Tainan doesn’t feel like the oldest city in Taiwan. I mean, it is the oldest city in Taiwan – the evidence is everywhere. Each of the city’s owners has left their mark in some way, from crumbling Dutch walls to Imperial Chinese temples to Japanese colonial amenities, and it’s delightfully easy to disappear down jumbled alleys clearly built long before cars, or even horses, were the primary mode of transport.
But it doesn’t feel old. The city has grown so completely around its historic foundations that they seem vestigial. Really, Tainan feels blue-collar. It doesn’t have the cosmopolitan hub status of Taipei to the north or the industry and trade harbour of Kaohsiung to the south; instead it feels more self-contained.
That’s not to say isolated. For Western backpackers it’s an off-the-beaten-path city in an off-the-beaten-path country, but the hostel I’m staying at receives a steady flow of regional tourists. I’m told that the Taiwanese government encourages internal tourism, and many students are taking advantage of the Chinese New Year holiday (a whole month!) to gallivant around the country. They’re joined by a mix of regional tourists from Japan, Korea, and Macau, as well as Hong Kongese visiting to watch the Taiwanese election. And then there’s me.
I chose Tainan as a place to stay for a few weeks because I wanted a Chinese immersion experience. When I left Taipei in 2013 I’d gotten to a level where I could communicate casually with my classmates, but was too shy to take any real risks. As I mentioned in a previous post, though, I’ve gotten much better at initiating and holding conversations since then, and I wanted to put that newfound confidence to use – language practice is, after all, mostly small talk. This past week I’ve spoken primarily Chinese in social settings, despite the number of people ready and eager to practice their English.
And on that note, goddamn is learning languages hard.
I’d honestly forgotten what it was like to listen to someone and get maybe 60-70% of what they say – on a really good day. To top it off, Taiwanese speak at lightning speed. I choose to interpret it as a positive signal I speak smoothly enough that they don’t feel the need to modulate their speech around me, but it means I often have to take a couple (long, awkward, silent) seconds to catch up to someone once they’ve finished speaking. And doing so takes an exhausting amount of concentration, which you don’t realize until you’ve been doing it for an hour and a half and are starting to intermittently zone out.
It makes me reflect on the ESL learners I’ve met. English is the most popular second language in the world, almost three times as much as the runner-up(!), so over the past two months I’ve met people from all over the world who use it to communicate, even to others who don’t speak it natively. I remember some ESL speakers would go quiet in groups, or even leave the room, and while I understood intellectually why they did that, it becomes more poignant when I’m the one that’s politely nodding and smiling after I’ve completely lost the thread of the conversation.
It also makes me think of my own behaviour when dealing with language learners, now that I’m relearning what’s actually helpful. Not that I’m not helpful – I typically make a conscious effort to slow down, enunciate clearly, and use simpler words when talking to people who are still working on their English. But a scenario I commonly run into in Chinese is somebody saying something that I don’t understand because I’m missing a key word or just didn’t hear them clearly, so they immediately try to translate. It’s more expedient, yes (but not always, depending on their level of English) but it can be overkill, and doesn’t help me learn the missing word and how it’s used. So that’s something I now know to avoid in future.
Finally, a point that wasn’t a new lesson but interesting to write about: your personality changes in your non-native language. This is something I found out about while studying in Taipei, when a Japanese classmate, who didn’t speak English, heard me speaking in English to another classmate. “You’re so harsh in English!” she told me. “In Chinese you’re more…cute.” (She used the word kawaii, for the anime fans out there).
For me specifically, I think a big part of it is that my humour in English is very language-based. I like jokes based on sarcasm, overstatement/understatement, and wordplay, all of which require a level of vocabulary I don’t have in other languages. People I’ve met who succeed in being funny in their second language are usually very physically expressive, and can make people laugh using slapstick and pantomime. Personally I can’t do that, so when speaking another language I become more of a straight man (despite my best efforts)…and comparatively nicer, since I don’t have the skill to be teasing without crossing the line into insulting.
So that’s Tainan so far. I have a week left to get to the sights I haven’t seen so far, and then comes Chinese New Year, and after that my next flight. 新年快樂 in advance!
Harmon Moon 