BEIJING - "Here's the one thing you need to know," Shannon said, and then paused for dramatic effect. "Chinese is PTPA: Person, Time, Place and Action."
It's the best instructional advice anyone's ever give me in Chinese. Better than when I found out the second and third tones are not, in fact, the same, better than when I found out I'd been writing the character for I - 我 - incorrectly. No, this constitutes nothing less than a Chinese miracle.
Everyday at Tsinghua I learn new words. Inside the classroom there are endless vocabulary lists, pop quizzes and impromptu 生词 (shengci, new words) thrown up on the board. After class is over I find myself learning more practical words, such as shower, earphones and stolen, for more practical reasons. Many of these encounters have been detailed on this blog, and I am sure more will in the future.
I find myself increasingly reaching for and finding new words, helping me to describe my problem to teachers, salespeople and random onlookers. But pressed to create dialogues on the spot, I find it coming out in an ungrammatical puddle, verbs, nouns and adjectives tripping over each other in unacceptable ways. I'm glad to at least be understood, but also realize that I must make the transition to more proper speech. That's where this little acronym comes in.
At first I thought PTPA was some kind of Golden Rule of Chinese, something most people learn on their first day of instruction. But I looked on Google and the phrase came up with no hits, and a couple classmates from different parts of the world had never heard of it. It might be a creation of Shannon's former university, a small language institute in California where he holed up 12 hours a day for 18 months, practicing his tones.
Like all rules, Shannon's has plenty of exceptions. But as a quick way to construct sentences on the fly, it'll do quite nicely.
Monday, March 19, 2007
The Georgian Order
