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The Technological Graveyard: I Kill My MacBooks


2010
09.28

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Posted in Learning, Nebulous Items, Sensory Overload | 7 Comments »

They're all dead, Dave.

So in one fell swoop, I killed both of my computers over the course of one weekend.

The newer one, the MacBook Pro I got back in Canada in February, is technically still in a coma at the Genius Bar in the new Pudong Apple Store.

I tried to eject my portable hard drive and it refused to complete the eject. It went into Rainbow Death Wheel mode and wouldn’t close or  reboot or even shut down. I had to let the battery run out to force it to turn off. When the battery finally ran dry and shut down, it refused to wake up.  We tried all the trouble shooting keyboard combinations to no avail.  The lovely Lily Zhang at the Genius Bar wasn’t able to revive it either. I now have to wait ten days to find out what happened.

The older one, the 2006 clunky old batteryless grinder of a white MacBook that I got in Dubai, is thoroughly dead. This was not unexpected. The rainbow wheel of death interrupted my sentence and it never woke up from its force quit. All I got thereafter was the startup screen you can see above. It hurts.

So, technically, I am on a low tech diet for the next fortnight at least. I have nowhere to upload camera photos and no computer with bluetooth to take my phone photos. I’m writing this from work on my heavily Great Firewalled office computer.  Almost everything I want to read is blocked. Facebook, Twitter, Word Press, Blogger and Typepad are blocked. You Tube is blocked. So far, this website is still available. I have yet to offend, I suppose.

How do I feel about all this?

Not as badly as I’d feared.

I do feel very disconcerted by the possibility that I didn’t back everything up on my newer computer.  If so, my Myanmar and Yangshuo pictures may be lost. My Thunderbird-based emails (from the past several years, downloaded from my hotmail address) may be lost. There are some other odds and ends that I may or may not have remembered to back up, like music and videos, but they can be replaced.

As I said, however, I don’t feel as badly as I had feared.  Part of me, surreally and unexpectedly, feels released.  Part of me wants to just continue this trend and just say fuck it to everything- fuck the job,  fuck my mp3 player and digital camera and all my other nerd toys,  fuck my blog,  fuck living abroad,  fuck it all.

I want a farm and I want to raise goats and I want to learn to make awesome goat cheese like a master and I want to learn to brew beer and play the banjo and I want to be a hermit living off the grid.

Yeah.

And the other part of me feels very unnerved by my sudden disconnect. Slightly horrified by how ephemeral my connection with the outside world is. No computer=no skype to call home with; no ability to easily blog or email; no photos to show that I’ve been where I said I’ve been; no quick reassuring notes between long absent friends and acquaintances.

Everything suddenly feels very tenuous. If two computers can fry over the course of one weekend, what else could go just as suddenly?  And do I have a support system in place to keep me going if worse things (death, job loss, family illness) occur?  What is my backup plan?

Do I need to start investing in goats and banjo sheet music yet?

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Huh? Efendim? Ting Bu Dong: Opening Your Door to People You Can’t Understand


2010
09.06

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Posted in Learning, Nebulous Items, Sensory Overload | 10 Comments »

On the other side stands a shouting woman

In Istanbul, at the last flat I lived in before we left Turkey in 2008, my upstairs neighbour- a middle-aged woman in a house dress and slippers- used to ring my doorbell repeatedly at all hours. If I was in the shower, she’d keep ringing it until I was out and dried and dressed. Sometimes she was content to keep her finger on the doorbell for a good ten minutes before I answered the door.

Whenever I opened the door to her, she’d launch into a very fast, very loud tirade about…something. But I was never sure what because, well, I couldn’t understand her. My Turkish abilities were good enough to understand her had she bothered to slow down and stop shouting, but my scrunched up mystified face only made her shift into even more clipped, shouty tones. I’d stand in my doorway, in my PJs or sopping wet or with dinner rapidly cooling in the kitchen and she’d shout at me, a wall of sound that seemed to go on for ever, increasing in density and impenetrability.

What was she shouting about?

According to my landlord, whom I’d then call for clarification (the woman was a distant relative, it seemed),  my doormat was too dusty or I’d placed my garbage out on the curb at the wrong time or…something. My deer-in-headlights facial expressions and pleas for her to slow down and repeat what she’d said more clearly fell on deaf ears. Shouting was the way to go.

She wasn’t the only neighbour who barraged me with finger-to-the-doorbell mystifying shoutathons over the years. I actually thought it was a Turkish thing for neighbours to find something to yell at each other about across the threshold. I came to dread the sound of the ever-present bird-call doorbells in my various flats. If it rang, especially if it kept ringing after the first push, I knew I was in for a long, complicated, shouty lecture.

But it isn’t just a Turkish thing to ring doorbells and shout at your foreign neighbours who stare wide eyed and incomprehending at the barrage of barely understood verbiage.

Oh, Shanghai, Shanghai.

As you may know from previous posts, my Mandarin abilities are pretty basic. They are a lot less basic now that I’ve completed my 80 hours of intensive study over the past month but really, they are still pretty basic.  I’ve demonstrated this lack of ability in the lifts going down to the lobby when neighbours have tried to engage in small talk and I just stood there smiling like an imbecile, repeating the few phrases I could remember, nodding politely.  Most of our neighbours have given up on the elevator pleasantries- I get a brief nihao then silence.

Here, it isn’t the immediate neighbours who shout at me across the threshold. No, the woman across the hall with the appalling snarling beady-eyed mutant mini-dog has ceased trying to talk to me when her dog runs out to the hall every morning to bite my ankles. She knows I’m far too stupid to talk to.

Others haven’t realized the extent of my stupidity and keep trying to shout.

A few weeks ago, our doorbell rang at around midnight. I was asleep. The doorbell kept ringing. And ringing. I woke, thinking perhaps the building was on fire or a neighbour needed help or we were being evacuated or something similar, and so I got up and padded out into the darkened living room, peered through the spy-hole and saw a woman. I opened the door to a barrage of shouting. Apparently I’d ordered food. She thrust bags full of styrofoam food containers at me and berated me for…something. I had no idea what was going on. She waved a piece of paper in my face, as if the blur of densely written Chinese script would clarify anything. I kept repeating my stock phrases of I don’t understand and This isn’t my food at her but she was fairly adamant that increasing the speed and volume of her argument would help me to realize that I had indeed ordered food and would now kindly pay her for her services. If only I would just stop being so difficult.

Last night, our doorbell rang and an older woman in a cotton nightie and fuzzy slippers stood there with a clipboard and stern arrangement of facial features. She shouted at us for a few minutes while we explained repeatedly that we had no idea what she wanted. The more confusion we displayed, the louder and faster she spoke. I caught a few things- something about 150 and television. The rest was just an elided blur of tones. My brain ached. We finally speed dialed our landlord and shoved the phone at her and she stood in the middle of our living room in the thin cotton nightie and anklet socks (slippers left politely at the doorstep), barking out her frustrated needs to him. Ah, we had to pay for our cable TV. Ah. Right then. We paid, thanked her, and she left.

I’ve reached a point where I don’t want to open our door to anyone unless I’m actually expecting someone (hello New York Pizza!) or answer my phone unless the caller display shows someone I actually know. I’ve had too many years of being shouted at, as if the increasing volume and speed of the conversation will help to overcome my fundamental lack of comprehension and crucial gaps in vocabulary knowledge. It makes me feel tired and stupid.

In my Mandarin course last month, I learned about likes and dislikes, shopping, fruits and clothing, numbers, furniture and rooms, measure words, family members, and jobs. I would have appreciated a unit on possible doorbell dialogues.

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Do As I Say, Not As I Do: On Learning Chinese/ Teaching English


2010
08.29

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Posted in Learning, Nebulous Items, Teaching | 2 Comments »

Huh?

I’ve been told I’m a good teacher. I’ve been teaching English for nearly a decade now and know how to nurture a reluctant super-low beginner out of their speechless shell and into proud conversations in English. I’ve taught study skills so many times that I could teach a class on how best to learn a language at the drop of the hat.

I can’t say I do much of that myself when I’m at the other end of the piece of chalk. I’m an abysmally undisciplined language learner and, had I found myself in my own class being taught by myself, I’d likely be the one that Teacher Me gets infinitely annoyed by. Hello! I’m at the back, doodling and making occasional (kind hearted) snarky remarks and frequently refusing to read aloud or go up to the board. I probably also have my phone out, covertly sending an occasional text message from beneath the desk (work stuff, mostly, as I have to balance both this month). I have been known to feed my iFish on my iPod in the middle of Group Reading Aloud Moments, trying to focus my brain with the tap-tap-tapping.  I loathe reading aloud in class. In one ear and out the other. I’d rather sit quietly and parse my sentences.

But I do learn in the end, in spite of my many bad study habits.

From the Teacher Side

My Mandarin course has got me thinking about language learning and language teaching. If I am my own worst student (and yet I speak 5+ languages to varying degrees of fluency, mostly self taught) then I seriously need to stop and think about how we teach languages, what we expect from students (and why), and how we can reshuffle our advice to students about how to improve. I can’t say I’ve ever taken my own advice so maybe alternate advice is called for.

Why I suck at studying languages:

1. I’m shy. I may not look it, but I am. Even in English, I get nervous when I have to speak to people I don’t know. Ask me on my first day of Beginner class to go out in the break and ask 5 people 5 questions and I quake in my boots. Everything I just learned in class flies out the window as I struggle to contain my terror.

In Turkey, although I was actively studying Turkish on my own from the beginning, all my Turkish friends thought I was stubbornly stupid because I wasn’t speaking much more than hesitant, simple sentences for my first year or two. Other teachers, more outgoing teachers, happily blurted out sentences with appalling grammar and cringe-worthy pronunciation and used all the wrong words in all the wrong places and had praise lavished on them.

(more…)

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On Language Burnout After a few too Many Countries


2010
08.26

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Posted in Learning, Nebulous Items, Teaching | 13 Comments »

These chickens have nothing to do with language

It’s a funny thing starting an expat/travel blog sixteen years after you started travelling/living elsewhere and failed to do anything else with your adult life except, well, travel and be an expat.

For one, you’re not as freshly enthusiastic as those who are venturing out on their first big trip or landing in their first (or even third) foreign country.  Sometimes I can be downright jaded and cranky.

My rose coloured glasses cracked sometime around 1997 in London and were thoroughly smashed over the course of 6 years in Turkey (a country I love very much but which didn’t always love me back).  I don’t wear glasses at all anymore.

This is not to say that I’m beyond the point of wonder and fascination, no, no. You may have noticed that this blog is almost neurotically drawn to the quirks of the utterly mundane in Faraway Lands (or rather, as I’m in Shanghai, the Immediate Vicinity). I like exploring places very much, thank you.

Sometimes, however, there is burnout.

About a month ago, I posted a piece about my fast-travel burnout, how I just couldn’t take any more bam*bam*bam backpacking, dashing from crappy bus to slow train to trishaw to scary shared taxi to back-of-scooter.  I’m reaching a similar point in language acquisition.

I have no idea what this says

A little background here:

I grew up bilingual in French and English, having been sent through a French immersion program from kindergarten to grade 12.  That’s one spare language.

Then, in my London years, I was surrounded by, working with, working for, dating (just one) and living with an impossible number of South Africans. At the end of all that, I ended up living in Cape Town for 6 months. At one point, I was stage manager in a wholly Afrikaans speaking theatre company, taking all tech cues in Afrikaans. That was three years of Afrikaans immersion.  I can still recite dirty poetry and demand cups of tea, fluently.

After South Africa, I moved to Turkey and spent six years trying desperately to grasp Turkish so I wouldn’t feel horribly embarrassed when my students would say, “You’ve been living in Turkey this long and you still aren’t totally fluent? Are you stupid?” Their English skills (usually after a dozen years spent studying English) were generally no better and no worse than my Turkish skills but I still felt horribly ashamed. I spent most of 2005 (year 4) loathing the language, resenting it, feeling like it just wouldn’t sink into my brain, feeling utterly stupid.  That year passed and more Turkish was absorbed and I stopped resenting it. I left Turkey as a solid Intermediate (still not fluent, but very good at what I needed to be good at).

Before I left Turkey, I started studying Spanish, as we were tentatively planning to move to Mexico or Colombia or maybe Ecuador (we are flexible that way). For six months I ploughed my way through Live Mocha levels and tried to separate my Turkish intake from my Spanish (because I was also taking Turkish classes at the time).  By the time we made it to Mexico, I could easily read Spanish but my speaking was hesitant and my listening was just tired.

Between 1994 and now, I also travelled in countries that required German, Flemish, Portuguese, Twee, Bulgarian, Romanian, Burmese, Indonesian, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian and Arabic. I learned between a little and a lot of each of these.

Could it be Walmart?

Now, after a year and a half in Shanghai, I’ve just started taking Mandarin lessons. It’s a 4 week intensive course and I’m ashamed to admit that although it’s just a basic beginner course, I’ve learned more in the past 3 weeks than I had in the past 18 months.  That’s actually quite embarrassing.

Why hadn’t I learned more than just the basics I needed to get by? I knew my Thank Yous and How Muches and Hellos and whatnot but I had a huge mental block against learning Chinese. I bought book after book of the Learn Chinese in 2 Days sort, hoping that I’d learn by osmosis. They mostly stayed shut, gathering dust on my bedside table or on my desk at work. I tried listening to people speaking and tried to pick up bits and pieces but usually failed (though I became fluent in metro announcements due to my long commute). I was functionally illiterate due to the character system so my old learning style of constantly reading signs and billboards and newspapers failed me. I mostly just felt tired and wished I could still use one of the other languages I’d worked so hard for, which were fading away in my brain already from disuse.

I have met a lot of foreigners who were fluent in Chinese: they had Chinese spouses or they’d come here out of a singular  passion for Chinese culture and language or they were super keen first time travellers with brains open to anything new. I felt like a big, thick, stubbornly ignorant old doofus because my Linguistic Firewall had slammed shut and I was almost willfully refusing to learn one more freaking language. I was here for work, and we were in China mainly because when we left Turkey in 2008 during the autumn height of the Big Fun Financial Crisis, it was the only place that would take us and pay us a non-laughable wage. I wasn’t here out of a love for China (though I do have a big soft spot for it now). Part of me resented China for making me learn one more freaking language. I was tired, damnit. Just leave me alone.

Ironically (in an Alanis Morrisette kind of way, perhaps) I’m a long-time career language teacher whose job it is to motivate students to learn and to help them develop independent learning skills. I know exactly what I’ve been doing wrong but, damn it, I’m tired.

I’m studying now, studying harder than I have since my early years in Turkey, trying to keep up with my course.  Sometimes my brain just feels full; sometimes Turkish vocabulary pops into my sentences when I try to say something in Chinese; sometimes I just want to bang my head against the table because I have way, way too much conflicting linguistic knowledge battling for space in my brain. I’m glad I enrolled, as I can now deal with shop keepers and waiters without feeling like a complete imperialistic jerk but it’s hard.

Is there a sell-by date for travellers and their ability/willingness to add one more language?

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