When's your birthday? Seems like a pretty good question for the third week of learning Spanish (ever, no Sesame Street background or anything). Numbers are pretty easy, learn the names of the months, put it together, and winner of a lesson, right?
Yeah, except when you ask the student "¿Cuándo es tu cumpleaños?" and he responds, slowly, carefully, "Es el ocho de octubre." The day you're teaching is actually the eighth of October, so you make a huge deal out of what you hear, saying, "¿¿¿¡¡¡¿¿¿Hoy es tu cumpleaños???!!!!???" and then you see by his face there's a communication error on someone's part, but he's saving you face by kind of going along with the singing and the big deal. He whispers to his classmate, and you realize, no dummy, he's calling the Chinese calendar by Spanish names, but they don't line up. You try to fix this at the end of class, explaining that those month names are only for the "gong li" the Gregorian calendar, not the "nong li" the Chinese lunar calendar. You make it worse by trying to give the kids some language to talk about these things in the next class, spend too long on it, and only end up confusing them way more due to your own lack of language.
After a year of living here I'm finally beginning to understand that Chinese people have two systems running in their heads, the global and the Chinese, but when it gets right down to it, the Chinese system comes out on top. So even a simple question like "when's your birthday" requires layers of explanation --which would sound like--see, it's the Third Month Sixth Day of the Chinese Lunar calendar, so it falls on a slightly different Western calendar date every year, so unless you also have this Chinese calendar in your head you'll never really know when my birthday is in order to wish me a happy birthday, which is the reason why you asked, so just let me give you a simplistic answer so we can fake communicating and nod and smile and build a tentative bridge of friendship whose underpinnings are weakened by huge cultural misunderstandings. My students are linguistically incapable of giving me these explanations. I've had to hammer all this out in the course of a year, bit by bit, drip by drip. Of course my Chinese isn't stellar, so the hammering out is that much harder, and then it's hard to clarify what I do know, much less explain it to a new batch of kids who have only been learning Spanish for three weeks, of just how different Chinese and Western cultures are.
I know that I don't know so much more at this point than this time last year. I'm not sure whether to be encouraged or disheartened by this, as the gaping hole of what I don't know grows deeper the further down I go, and how to make myself understood in this gaping hole is even more challenging.
Yeah, except when you ask the student "¿Cuándo es tu cumpleaños?" and he responds, slowly, carefully, "Es el ocho de octubre." The day you're teaching is actually the eighth of October, so you make a huge deal out of what you hear, saying, "¿¿¿¡¡¡¿¿¿Hoy es tu cumpleaños???!!!!???" and then you see by his face there's a communication error on someone's part, but he's saving you face by kind of going along with the singing and the big deal. He whispers to his classmate, and you realize, no dummy, he's calling the Chinese calendar by Spanish names, but they don't line up. You try to fix this at the end of class, explaining that those month names are only for the "gong li" the Gregorian calendar, not the "nong li" the Chinese lunar calendar. You make it worse by trying to give the kids some language to talk about these things in the next class, spend too long on it, and only end up confusing them way more due to your own lack of language.
After a year of living here I'm finally beginning to understand that Chinese people have two systems running in their heads, the global and the Chinese, but when it gets right down to it, the Chinese system comes out on top. So even a simple question like "when's your birthday" requires layers of explanation --which would sound like--see, it's the Third Month Sixth Day of the Chinese Lunar calendar, so it falls on a slightly different Western calendar date every year, so unless you also have this Chinese calendar in your head you'll never really know when my birthday is in order to wish me a happy birthday, which is the reason why you asked, so just let me give you a simplistic answer so we can fake communicating and nod and smile and build a tentative bridge of friendship whose underpinnings are weakened by huge cultural misunderstandings. My students are linguistically incapable of giving me these explanations. I've had to hammer all this out in the course of a year, bit by bit, drip by drip. Of course my Chinese isn't stellar, so the hammering out is that much harder, and then it's hard to clarify what I do know, much less explain it to a new batch of kids who have only been learning Spanish for three weeks, of just how different Chinese and Western cultures are.
I know that I don't know so much more at this point than this time last year. I'm not sure whether to be encouraged or disheartened by this, as the gaping hole of what I don't know grows deeper the further down I go, and how to make myself understood in this gaping hole is even more challenging.
