Racing Games and Fishing Games

Up earlier than I should be, but I can’t sleep.  Work then.  Don't kvetch.  I have been frustrated the last few days searching for interesting articles in Chinese to translate.  I had been going to the People’s Daily, which often takes up front page real estate with stories about bumper harvests in Shanxi, the president welcoming foreign dignitaries and anti-corruption cases.  I moved my efforts over to an online news aggregator my friend recommended called Toutiao 头条 or “lead story” and while there are more “human interest” stories and certainly more videos on their home page, here the stories are invariably light.

I don’t know that I’m necessarily expecting anything particularly deep, or reflective.  I don’t think I’m going to find a revealing exposé on the state of the nation and even if I did, I would likely miss the subtlety of the writing.  This morning going through Toutiao, I passed on an article about border patrol guards spending the holiday out on the frontier, I passed on an article about the royal family voting in Thailand, couldn't be bothered with the kid in Taiwan who thought he was buying an iPhone but instead bought chocolate.  The sponsored article about the Yangtze River Economic Belt Development was unable to hold me either.  Mind you, all I’m trying to do is translate the first three paragraphs, list out all the vocabulary I can’t independently decode, study them over and over and over again until I can read the passages without training-wheels.  To quote Miles Davis from the Bitches Brew sessions: “What difference does it make?”  From the perspective of language study, it doesn’t matter at all, still I"m craving some degree of intrigue or at least utility. 

I get unsolicited Chinese texts on my phone, all the time.  I glance at them and only really translate them if I’m concerned they are going to shut my phone off.  It dawned on me this morning that these texts were as viable as source of reading as anything else in my Chinese environment.  I took three of these messages and pasted them into an email and sent them to myself so I could easily manipulate the text on my lap top.  Here’s what I discovered:

The Number 13 line at Dongzhimen Station is going to be closed as they complete some new work.  The city government wants to wish me and my kin a happy new year, and to remind us that it is illegal to light fireworks off within the fifth ring road during the holidays.  And, finally, there is a casino in Macao that would very much like to welcome me to play baccarat, racing games and fishing games and a sixty-color lottery with very high odds!  Now I know. 

I’ve been investing over an hour a day on this sort of effort for the last two months or so. And though it is painfully slow, and I can wonder, regularly, how much further along I’d been if I’d been diligent about this earlier, I can feel the difference when I read billboards and signs:  Ah, that liquor company wishes the whole nation a prosperous new year.  Comprehending two or three more of those ten characters made all the difference, so that something that would otherwise have been opaque was clear as day.  

Translating these things, Google Translate is invaluable.  But I also use a free online tool called: https://www.mdbg.net  I take a line of text, throw it in, and they will assemble the vocabulary into what are largely character-couple vocabulary pieces.  I remove all the things I know, reenter and then copy that list of vocabulary into a Word doc.  Time permitting what I've enjoyed doing is taking each individual character I don't recognize and then look at all the other words it is a building block for.  So "racing games" above is 塞游戏 sai youxi.  I didn't recognize the "sai" which means to compete.  Checking and of course it is the root word in 比赛 bisai 'to compete', which I've used a million times.  And it is also the first character in dozen words I don't recognize but make easy sense once you see them all laid out.  It must map the mind out differently from the earliest childhood when ideographs can be switched around that way like Lego blocks.  There are of course compound words in English, as well as prefix and suffix, and letter pairings to make things into adverbs or suggest tense.  But when each character has its own independent power, there is a certain mathematical elegance to what then becomes possible in an ideographic system like Chinese. 

Sunday, 02/10/19