Lost on Planet China...

I've been listening to J. Maarten Troost's Lost on Planet China, which chronicles a trip to that nation by the author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific. Troost has been called a travel writer but insists that he's mainly written about places he's actually lived, so he should be called a domestic writer. In any case, he's an entertaining and informative writer, providing both his humorous perspective on what it's like for a Westerner in China and a wealth of data and historical detail on what a country becomes when it tries to be ancient China, a communist state and a vanguard of capitalism all at once. What he sees and learn both astonish and frighten him, and will the reader as well.

But right now, I've been hearing about Tibet, the "Roof of the World" and the latest site that the Han Chinese are taking over. For the author, it was a sort of escape, because even if it's becoming Chinese it's still cleaner and less crowded. That sent me to my own sort of escape, looking for information on Tibet and the Tibetan language. Among other things, I found a book - a short book, but still an entire book - at this site. If you're looking for a friendly, minimalist introduction to how Tibetan works, you couldn't do better.

As to my own escape, well, that was from Spanish. Over at the new Aspiring Polyglot, Kelly has a post on the Never-ending Journey that is learning a language. She excerpts from a poster at How to Learn Any Language and tosses in her own thoughts. Here are some of mine to add: For quite some time, I've been dutifully doing my Pimsleur lessons, skimming various other sources for review and the like and my Spanish has improved a lot. Really. But the other night, I found myself in a multi-party conversation about life, the universe and everything in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. And while my Spanish comes faster and more naturally than ever before, boy, there's a lot it still can't do. So listening to J. Maarten Troost's tales of a beautiful, almost alien land high in the hills on the far end of China, I thought, why not?

Having had a look at Tibetan, its beautiful characters, its interesting structure... I know why not - Spanish is a language I have the chance to use and I've got a lot more knowledge to build on. With determination, I can do something with it. And determination is what's needed, of course, for all language learners when they find themselves on the plateau between "Hey, I'm really getting good at X!" and the reasonable approximation of fluency that is the best most non-natives can hope for. One difference, however - and Kelly will find this in reading Il Nome della rosa, is that if you know one Romance language and are learning another, your skill sets will come in a different order. Looking at Japanese and Mandarin, the sense one gets is that first you get pretty good at speaking and then you discover you can't read a newspaper, never mind a novel. For me, I pick up a novel or skim the headlines and feel good about my Spanish. It's when I go to make a wry observation about the weather or offer a nuanced sentiment about a colleague that my Spanish goes to hell. Still, with time and determination...

Go read Kelly's post. Hopefully this will make more sense in light of it.