheen?” Who can keep track of all this Oriental tongue trickery?!
Sometimes I'll say some Mandarin phrases in class and the students will correct my pronunciation. But lately, I've realized that I shouldn't heed their advice to openly because their Mandarin pronunciation may not be any better than mine since they don't speak it fluently.
I'm not the only one who's disconcerted by the lack of Mando fluency. I've had students tell me that they believe that 30-40% of the students can't speak Mandarin well, a Chinese English teacher said that the number is probably closer to 50%. Half! Half of these Chinese students are unable to speak their nation's language at a satisfactory level! It probably doesn't help that some of the older teachers will teach in dialect.
There are 16-17 year-old kids who still buy Mandarin tapes to study and listen. I might have been ESL in America, but I can confidently say that I had a pretty firm grasp of speaking and listening to English by the time I was in high school without the aid of instructional audio tapes.

Besides ChinesePod, I've also been obsessed with vintage podcasts of The Ricky Gervais Show. Rick, another volunteer, had let me ripped them off his iPod before we left Changsha in August. I've been listening to Mr. Gervais, Mr. Karl Pilkington and Mr. Stepehen Merchant faithfully every time I go for a run. It's super hilarious stuff and takes my mind off everything because they're constantly talking nonsense and Karl Pilkington is the most genius functionally stupid person ever, and I heart him. I also have a mad huge crush on Stephen Merchant and want to marry him and make tall-short babies (he's 6'7″!).
As I was climbing Huanghushan, the hill behind the school, I was listening to episode 19 of their XFM first season show. Stephen and Ricky started to discuss the intricacies of Chinese, here are some of the highlights:

SM- “When it's written down it looks like little children's drawings of those little paper houses that Chinese people live in. And there's loads of em.”

SM- “For wont of a better word, when I listen to Chinese it sounds like gobbly-gook.”
RG- “That's a dialect. I think it's the main dialect. That, mandarin and orangutan.”

SM- “It's just because I'm very ill informed. I've only seen Chinese people in Kung Fu movies…”
RG- “…In Chinatown.”

SM- “Not really a town, more of a novelty street.”

SM- “They are unscrutable.”
RG- “You can not scrut a Chinaman or a Chinawoman.”

Is it wrong that this made me love Stephen Merchant even more?! I've uploaded the track and you can right-click and save here for your listening pleasure.