Being Chinese…

Sometimes, I do wonder why we Chinese (and probably the Koreans and the Japanese) work so hard. In a way, I’ve always thought of a correlation with Confucianist culture. However, thinking back again, it’s probably not very true either. Confucianism is like dead among my peers anyway (and even amongst many youths in China). And we still work hard. Incredibly hard.

Hmm.. and yea, I think I may be looking a little too far. The answer may lie somewhere closer. It’s in our language. I still remember the days when I have to do 習字 everyday, with probably 10 new terms every session. Then, there’s the dreaded 聽寫/默寫 weekly. It would still be crazy if I were to do it now again on a consistent basis. But yet, we somehow managed it. Contrast that with my English sessions. To be frank, I’ve hated learning English grammar more when I was young due to the many nonsensical grammatical rules and tenses they have (does it really matter if I write “I eat my lunch yesterday” instead of “I had my lunch yesterday” or “I eat my dinner already” instead of “I’ve taken my dinner already”), and the phonetics which has a weird tendency to disobey the rules and logic they were supposed to obey. But yea, by primary 5, I don’t think I even needed to work to prepare for my spelling test beforehand; All I needed was to just glimpse thru the words, and I’m done.

And yea, I think everywhere I go, it seems that the Chinese are probably the most alien and unique among foreign people. They can never imagine how we actually speak with intonations, and the fact that we DON’T have an alphabet system and have to remember 2000-3000 characters instead, and our standards can still suck after 12 years of education. Even the Arabic script ain’t that hard (although the apparently incomprehensible similar-looking curlies here and there do put us off).

Well, but then again, it just seems a sort of bragging right whenever I show off just writing a few simple words. And yea, I also love ridiculing the Europeans for all their nonsensical tenses and grammatical rules (you can just use a word or a term to denote whether it’s the present, past, or future, or whether it’s plural or singular) and also we Chinese don’t have to manage the masculine/feminine nonsense most of Europeans do. Learning to speak Chinese (once you get the hang of the different intonations) is actually pretty easy.

I’ve digressed. But yea, it’s something we all grow up with, and it has been hard work for all of us, hasn’t it?

And here’s the article that inspired me.

http://popagandhi.com/732/conquer-the-chinese-language-conquer-the-world/