This was an impulse purchase from the January "100 books under $4" list. It isn't my usual thing at all, but I really like the title. No romance or mystery, except the eternal mystery of the Chinese language.
It is a description of an American's struggles to learn Chinese and the insights she gains into the nature of the society and its people along the way. Fallows is not your average American abroad; she is a scholar and a linguist with a PhD from Harvard. Although she describes many technical aspects of the language, the discussion never becomes pedantic, but remains lively and anecdotal.
The historical background of the language is fascinating. I had not known that the written language was completely redesigned during the Mao years. Also, I had always thought that "top to bottom, right to left" was how it was done. Although that is the traditional way, it seems that the Chinese are far more flexible than that.
There are only about 400 syllables which make up the language and most words are only one syllable. So, if you assume that Chinese may, like English, have a basic working vocabulary of around 2000 words, Chinese has a lot of homophones. That's where tone or inflection come in, and apparently most Americans can't even hear that.
Anyway, it was interesting and informative - and fun. Plus a little personal satisfaction. One of my classmates this semester claimed, in writing, that economically disadvantaged kindergarteners have five million fewer words in their vocabularies than five-year-olds from economically stable families. So I did a little research - it only took one google to learn that according to the OED people the English language is possessed of something like a quarter of a million words - those five-year-olds must have lost the remaining 4.75 million.
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