Orange you glad I didn’t say apple?

I wish it wasn’t so hard to learn a language.  It took me 5 years at school to learn French enough to be able to understand 50% of Le Journal when it was on SBS on Saturday mornings, and half that time to almost completely forget it all. I would love to learn a couple of languages for the fun of it, but it’s becoming more apparent to me how useful it would be for me to understand Mandarin.

For one thing, I would know what my flatmates talk about to each other.  These new ones, I barely speak to.  I say hi when I come home,I say goodnight, I say bye, I say the time machine is flooded but it’s ok because the landlady said it’ll be fixed by yesterday, but not much else.   So I don’t know much about them.  They speak Chinese very differently to my old flatmates in a way that I sometimes think they’re angry when they’re actually just joking with each other.  It’s sounds kind of like Irish people speaking Mandarin, with really strong r’s, all gruff, something stuck in the back of the throat… heeer shurr howla…  

My old flatmates spoke Chinese like they were always talking about something amazing, "omg really?  no way!", but these guys sound like they’re always telling each other off, like every sentence sounds like it starts with "you know you really shouldn’t…"  and ends with "but you go ahead and fuck up some more, see if I care".  But they sound like that even when they’re smiling or laughing, so it just means I don’t interpret their inflection or tone or whatever correctly.  I miss my old flatmates.  Sherry used to hum to herself music that sounded like Crowded House.  One of these guys does this crazy warbling frog singing thing all the time.  It was funny for a bit, I suppose.

On one hand I really like that I don’t understand what they’re saying, because then I don’t feel like I’m intruding on private conversation when I come home.  They can keep talking about whatever as if I don’t exist.  In fact, that’s a common theme in my life.  If I were a character on Naruto, I think Invisibility would be my kekkei genkei.   Oh wow… that actually began as a serious thought to myself.  Heh…  :-

On the other hand, I am curious.  One time this giant branch landed in the driveway at home.  I tried to move it but it was too heavy so I just shrugged and went inside. I didn’t mention it to Sherry (my previous flatmate) because she was heaps pregnant at the time so I didn’t think it should be her problem to worry about it.  Then her husband came home and was talking to her, and pointing outside and making hand gestures indicating something big.  I chimed in with "oh yeah, you mean that massive branch?  I tried to move it but I can’t on my own, can you help me?"  Sherry kept the smile plastered on her face but she said "oh, you understand Chinese?" with this glint of panic in her eye of "oh shit… this whole time you knew what we were saying".  It made me wonder…

It’s not just flatmates.  I work for a Chinese company – if I need to know if an order has arrived in port in Sydney or been handed over to couriers in Ballarat, I have to email Beijing to find out.  If I could do that in Chinese, they’d realise how cool I am and we’d be friends and I’d get promoted overseas and I’d make people call me Chairman Wow.  Also, trade relations between me and China are good right now.

Sooooooo anyway, as the disjointed list of reasons I’ve given you indicates, I realised it would be really useful to learn Mandarin.  But it would take so long to understand conversation at the level I want, and then learn to read Chinese characters, that I can’t even be bothered with it.  Even Chinatown Ted has trouble with Cantonese nowadays, and he grew up speaking it at home.  By the time I’d gotten anything useful out of it, I would have moved somewhere else and work for a different company.   The only solution is to get into one of those military-style intensely extreme immersion classes that would make me forget English and possibly have a mental breakdown.  Yeah… super sweet.  

This concludes tonight’s procrastination.