The Chinese book section
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Before our move to China, I have NEVER entered the Chinese book section e.g. in Popular. I can only look stupid there because I can’t read Chinese beyond some really basic words.
Last week, I was stockpiling on our books to bring home and actually ventured there to take a look. Despite the bad rap Chinese-ed people get, I have to tell you this impressive experience:
For 2 hours or so, I had been browsing the English and Malaysiana sections lugging around a 1.5 feet stack of novels, activity books and stationeries with my bare hands.
But just 5 minutes in the Chinese section, this well-mannered Chinese sales assistant (or salesteen) came up to me with a basket for all my stuff!
Also, even in Xiamen, I’ve had some thoughtful young people hold the door open or keep the lift waiting for me as I struggle with Lucas in his stroller. I’ve even seen young working women helping old ladies with heavy bags of goods!
Now, tell me, have you seen any young working women in Malaysia helping old ladies with plastic bags of fruit or other stuff???
Hmm…they must be doing something right in Chinese schools other than the horror stories of overloaded homework, no bathroom breaks, roasting in the sun and raps over the knuckles for forgotten homework/books.
Also, this nice fella actually sweated buckets doing his best to find me some beginner’s books on hanyu pinyin or bilingual books/flashcards. I was looking for a Chinese-English picture dictonary for Lucas and me (which I’d bought in English for my little sister, nieces and for myself in Spanish and German).
Unfortunately, despite our joined and individual searches, we couldn’t find a suitable one in Chinese. He was very apologetic and even wanted to bring their Chinese language specialist out there to help but I was already tired out from our searches. Maybe next time…
The ones he showed me were useless because I’ll need a Chinese teacher next to me pointing out what the Chinese characters mean. I was looking for one which has the Chinese character, hanyu pinyin and the English word that will allow me to learn Chinese independently. After all, wasn’t the hanyu pinyin invented to help more people learn Chinese?
During my browsing, I found some interesting books:
THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL - it becomes a mouthful when literally translated into Chinese. It sounds really funny to me! How does it sound to Chinese-speaking kids? Will you want to read a book with such an unromantic title?
MILITARY MORALS - This book looked promising until I flipped through the internal pages…
Guns are used to compare concepts of “long” and “short”! Good grief…surely there are other military examples (flagpoles, soldiers, hills, aircraft) instead of this???
I know that guns and wars are unavoidable topics but I don’t think that these have to be introduced at the infant stage. Give dialogue and negotiations a chance, please!
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Filed in books, culture 4 Comments so far
sasha on 28 Jan 2008 at 2:21 pm #
use gun to teach long and short? Soo freaky!
Shireen on 28 Jan 2008 at 4:12 pm #
*gulps*…good grief alright!!
huisia on 28 Jan 2008 at 5:01 pm #
in here, really have a lot of funny translations
KittyCat on 29 Jan 2008 at 12:01 pm #
Sasha - What to do ah? They have strong military roots…
Shireen - LOL
HuiSia - I really like that book you know, maybe I can just block out that page!