The Tricks of Art and the Art of Tricks

I missed an appointment with my friend Ray today.  My meetings with Ray started out with him tutoring me in Chinese and have now morphed into me tutoring him in Australian culture. Which leads me to the problem of learning languages.  I do claim that I have been half successful 50% of the time with learning Chinese.  It’s just that I lack application.  I have heard that it takes ten years to get good at Chinese (spoken and written).  That is way too long for me.

Some of my friends complain that learning Chinese is difficult because there are so many words that read or sound the same but mean different things.  What about “desert” (dry wasteland) which sounds different from, but is spelt the same as, “desert” (run away from the army)?  Also, consider “dessert” meaning pudding etc which sounds the same as “desert” (run away from the army).  Note that “desert” meaning something you deserve also sounds the same as the pudding “dessert” and the run away from the army “desert”.  This is not to ignore “close” (near) and “close” (shut).  If you look at an English dictionary you will find many, many, many other examples of two or more words that sound the same, or are maybe spelt the same, but which have different meanings. I think I am talking about homophones and homonyms.

My point is that it is not just in Chinese that you find these homophones and/or homonyms.  They must make life difficult for learners of English as a second language.

I believe that what really makes Chinese hard to learn is the writing system.  No one can look at a Chinese character they have not learned and really figure out what it means.  The most one can do is figure out what radical is being used and possibly work out what it just might sound like. But, beyond that, most of us ordinary people may as well be looking at a sentence written in Martian.

As a result of this failure with Chinese…  Actually, I would not class it as a failure, more a realisation that I do not possess the drive to learn the language properly.  Maybe “laziness” is the word I am looking for. However described, this problem has caused me to start to study French. (By “study” I mean occasionally to listen to a few sentences in French and sometimes read a few lines of French, with an English translation, naturally) So far, this has proven much more suitable to my listless language learning style.  I have found that lots of French words look like English words. These words sometimes have the same (or at least a similar) meaning as in English. Apparently, you just have to pronounce them with a French accent.  How hard can it be?  Time will tell although the verbs seen to keep changing and the word French people use instead of “the” or “a” seems to change from “la” to “le” with no apparent rhyme nor reason.  It is something about masculine and feminine nouns.

These features vaguely remind me what little I recall of the Latin that I failed to learn so many years ago. I am rather proud of my obstinate refusal to apply myself to Latin.  I had to learn some phrases parrot-fashion in my capacity of an altar boy in a Catholic church. Eventually, however,  my one-boy stand against Latin (demonstrated by my persistent and repeated failure in the subject) was gloriously vindicated when the Church, the last bastion of the language, gave it up (except maybe in the Vatican) in favour of the language of the place, the lingua loci, if you will.

I have heard it said that it is harder for a non-native speaker of English to learn English than it is for an English speaker to learn… some language or other. Well, I have, more or less, mastered , or, if not mastered, gained a working knowledge of, English.  This happened with very little effort, I may say, although I must concede that spending my whole life in Australia probably helped.

Nevertheless, I will continue to plod along in Chinese.  I am sure a smattering of the language will come in handy sometime. (Incidentally, do you not think that “smattering” is a funny word?)

As we careen towards Christmas the mind turns to gift giving.  It is natural to think of what to give the single most important person in one’s life: oneself.  I was looking at web sites for inspiration.  Naturally, some of these websites sold magic stuff.  And thus it was that I was reading the blurb on some trick or other and it slowly dawned on me, in a “hey! wait a minute!” moment - I already own this trick.  So cleverly was the ad written, or so slowly does my brain work, that I did not recognise a trick for which I had actually paid good money (well, money).

Of course, the trick was one that I had bought, played with for a while before realising and accepting that I had no hope of pulling it off in a real - as opposed to an imaginary - life situation.  I have quite a collection of such tricks.  I will not name any of them for the same reason that I did not attempt them: to do so would risk more self humiliation than my delicate ego could bear.

Suffice it to say that most of these impossible-for-me tricks were described as being “easy”, “with no difficult sleights” or “for the beginner”, or some such.  At any rate I was not brave enough to try any of them on actual people.  I am coming to the conclusion that I am not cut out to be a magician.  There are so many good magic practitioners around that the field is best left to them.