Twenty five years in Japan, sayonara

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Just bitching. I don’t mind the cold it’s a real “winter” cold. I’m from Salt Lake so it gets down much lower in temperature, but it doesn’t rain for days and days. It snows then after a couple of days, the sun shines. Yilan has that Seattle type of wet, light rain for weeks and weeks (or so they say, never been to Seattle).

I donno. I thought that I would be more excited than I am. I used to love going to new places, meeting new people and all. I’m not sure why this is so much different this time. Of everything, the language seems to be the biggest thing. I did it once before but maybe it’s because Chinese is harder than Japanese. Maybe it’s because Mandarin is a tonal language.

On the good side, our kids are really loving staying with my wife’s family. My daughter thinks she owns the world now she’s in the care of a set of grandparents and two aunts. I have a feeling it will take a while for her to recover when she’s faced with the reality of parents. :eek:

22

Yilan is pretty nice. There are beaches nearby. These day’s it is actually pretty close to Taipei timewise.

Chinese you have to study. I’d do Mandarin for you and your kids for sure since it doesn’t sound like your wife is hard core Taiwanese. You’ll all be able to use Mandarin around the world instead of a pretty limited Taiwanese geography.

The dreariness in seattle certainly is a drawback, so I feel for you on the rain side.

23

Bravo, sir, bravo.

TB good luck with the re-lo and you absolutely should consider the username change!

24

Oh my, that. is. effin’ brilliant. You win the interwebz today sir. Well played.

25

How about Taiwan Ahn?

26

How exciting!

Now for the pep talk…It’s okay if you don’t love it immediately. Sometimes you fall in love with a place at first sight, and sometimes you are disappointed and sad about a place, until it insidiously sneaks its way into your heart. It’s okay to just troop through it for a while. Eventually, you’ll almost certainly grow fond of the place.

Chinese will be a challenge, but there is a lot about it that is easier than Japanese. To begin with, the grammar is dead simple. Learning the vocabulary can be tough, but you won’t be spending a lot of time doing grammar drills. The tones seem really daunting, but it’s nothing we don’t do in English…think about the rising tone we use to indicate questions. It’s the same concept. In actual use, individual and regional speech patterns can vary the tones even among native speakers, and you don’t have to completely master the tones to make yourself understood. My town’s regional dialect was so confusing that I stopped trying to even try to learn tones and decided to just guess and slur my way through things. Despite making no effort with tones, I still was completely capable to manage daily life and performed well on standardized speaking and listening tests. Now and then you’ll find a word where you absolutely must use the right tone to be understood, but 90% of the time it really doesn’t matter all that much.

Congratulations on your new adventure!

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Ack! Double post.

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Thanks for the encouragement, even sven. It will be an adventure. :eek:

I may be letting the tones freak me out more than I need to. I can’t tell now which tone a word is, but I can hear that there are tones, so maybe some more exposure will help. After being around Chinese language at home for a number of years, I can pick out a few words in a conversation. It no longer sounds just like a string of completely unintelligible noise. Not that I understand any of it yet. . .

I met an American down there who said something similar. He said that when he puts the words together, then people can usually understand. That seems to be the way. I guess that giving people some more context will help. Rather than just say “water,” for example, say I’d like one glass 一杯 of water 水.

I do like Taiwanese people. If I can just stop freaking out about the language. Funny thing is that I’ve done it before and know how to change my approach. Still, I am freaking out, though.

29

tones are a lot less important when you get phrases down.

Set a goal of something like 1 hour a day, every day, for Chinese study. You’ll get there.

30

My nephew spent about eighteen months in Taiwan knowing scarcely any Chinese when he arrived and was pretty fluent at least in his field (financial) when he left. He loved it there but the people who’d hired him out of the U S screwed up something about the visa and he was asked to leave for at least three years.

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We arrived on Feb. 1st. Came to Yilan for a couple of days on a scouting exhibition, back to Taipei for supplies and a car and then now back in the countryside. The shipload of junk from Tokyo is breaking out of it’s identical cardboard boxes, although items frantically thrown in at the final moments are still lost.

Finding places to rent was remarkably difficult. Most families buy and not many units on the market. Finally, we found a converted bunker (not really, but Taiwan has the typical Asian subtropical concrete boxes while Japan went with wood) with two huge rooms and 15’ ceilings? Before we had our stuff in, the place echoed.

I have no idea if people are crazy or typical as there is as much difference between Japanese and Greater Chinese cultures as among them and the US. People talk louder and more animated than in Japan, but there is also less of the Over-The-Top extreme gratitude (Oh my god, thank you so much for opening the door for me, I’ll include you in my will and name my first son after you.)

The natives seem friendly. People drive much more insane than in Tokyo, which is great as it more matches my style. My wife will need to start driving and it terrifies her.

She’s getting more of a cultural shock, having resided in Tokyo for 17 years and having never lived as an independent adult in her native country. For me, everything is new, but she’s going on memories of a world as a child or student. This is the first time she’s had to buy detergent in Taiwan.

In a little less than six weeks, both kids’ first language in now Mandarin. Of course, this is due to their strong start due t my wife’s hard work and previous trips, but still. Just six weeks. Didi, at two and a bit was having a little harder time picking it up than his four-year-old sister who looks to be gifted in languages. At times it was hard to tell which language he was attempting, but Chinese is edging out Japanese now.

I haven’t really started to study yet, but just being exposed more, I’m starting to pick out a few words.

It’s Chinese New Year’s Eve, and everyone is lighting off fireworks. We’ll have another week to settle in and then start our new jobs.

One of my friends was saying they could never pack up and just move to a totally new country and culture, but I like it. New things to learn and do.

32

Whenever I see or hear ‘sayonara’, I can’t help thinking of the Pogues song of the same name.

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Happy new year! Gung hay fat choy!*

Hope things go well and you settle in quickly.

*The greatly-distorted, probably from Cantonese, Anglo representation of “Happy New Year” in Chinese… no doubt as similar to real Chinese as North American Chinese food is similar to real Chinese food…

34

Chinese New Years! Prepare for the world to sound like a demolition lot for weeks!

Congrats on making it over. Even moving down the street alone can be a pain, and moving a family overseas successfully is no small accomplishment.

35

I had my first taste of stinky soybeans for breakfast in Fukuoka a few years ago. Tangy and nutty in the mouth. Problem is, your sense of scent indicates to your brain that you’re about to consume decomposing flesh.

:eek:

I grew to love it.

Congrats on the move and what sounds like a terrific name change !!! If it’s best for the kids, it’s best.

36

It was pretty funny. After you’ve been in a few big ones, little quakes just aren’t that scary. I was sitting at the table, leisurely surfing the Net and the floor starts to shake. It got a little worse and I briefly looked around at what would happen if it got really bad. We’ve got a fairly sturdy Ikea kitchen table, which is comforting, until I remembered I live in the typical Asian two-story concrete box. If the second floor tumbles down on my head, the three-quarter inch table isn’t doing to make that much of a difference. Fortunately, the shaking stops and back to the net.

We’re getting settled in. We’ve both got our jobs. My wife is teaching at a local high school and I’m teaching English to a bunch of [de]brats[/kids] Taiwan’s new hopes for the future. After years of working in business, this a new experience. It’s good, though and it’s a start. I really feel sorry for the kids. Memorize, memorize and memorize. A few of them like English, most are their because of the mothers want them to get into a better university and a few have absolutely no desire to waste any more of their life on studying, but aren’t old enough to make their own choices. The Taiwanese teachers keep order by yelling. Remember Tiger Mother? She’s Taiwanese.

My wife and I want to have our own afterschool thing eventually. Try a different approach for language and education and teach kids of parents who are more interested in drawing out their kid’ strengths rather than forcefully drilling knowledge into their skulls. But first things first, and getting acclimatized to Taiwan and familiar with the education system while drawing a paycheck, no matter how meager, is our first priority.

Beta-chan and Didi are now completely fluent in Chinese. At 4 1/2, Beta-chan amuses herself by correcting my attempts at communication with the natives. My wife will indicate the pitch of words with a gesture, so Beta-chan copies this, but without the concept that pitches which go up ought to be accompanied by similar gestures, rather than random circles.

At 2 1/2, Didi was first mixing all three languages, sometimes in the same sentence. Chinese and English words with Japanese grammar. He’s pretty much gotten back into separating his languages according to who he talks to.

They both like the preschool / kindergarten.

Taiwanese are really friendly, and several of the neighbors have kids. They still do the old fashion “just show up on the door and ask if they can come in and play.” No need for play dates. Really nice. We live near a large park and everyone heads over there on the weekends.

We’re out in a small city / large town and I really like the slower pace after fighting the crowds of Tokyo.

37

Can someone explain the **TaipeiPersonality **pun? I am afraid it means nothing to me.

38

Type A Personality Theory.

39

Well, Cantonese is closer to real authentic Chinese than is Mandarin.

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Gocha. Thanks.