A year and a month have gone by since my last post. The interpreter I mentioned did in fact get an internship in my office, which he’s already completed.
So, contrary to my intentions at the time, it was another fitful restart of my Mandarin Experiment. My viewing has been better than nothing in the past year, but it’s nothing to brag about. In 13 months, I’ve watched a total of 46 hours, or an average of seven minutes per day—a far cry from the 40 daily minutes I watched for some time back in 2014 and 2015.
I finished the soap opera My Ruby, My Blood and watched about 25 episodes of another soap opera, Mr. Right. I haven’t really liked either of them, and the only reason I do watch them is because my girlfriend keeps me company, which makes it worthwhile. I started noticing, however, that her main motivation seems to be as sleeping aid. She says, “Let’s watch Chinese!” I set it up and we watch about 5 minutes, after which she announces that she can’t deal with how sleepy she is, and the viewing is over… So I may have to switch back to movies and Qiao Hu.
Yesterday, however, was one of my best Chinese viewing days ever. I had a 12-hour flight from Sao Paulo to Addis Ababa on my way to Kuwait. Ethiopian Airlines had a good movie selection, including about 10 Chinese movies. I watched Youth, Have a Nice Day, and Old Beast. About a week before that, at home, I had watched Nightingale and Coming Home.
I had high expectations for Coming Home, since it is from my favorite director Zhang Yimou and stars the beautiful Gong Li, now middle aged. It didn’t disappoint, but it wasn’t one of their better films, either. Have a Nice Day, a 2017 animated dark comedy, was quite entertaining and different from anything I’d seen previously.
The movie I most enjoyed and would recommend, however—also from 2017—is Youth. It’s a coming-of-age story about a group of teenagers in a military art troupe in the 1970s. It gives rich insights into recent Chinese history and Chinese culture, and weaves moments of heroism and beauty into the ordinariness of human pettiness and egotism. While most of the film takes place in a short period in the 1970s, the latter segments follow the characters into adulthood and middle age, and I found the way it tied up the human dramas at the end quite satisfying.
I just looked up the director, Feng Xiaogang, and discovered he’s commercially a very successful director in China, mostly of comedies. I looked up his filmography and I have previously seen one of his other movies—Aftershock—which, like Youth, is a foray outside of his usual comedic genre, and instead a historically-based drama. I remember liking Aftershock quite a lot.
I won’t make any predictions now about the continuity of my recent viewing, but I will mention a bold statement I have made to a few people in recent months. At Brazil’s Federal Court of Accounts (TCU), where I currently head the international relations department, we will host a large international congress (INCOSAI) in the second semester of 2022. I have stated that if I happen to still be in that position, I will welcome and converse with the Chinese delegation in passable Mandarin! I think I may be able to do this if I not only complete my 1,000 hours of this Mandarin experiment by then, but also do another 1,000 hours of Part 2 of the Mandarin project, whose approach I won’t reveal quite yet. To do so, however, I will have to increase my 7 minutes per day to a full 60 minutes, a steep task considering I am also trying to learn computer programming, in addition to my demanding day job, my business, my farm, my Law degree, my travels, raising my daughter …
A Language Acquisition Experiment - Mandarin Chinese 