Over the past weekend, I went on a shopping spree in one of Changchun’s shopping malls. Among other things, it gave me the opportunity to polish my evolving Chinese language skills a little. Blushing at that endeavour with the benefit of hindsight, the outcome’s been a mixed bag. There’s a bookshop in that shopping mall. Bookshops always draw me. They’re an irresistible temptation. In that bookshop I may have put on a more or less solid performance in terms of speaking Chinese. I managed to ask for books penned in English and was then directed to the right section. After turning the bookshop upside down, I tried to get my hands on aftershave. In that respect, my Chinese didn’t shape up. Instead, I had some digging to do myself. Who cares? After all, I’m not yet fluent in Chinese, by a long shot.

By the way, there are two approaches you can kick off with to learn Chinese. You can start off with Chinese characters. And you learn Chinese vocabulary and grammar along the way. Or you can start out with Pinyin. Pinyin stands for the romanisation system used for Mandarin. Pinyin’s also known as Hanyu Pinyin. Hanyu means Chinese and Pinyin means spelling of the sound. That gives you a notion of what Pinyin’s primarily used for. Pinyin’s chiefly used to teach the standard pronunciation of Mandarin. It makes no hoot of a difference which technique you use to learn Chinese. The head of my department taught for loads of years at universities in Germany. He every now and then geared staff of the German foreign ministry (Auswaertiges Amt) up for their stint in China. He then kicked off with Chinese characters. My private Chinese teacher’s started out with Pinyin.

Be that as it may. As long as Chinese presents a challenge for you, you may have a banter in Chinglish. Chinglish reflects written or spoken English, which is influenced by Chinese. You can chat in Chinglish as plenty of whites chat in South Africa. They’re fluent in both English and Afrikaans. They switch between both languages in the middle of the sentence. You can do that sort of thing in Chinglish as well. It may sound like “Wo you shi jian yin wei ni mei mei he wo have our date tomorrow, not today”. A second variety of Chinglish sounds like English, which is influenced by particularities of Chinese. For instance, the verb “kan” means in Chinese see and watch as well as read and look. A native Chinese speaker who attempts to get a handle on English may thus relay to you “I’m looking a movie. But tomorrow I’ll watch a book”. When he relays it to you, give it some thought. And it won’t go over your head.

Changchun’s Sculpture Park

Doing the tourist thing goes over my head. Leading an international lifestyle and doing the tourist thing do exclude each other. Leading an international lifestyle implies living across the globe and having a worldwide set of friends as well as…With my boots on the ground in a certain spot, I may undig investment opportunities or give the respective literature a go. I may make contacts, both privately and professionally. I may suss restaurants out as well. Yet it doesn’t include doing the tourist thing. I almost never do the tourist thing. It’s called tourist thing for a reason. It’s for tourists, not for global players, for whom the world’s a village.

(Photo opposite: Sculpture at Changchun’s Sculpture Park) However, through talk of the town I’ve learned about the Changchun World Sculpture Park. That park’s rumoured to showcase sculptures from eastern and western civilisations. It seems to combine art and natural beauty in quite a choice setting. You may feel like doing the tourist thing there when in Changchun. But don’t look for me there. My interests have taken an entirely different turn in the course of time.

Instead of doing the tourist thing, I do value silence, every now and then. Do you recollect a concept called silence? No mobile phone. No text messaging. No BlackBerry. No nothing. Just unplug every now and then. It does step up my quality of life. Silence every now and then helps you not take leave of your senses. You may be minded to give it some thought.

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