I Have an Idea

The government has finally deigned to switch the central heating on so now half my radiator works very hard at heating whilst the other half does nothing and remains frigid. Shouldn't the whole radiator be warm? Or is that just my Western Imperialism?

Saw that one of the street vendors was selling the complete works, in translation of course, of Shadespeare. Is he any good, do you think?

In order to improve my Chinese I have been having the TV on in my room. But I've had to turn it off as all it plays are Chinese wartime dramas full of people crying and it was rather depressing. The other channels are annoyingly fuzzy. However I may have to perserve as actually the programmes are very handy for learning as they are all subtitled in Chinese for non-speakers of Mandarin so if I don't recognise something by listening I can at least see the character. Although I don't read Chinese fast enough so if the word is at the end of a sentence I still don't get it...

 The longer I am out here the more I am convinced we need to invent some language as a lingua franca. The fact is that pretty much every Chinese person I have met, including those who profess to be English teachers, still find it difficult to turn out English that isn't wrong in some way. Often amusingly wrong. Which doesn't exactly encourage respect. After a certain age, I think it becomes too difficult to learn the many subtleties of a mature language like English, and I'm sure this applies to Laowai's speaking Chinese, so why don't we invent a simple, logical language we could use as an intermediary? Why do we spent countless hours on these complex languages, so filled with nuance, when all the majority of foreign dealings really only need a mechanical language? And those who want to study the literature etc of other cultures can put in the hours required to learn the foreign language, leaving the more prosaically minded to learn only what they need in a far shorter amount of time. I believe certain tribes of American Indians, whose languages were often not even related, still managed to communicate when trading using a universal sign language. Seems a good idea to me-though I would advocate sounds and not gestures! Much easier over email...

For example, take this sentence: Yesterday I asked him to buy 6 postcards.

Do we need the -ed on the end of asked? Do we need to differentiate between he and him? What's the to for? And arguably the postcards does not need the s.

In Chinese the sentence is 昨天我要他买六张明信片. Literally "Past day I want he buy 6 measureword postcard"

What's the measure word for? We spend hours learning the correct measure word for each noun. Sure they contain subtleties of meaning but when you are negotiating a shipment, why would you need them? And characters are pretty and interesting and work very well for Chinese, but far too time consuming for a foreigner to learn.

So my Jones Magic Solution is we need a new one language with uniform grammar, a clear phonetic alphabet and the odd adjective. And then we'll have that Babylonian Tower up in no time!

I can hear wailing outside- like when you put a blender in a cat. Yes, it's Beijing opera. But why are they playing it outside at such a volume? In the UK they have laws against that...