What would be the point of giving out video awards if we ignored most of the planet?  If our slightly better-known cinema awards rivals can honor foreign language films, so can we. Besides, there is nothing like a watching a film with subtitles to make a person feel attuned with the cognoscenti.  So without further ado, I bring you our first nominee for Best Foreign Language Video.

This HD video, in Cantonese with Mandarin subtitles, follows Lingnam University students Silva Siu and Ying Tsang on the 2009  edition of the Fong Sum Wood Library tour.   Cheerful and thorough, Silva leds Ying through nearly every aspect of the library and it’s services, all without the action sequences, skyline shots, corrupt cops, smokey rooms, or dark rainy alleyways that Hong Kong movies normally bring to mind.  This video won’t be coming to IFC, or that martial arts video store we used to visit down by the Port Authority Bus Terminal, but if you want to learn more about Lingnam’s library this will be a blockbuster. Oh and try not to drool too much over all those flat screen TVs in the media center.

are viv + i?
“ni hao ma… (again)” this time from beijing, china!
  

having aready been to the southwestern part of china, we had an opportunity this time to visit the northeastern part… the capital of china:  beijing (a.k.a. “peking” or “the forbidden city“).  

ni hao ma... welcome to "the great wall of china"!

to be honest, i really wasn’t looking forward to going. i was hoping we could rest/stay longer in hong kong before our next scheduled trip to japan.
but having gone, all i can say is: (besides being mind-numbingly COLD…) beijing ROCKED! 
of course, vivien was responsible for this (as she has/is/will continue to be the reason all things in my life ROCK )!  it was awesome seeing her switch gears from speaking cantonese to mandarin. she navigated us through the streets as if we were locals! what an incredible skill it is to be multi-lingual!
**SIDE NOTE: upon our return, i’m gonna get miss rosetta stone and learn some mandarin (maybe i’ll also have to look into mandy and pandy)! as is evident, china will continue to develop its global presence and will be a (if not “the“) dominant presence/force in the next 10-25 years. and Lord willing, we hope to return (and hopefully i’ll be fluent in mandarin!).**

upon arrival, i really wasn’t sure what to expect. i remember being somewhat fearful of beijing/china. growing up as an army brat and having lived in germany before “the wall” came down, i remember when watching tv shows, instead of regular commercials pitching consumerproducts, we had to watch 30 second u.s. military spots on the evils of communism + to be wary of foreign enemies of the u.s. i guess this had a lasting influence on me, but ultimately it was irrelevant and unnecessary. what i found was that there was just so much to see/witness and experience in beijing! and the people…? they were SOOO kind and willing to help. it blew me away how warm they were (and how much they SPIT… and coming from a spitter like me, that’s saying A LOT)!
we started with tiananmen square. we were on the same street where history was made about 20 years ago! i remember every tv station in the world played and replayed the lone man in white standing up to the row of tanks coming down the street. weird to think how much has changed since then…
and with the government’s censorship/effort to block details of this tragic event, we were told by locals that many of today’s younger chinese don’t even recognize who is + the significance of “the tank man” and what transpired during the fateful summer of 1989. 

the forbidden city in tiananmen square!

we proceeded to enter the forbidden city -  imperial palace from the ming dynasty to the end of the qing dynasty (roughly 5 centuries!). it was declared a world heritage site in 1987, and listed by unesco as the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world… another words, this place was MASSIVE!  

welcome...

entering the inner courts...

we strolled a few blocks over to a very happening street with shops galore! even saw a joint korea-china venture lotte shopping mall. after being numbed by store after store, we decided to head a few blocks to the famous wángfujing night market…
now THIS is what beijing is about!  

not the fastest rickshaw, but the driver was ALWAYS smiling...

viv joining some friends welcoming all to the wangfujing night market...

right as we entered the initial entrance gate we were greeted by: live scorpions + seahorses (why aren’t there any good live scorpions + seahorses joint in seattle?!?! or for that matter… good pig brains?!?!)!  

who wants some fresh seahorses + scorpions?!?? YUM!!!

poor things... they didn't know what hit them from behind (PS - it was the tip of a skewer)...

i mean... seriously... eating seahorses?! look how cute these lil' guys look!

when in china…

vivien "the scorpion destroyer" ng...

got a chance to visit the summer palace (a summer resort for empress dowager cixi. a “summer resort“?!?! zaang! ballaz! either that or the emperor got caught doing something bad…). sorry viv, the best summer palace i can offer is shared communal usage of the gazeebo @ greenlake!

viv welcoming you to her... i mean... "the" summer palace.

viv + i noticed the striking resemblance between this famous (and incredible good-looking) buddha and i...

saw both the jinyuan (largest in china) + the place mall (which boasts the world’s largest lcd tv @ over 6,000 sq. m.! beats this kid’s setup hands down!):

i'm thinking viv got the hint what i want for christmas!

after eating scorpions + seahorses, we decided to splurge on dinner @ the BALLA green t house!

but none of the shopping malls in beijing (or anywhere in the world for that matter) compared to the experience we had at the infamous: silk street market! this place was WILD!
packed inside this 5 floor building (including a basement), were more little booths/shops than you could imagine or your brain could even process. the place was SO cramped with shops and each shopkeepers wanted your money! you literally couldn’t walk more than 3-4 feet before being swarmed, grabbed at, pulled and mauled by the shopkeepers.
now… if you can handle this kind of thing (which i really can’t), then this IS your place to bargain and get some cool stuff. and we were so lucky to have a family friend of viv’s come along. he had a reputation of making shopkeepers cry and angry (and sometimes both) with his bargaining skills.
his rules of bargaining?
1. NEVER give or reveal your price until the shopkeeper guesses it and
2. do NOT bargain unless you’re serious about buying it.
thanks to him viv + i have a ridiculously cheap priced north face backpacks (which will come in handy in new zealand + australia)! sure it says, “the morth face” but who cares…   

mutianyu – a section of the great wall. truly an awe-inspiring moment to step foot on this landmark! because it was so cold, viv + i almost had the great wall to ourselves for the entire day. during the peak summer seasons, there are scores and scores of visitors there and nearly impossible to take a picture w/o having some step in front of the camera. another cool feature of mutianyu, they have a toboggan ride you can take down to the visitor’s base area… definitely worth taking! 

viv welcoming you to the "mutianyu" great wall of china!

almost there... just another 5 minutes...

this shows how whooped we felt after climbing all the stairs... and it was MORE than "just another 5 mins"!!!

viv finding out the huskies won the apple cup. oh yeah... and that we were at the great wall!

after climbing to the top of the wall, what better way to get down than via toboggan... WHEE!

and what would a visit to beijing be without seeing the architectural marvels of the olympic park?

at the entrance of the beijing olympic park...

running to the bird's nest (with my "the morth face" backpack)!

michael phelps, michael schpelps! look at that perfect form!

and some more random pics of our amazing beijing adventure:

how cool is that? our hotel reminded us what day of the week it was!

pretty much all of asia's got the public transporation thing down pat...

nothing beats sweet potaterz (in the best slingblade voice) from street vendors!

mah-johng being played in the streets by the locals... the grandmas were the most brutal playaz!

ah-ha! the key to eating mickey-d's + staying slim = ride your bike there!

a typical night (and day for that matter) in downtown beijing = TONS of traffic!

zai jian 再见 (for now)…

for more reading:
- where in the world… (part 4)
- where in the world… (part 3)
- where in the world… (part 2)
- where in the world… (part 1)

Caution: This post is very long. It runs to 48 pages on the Net.

This is a continuation of the earlier post. I split it up into two parts because it had gotten too long.

Ratings: Languages are rated 1-5, easiest to hardest. 1 = easiest, 2 = moderately easy to average, 3 = average to moderately difficult, 4 = very to extremely difficult, 5 = most difficult of all.

Time needed: Time needed to learn the language “reasonably well”: Level 1 languages = 3 months to 1 year. Level 2 languages = 6 months to 1 year. Level 3 languages = 1 to 2 years. Level 4 languages = 2 years. Level 5 languages = 3-4 years, but some may take longer.

NE Caucasian, NW Caucasian and Kartvelian

Of course the Caucasian languages like Tsez, Tabasaran, Georgian, Chechen, Ingush, Abkhaz and Circassian are some of the hardest languages on Earth to learn. Tsez has 126 different cases! Tabasaran is rated the 3rd most complex grammar in the world, with 48 different noun cases.

Tsez, Tabasaran, Chechen, Circassian, Ingush and Abkhaz are rated 5, hardest of all.

One problem with Georgian is the strange alphabet: ქართულია ერთ ერთი რთული ენა. It also has lots of glottal stops that are hard for many foreigners to speak, a single verb can have up to 12 different parts, similar to Polish, consonant clusters can be huge – up to 8 consonants stuck together, and there are 6 cases and 6 tenses. Georgian is said to be one of the hardest languages on Earth to pronounce.

Georgian is rated 5, hardest of all.

Ubykh, a Caucasian language of Turkey, is now extinct, but I believe there is one second language speaker. It has more consonants than any language on Earth.

Ubykh is rated 5, hardest of all.

American Indian Languages

American Indian languages are also notoriously difficult, though  few try to learn them. You almost really need to learn these as a kid. It’s going to be quite hard for an adult to get full competence in them.

Dene-Caucasian

Na-Dene

Navajo has long, short and nasal vowels, a tone system, and a grammar totally unlike anything in Indo-European. A stem of only four letters or so can take enough affixes to fill a whole line of text. Some Navajo dictionaries have thousands of entries of verbs only, with no nouns. A verb has no particular form like in English – to walk. Instead, it assumes various forms depending on whether or not the action is completed, incomplete, in progress, repeated, habitual, one time only, instantaneous, or simply desired.

For instance, the verb ndideesh means to pick up or to lift up. But it varies depending on what you are picking up.

For instance, ndideeshtiil – to pick up a slender stiff object (key, pole), ndideeshleel – to pick up a slender flexible object (branch, rope), ndideesh’aal – to pick up a roundish or bulky object (bottle, rock), ndideeshgheel – to pick up a compact and heavy object (bundle, pack) , ndideeshjol – to pick up a non-compact or diffuse object (wool, hay) , ndideeshteel – to pick up something animate (child, dog), ndideeshnil – to pick up a few small objects (a couple of berries, nuts), ndideeshjih – to pick up a large number of small objects (a pile of berries, nuts), ndideeshtsos -to pick up something flexible and flat (blanket, piece of paper), ndideeshjil - to pick up something I carry on my back, ndideeshkaal – to pick up anything in a vessel, ndideeshtloh – to pick up mushy matter (mud).

But picking up is only one way of handling the 12 different consistencies. One can also bring, take, hang up, keep, carry around, turn over, etc. objects. There are about 28 different verbs one can use for handling objects. If we multiply these verbs by the consistencies, there are over 300 different verbs used just for handling objects.

In Navajo textbooks, there are conjugation tables for inflecting words, but it’s pretty hard to find a pattern there. One of the worst things about Navajo is that every little morpheme you add to a word seems to change everything else around it, even in both directions.

It is even said that Navajo children have a hard time learning Navajo as compared to children learning other languages, but Navajo kids definitely learn the language.

Similarly with Hopi below, even linguists find even the best Navajo grammars difficult or even impossible to understand.

Navajo is rated 5, hardest of all.

Hopi is so difficult that even grammars describing the language are almost impossible to understand.

Hopi is rated 5, hardest of all.

Slavey, a Na-Dene language of Canada, is hard to learn. It is similar to Navajo and Apache. Verbs take up to 15 different prefixes. It also uses a completely different alphabet, a syllabic one designed for Canadian Indians.

Slavey is rated 5, hardest of all.

Salishan

The Salishan languages spoken in the Northwest have a long reputation for being hard to learn, in part because of long strings of consonants, in one case 11 consonants long. The Salish languages are, like Chukchi, polysynthetic. Some translations treat all Salish words are either verbs or phrases. Some say that Salish languages do not contain nouns, though this is controversial. Many of the vowels and consonants are not present in most widely spoken languages.

Nuxálk is a notoriously difficult Salishan Amerindian language spoken in British Colombia. It is famous for having some really wild words and even sentences that don’t seem to have any vowels in them at all. For instance, xłp̓x̣ʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ – he had a bunchberry plant.

The Salishan languages are rated rated 5, hardest of all.

Kootenai

Yet the Salishans always considered the neighboring language Kootenai to be too hard to learn. Kootenai is an isolate spoken in Idaho.

Kootenai is rated 5, hardest of all.

Algonquian

Ojibwa and Cree are said to be very hard to learn. They are written in a variety of different ways with different alphabets and syllabic systems, complicating matters even further. They are both polysynthetic and have long, short and nasal vowels and aspirated and unaspirated voiceless consonants. Words are divided into metrical feet, the rules for determining stress placement in words are quite complex and there is lots of irregularity. Vowels fall out a lot, or syncopate, within words.

Cree adds noun classifiers to the mix, and both nouns and verbs are marked as animate or inanimate. In addition, verbs are marked for transitive and intransitive. In addition, verbs get different affixes depending on whether they occur in main or subordinate clauses.

Cree and Ojibwa ares rated 5, hardest of all.

Uto-Aztecan

Numic

Comanche is legendary for being one of the hardest Indian languages of all to learn. Reasons are unknown, but all Amerindian languages are quite difficult. I doubt if Comanche is harder than other Numic languages. Bizarrely enough, Comanche has very strange sounds called voiceless vowels, which seems to be an oxymoron, as vowels would seem to be inherently voiced. English has something akin to voiceless vowels in the words particular and peculiar, where the bolded vowels act something akin to a voiceless vowel.

Comanche is rated 5, hardest of all.

Quechuan

Quechua is said to be very hard to learn. Some say that Quechua speakers spend their whole lives learning the language.

Quechua is rated 5, hardest of all.

Oto-Manguean

Chinantec, an Indian language of southwest Mexico, is very hard for non-Chinantecs to learn. The tone system is maddeningly complex, and the syntax and morphology is very intricate.

Chinantec is rated 5, hardest of all.

Iroquoian

Cherokee is said to be very hard to learn. In addition to everything else, it has a completely different alphabet. It’s polysynthetic, to make matters worse. It is possible to write a Cherokee sentence that somehow lacks a verb. There are five categories of verb classifiers. Verbs needing classifiers must use one. Each regular verb can have an incredible 21,262 inflected forms! All verbs contain a verb root, a pronominal prefix, a modal suffix and an aspect suffix. In addition, verbs inflect for singular, plural and also dual. Number is marked for inclusive vs. exclusive.

Cherokee also have lexical tone, with complex rules about how tones may combine with each other. Tone is not marked in the orthography.

Cherokee is rated 5, most difficult of all.

Australian

Australian Aborigine languages are said to be some of the hardest languages on Earth to learn, like Amerindian or Caucasian languages.

All Australian languages are rated 5, most difficult of all.

Afroasiatic

Semitic

Arabic has some very crazy manners of noun declension, even in the plural. For instance, the word girls changes in an unpredictable way when you say one girl, two girls and three girls, and there are two different ways to say two girls depending on context.

Further, it is full of irregular plurals similar to octopus and octopi in English, whereas these forms are rare in English. The language is full of stuff like that. When you say I love you to a man, you say it one way, and when you say it to a woman, you say it another way. On and on. There are 28 different symbols in the alphabet, three different ways to write each symbol depending on its place in the word, and on top of that, there are many different scripts. The laryngeals, uvulars and glottalized sounds are hard for many foreigners to make.

Arabic is at least as idiomatic as French or English, so it order to speak it right you have to learn all of the expressionistic nuances.

To attain anywhere near native speaker competency in Egyptian Arabic, you probably need to live in Egypt for ten years, but Arabic speakers say that few if any second language learners ever come close to native competency. There is a huge vocabulary, and most words have a wealth of possible meanings.

Arabic is rated 4, extremely difficult.

Maltese is a strange language, basically an Arabic language that has very heavy influence from non-Arabic tongues. It shares the problem of Gaelic that often words look one way and are pronounced another.

Maltese is rated 4, extremely difficult.

Hebrew is said to be hard to learn, but I am not sure why. Part of the problem may be the writing system, which leaves out vowels if I am not mistaken.

Hebrew gets a 4 for extremely difficult.

Dravidian

Malayalam, a Dravidian language of India, was recently rated the hardest language of all to learn by the World Language Research Foundation. Tamil, a Dravidian language, is probably close to Malayalam in difficulty. Tamil has an incredible 247 characters in its alphabet. In addition, as with other languages, words are written one way and pronounced another. Both Tamil and Malayalam are very hard to pronounce and have complicated scripts.

Malayalam and Tamil are rated 5, most difficult of all.

Altaic

Most agree that Korean is a hard language to learn.

The alphabet, Hangul at least is reasonable; in fact, it is quite elegant. But there are 4 different Romanizations- Lukoff, Yale, Horne, and McCune-Reischauer – which is preposterous. It’s best to just blow off the Romanizations and dive straight into Hangul. This way you can learn Romanization later, and you won’t mess up your Hangul with spelling errors, as can occur if you go from Romanization to Hangul. Hangul can be learned very quickly, but learning to read Korean books and newspapers fast is another matter altogether.

Bizarrely, there are two different numeral sets used, but one is derived from Chinese so should be familiar to Chinese, Japanese or Thai speakers who use similar or identical systems.

Korean has a similar problem with Japanese, that is, if you mess up one vowel in sentence, you render it incomprehensible. Korean has a wealth of homonyms, and this is one of the tricky aspects of the language. Any given combination of a couple of characters can have multiple meanings. Pronunciation is easy, with the exception of morphing consonants at the end of the word that slide into the next word. One problem is that the b,  p,  j, ch, t and d are pronounced differently than their English counterparts.

Meanwhile, Korean has an honorific system that is even wackier than that of Japanese. However, the younger generation is not using the honorifics so much, and a foreigner isn’t expected to know the honorific system anyway.

Korean is rated by language professors as being one of the hardest languages to learn.

Korean is rated 5, hardest of all.

Japonic

Japanese also uses a symbolic alphabet, which is odd in that even Japanese speakers will sometimes encounter written Japanese and will say that they don’t know how to pronounce it. I don’t mean that they mispronounce it; that would make sense. I mean they don’t have the slightest clue how to say the word! This problem is essentially nonexistent in a language like English.

There are over 5,000 frequently used characters in 3 different symbolic alphabets that are frequently mixed together in a confusing way. Due to the large number of frequently used symbols, it’s said that even Japanese adults learn a new symbol a day a ways into adulthood.

The Japanese writing system is probably crazier than the Chinese writing system. Japanese borrowed Chinese characters. But then they gave each character several pronunciations, and in some cases as many as 24. Next they made two syllabaries using another set of characters, then over the next millenia came up with all sorts of crazy and often senseless rules about when to use the syllabaries and when to use the character set. Later on they added a Romanization to make things even worse.

Chinese uses 5-6,000 characters regularly, while Japanese only uses around 2,000. But in Chinese, each character has only one or maybe two pronunciations. In Japanese, there are complicated rules about when and how to combine the hiragana with the characters. These rules are so hard that many native speakers still have problems with them. There are also personal and place names (proper nouns) which are given completely arbitrary pronunciations often totally at odds with the usual pronunciation of the character.

Speaking Japanese is not as difficult as everyone says, and many say it’s fairly easy. However, there is a problem similar to English in that one word can be pronounced in multiple ways, like read and read in English. There is also a class of Japanese called “honorifics” that is quite hard to master. These typically effect verbs. Honorifics vary depending on who you are and who you are talking to. In addition, gender comes into play. One wild thing about Japanese is counting forms. You actually use different numeral sets depending on what it is you are counting! There are dozens of different ways of counting things.

The grammar is quite complicated, one of the most complex on Earth. Verbs engage in all sorts of wild behavior, and adverbs often act like verbs. Meanwhile, honorifics change the behavior of all words. There are particles like ha and ga that have many different meanings. One problem is that everything that all noun modifiers, even phrases, must precede the nouns they are modifying.

In this sentence:

The plane that was supposed to arrive at midnight, but which had been delayed by bad weather, finally arrived at 1 AM.

Everything underlined must precede the noun plane:

Was supposed to arrive at quarter to three, but had been delayed by traffic accident the plane finally arrived at three-thirty.

Speaking Japanese is one thing, but reading and writing it is a whole new ballgame. It’s perfectly possible to know the meaning of every kanji and the meaning of every word in a sentence, but you still can’t figure out the meaning of the sentence because you can’t figure out how the sentence is stuck together in such a way as to create meaning.

However, Japanese grammar has the advantage of being quite regular. For instance, there are only two irregular verbs.

Like Chinese, it has short words, no case, gender, verb inflections or tense. However, while Chinese is forgiving of errors, if you mess up one vowel in a Japanese sentence, you may end up with incomprehension.

The real problem is that the Japanese you learn in class is one thing, and the Japanese of the street is another. One problem is that in street Japanese, the subject is typically not stated in a sentence. Instead it is inferred through such things as honorific terms or the choice of words you used in the sentence. Probably no one goes crazier on negatives than the Japanese. Particularly in academic writing, triple and quadruple negatives are common, and can be quite confusing.

Yet there are problems with the agglutinative nature of Japanese. It’s a completely different syntactic structure than English. Often if you translate a sentence from Japanese to English it will just look like a meaningless jumble of words. Although many Japanese learners feel it’s fairly easy to learn, surveys of language professors continue to rate Japanese as one of the hardest languages to learn. However, it’s generally agreed that Japanese is easier to learn than Korean.

Japanese is rated 5, hardest of all.

Turkic

Turkish is often considered to be hard to learn, and it’s rated one of the hardest in surveys of language teachers, however, it’s probably easier than its reputation made it out to be. It is agglutinative, so you can have one long word where in English you might have a sentence of shorter words. Many words have more than one meaning.

There is no verb to be, which is hard for many foreigners. Instead, the concept is wrapped onto the subject of the sentence as a -dim or -im suffix. Turkish is an imagery-heavy language, and if you try to translate straight from a dictionary, it often won’t make sense. However, the suffixation in Turkish, along with the vowel harmony, are both very precise, and there are few if any exceptions. The Roman alphabet and almost mathematically precise grammar really help out.

Turkish is only rated 2, or moderately easy.

Finno-Ugric

Finnic

Finnish is very hard to learn, and even long-time learners often still have problems with it. You have to know exactly which grammatical forms to use where in a sentence. In addition, Finnish has 15 cases in the singular and 16 in the plural. This is hard to learn for speakers coming from a language with little or no case.

For instance, talo is the house, talon – house’s, taloa – some of the house, taloksi – into/as the house, talossa – in the house, talosta – from inside the house, taloon – into the house, talolla – on to the house, talolta – from beside the house, talolle – to the house, taloista – from the houses and taloissa – in the houses.

A simple adjective + noun noun phrase of two words can be conjugated in up to 100 different ways.

As with Hungarian, words can be very long. For instance, lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas which means a non-commissioned officer cadet learning to be an assistant mechanic for airplane jet engines.

Finnish, oddly enough, always puts the stress on the first syllable. Finnish vowels will be hard to pronounce for most foreigners. However, Finnish has the advantage of being pronounced precisely as it is written. This is also part of the problem though, because if you don’t say it just right, the meaning changes. And Finns don’t understand foreigners very well, because they are not used to non-native speakers trying to speak their language. So, similarly with the Poles, when you mangle their language, you will only achieve incomprehension.

As in many Asian languages, there are no masculine or feminine pronouns. One redeeming feature of Finnish is a complete lack of consonant clusters.

Finnish is rated the second hardest to learn by language teachers. Estonian has similar difficulties with Finnish, since they are closely related. However, on the plus side, Finnish is very regular.

Finnish is rated 5, hardest of all.

Ugric

It’s widely agreed that Hungarian is one of the hardest languages on Earth to learn. Even language professors agree, as they rate it second hardest to learn. For one thing, there are many different forms for a single word via word modification. This enables the speaker to make his intended meaning very precise. Hungarian is said to have an incredible 35 different cases, but the actual number is probably just 18. Verbs change depending on whether the object is definite or indefinite. There are 5 different types of verb conjugations. Nearly everything in Hungarian is inflected, similar to Lithuanian or Czech.

There are also very long words such as megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért. Being an agglutinative language, that word is made up of many small parts of words, or morphemes. That word means something like for your (you all possessive) repeated pretensions at being  impossible to desecrate.

Another long word is töredezettségmentesítőtleníttethetetlenségtelenítőtlenkedhetnétek.  And I’m not even really sure what that means.

The preposition is stuck onto the word in this language, and this will seem strange to speakers of languages with free prepositions.

Hungarian is full of synonyms, similar to English.

For instance, there are 78 different words that mean to move: halad, jár, megy, dülöngél, lépdel, botorkál, kódorog, sétál , andalog, rohan, csörtet, üget, lohol, fut, átvág, vágtat, tipeg, libeg, biceg, poroszkál, vágtázik, somfordál , bóklászik, szedi a lábát, kitér, elszökken, betér , botladozik, őgyeleg, slattyog, bandukol, lófrál, szalad, vánszorog, kószál, kullog, baktat, koslat, kaptat, császkál, totyog, suhan, robog, rohan, kocog, cselleng, csatangol, beslisszol, elinal, elillan, bitangol, lopakodik, sompolyog, lapul, elkotródik, settenkedik, sündörög, eltérül, elódalog, kóborol, lézeng, ődöng, csavarog, lődörög, elvándorol , tekereg, kóvályog, ténfereg, özönlik, tódul, vonul, hömpölyög, ömlik, surran, oson, lépeget, mozog and mozgolódik .

Only about five of those terms are archaic and seldom used, the rest are in current use.

In addition, while most languages have names for countries that are pretty easy to figure out, in Hungarian even languages of nations are hard because they have changed the names so much. Italy becomes  Olazorszag, Germany becomes Nemetzorsag, etc.

As in Russian and Serbo-Croatian, word order is relatively free in Hungarian. Further, there are quite a few dialects in Hungarian. Native speakers can pretty much understand them, but foreigners often have a lot of problems. Accent is very difficult in Hungarian due to the bewildering number of rules to determine accent. In addition, there are exceptions to all of these rules. Hungarian spelling is also very strange for non-Hungarians.

There are many irregularities in inflections, and even Hungarians have to learn how to spell of these in school and have a hard time learning this. Hungarian phonetics is also strange, and to make matters worse, there is tons of slang. One of the problems with Hungarian phonetics is vowel harmony. Since you stick morphemes together to make a word, the vowels that you have used in the first part of the word will influence the vowels that you will use to make up the morphemes that occur later in the word. The vowel harmony gives Hungarian the “singing effect” when it is spoken. The gy sound is hard for many foreigners to make.

It’s hard to say, but Hungarian is probably harder to learn than even the hardest Slavic languages like Czech, Serbo-Croatian and Polish.

Hungarian is rated 5, hardest of all.

Sino-Tibetan

Sinitic

It’s fairly easy to learn to speak Mandarin at a basic level, though the tones can be tough. This is because the grammar is very simple. Short words, no case, gender, verb inflections or tense. But with Japanese, you can keep learning, and with Chinese, you sort of hit a wall, often because the syntactic structure is so strangely different from English (isolating).

The alphabet uses symbols, so it’s not even a real alphabet. There are 85,000 symbols, but you only use about 3,000 of them, and many Chinese don’t even know 1,000. It’s a real problem when you encounter a symbol you don’t know because there is no way to sound out the word. You are really and truly lost and screwed. Mandarin is similar to German in that you need to learn quite a bit of vocabulary just to speak simple sentences.

The tones are often quite difficult for a Westerner to pick up. If you mess up the tones, you have said a completely different word. Often foreigners who know their tones well nevertheless do not say them correctly, and hence, they say one word when they mean another.

A major problem with Chinese is homonyms. To some extent, this is true in many tonal languages. Chinese being monosyllabic, there is a limited repertoire of sounds that can be used. At a certain point, all of the sounds are used up, and you are into the realm of homophones. Tonal distinctions is one way that monosyllabic languages attempt to deal with the homophone problem, but it’s not good enough, since Chinese still has many homophones, and meaning is often discerned by context. Chinese, like French and English, is heavily idiomatic.

It’s little known, but Chinese also uses different forms to count different things, like Japanese. Many agree that Chinese is the hardest to learn of all of the major languages. Language professors have rated Chinese as the hardest language on Earth to learn.

It gets a 5 rating for hardest of all.

However, Cantonese and Min Nan (Taiwanese) are even harder to learn than Mandarin. Cantonese has 9 tones to Mandarin’s 4, and in addition, they throw in a lot of traditional Chinese characters in their writing. Min Nan also has a more complex tone system. In addition, Cantonese has verbal aspect, possibly up to 20 different varieties. Furthermore, since non-Mandarin characters are not standardized, Cantonese cannot be written down as it is spoken.

Cantonese and Min Nan get 5 ratings, hardest of all.

Austroasiatic

Mon-Khmer

Vietnamese is also hard to learn because to an outsider, the tones seem hard to tell apart. Therefore, foreigners often make themselves difficult to understand by not getting the tone precisely correct. It also has “creaky-voiced” tones, which are very hard for foreigners to get a grasp on. Vietnamese grammar, like Chinese, is simple, and reading Vietnamese is pretty easy once you figure out the tone marks. It’s monosyllabic like Chinese. However, the simple grammar is relative, as you can have 25 or more forms just for I, the 1st person singular pronoun.

Vietnamese gets 4, extremely difficult.

For unknown reasons, Khmer has a reputation for being hard to learn. I understand that it has one of the most complex honorifics systems of any language on Earth. Speaking it is not so bad, but reading and writing it is said to be pretty difficult.

Khmer gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Hmong-Mien

Hmong is widely spoken in this part of California, but it’s not easy to learn. There are eight tones, and they are not easy to figure out. It’s not obviously related to any other major language but the obscure Mien.

It has some very strange consonants called voiceless nasals. We have them in English as allophones – the m in small is voiceless, but in Hmong, they put them at the front of words – the m in the word Hmong is voiceless. These can be very hard to pronounce.

Hmong gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Austro-Tai

Austronesian

Malayo-Polynesian

Bahasa Indonesia and the related Malaysian are fairly easy languages to learn. For one thing, the grammar is dead simple. Verbs are not marked for tense at all.

Bahasa Indonesia and Malaysian get a 1 rating for very easy.

However, Tagalog is considerably harder. Tagalog is an ergative-absolutive language, not a nominative accusative language. In the former, phrases are marked not according to subject or object as in the latter, but according to whether the verb is transitive or intransitive. The subject of a transitive verb is marked one way, and the subject of an intransitive verb and object of a transitive verb are marked a second way.

Compared to many European languages, Tagalog syntax, morphology and semantics are often quite different. Unlike Malay, verbs conjugate quite a bit in Tagalog. However, articles and creation of adjectives from nouns is very easy. Compare ganda = beauty (noun) and maganda = beautiful (adjective).

Tagalog gets a 3 rating, moderately difficult.

Maori and other Polynesian languages are said to be quite hard to learn. I’m not sure why that is exactly.

Maori gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Tai-Kadai

Thai is a pretty hard language to learn. There are over 100 symbols in the odd script, there are no spaces between words in the script, and vowels can come before, after, above or below consonants in any given syllable. There are five tones, including a neutral tone. Tones are determined by a variety of complex things, including a combination of tone marks, the class of consonants, if the syllable ends in a sonorant or a stop, and what the tone of the preceding syllable was.

There is a system of noun classifiers for counting various things, similar to Japanese. In addition, common to many Asian languages, there is a complicated honorifics system. The vowels are different than in many languages, and there are some odd diphthongs: eua, euai, aui and uu. There is a contrast between aspirated and unaspirated consonants.

Consonant pronunciations vary depending on the location of the syllable in the word – for instance, s can change to t. There are many vowels which are spoken but not written. There are many consonants that are pronounced the same – for instance, there are 6 different t’s, not counting the s’s that turn into t’s. The Thai script is definitely one of the most difficult phonetic scripts. Nevertheless, the Thai script is easier to learn than the Japanese or Chinese ones. In spite of all of that, the syntax is simple, like Chinese.

Thai gets a 4 rating, extremely hard to learn.

Niger-Kordofanian

Niger-Congo

Bantu

Bakjalukasha, a Bantu language spoken in Ivory Coast, is also said to be hard to learn. Many of these African languages are tonal and can be quite complex. They also divide nouns into different categories (noun classes) like Caucasian languages do. Further, they are often seriously inflected.

Bakjalukasha gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

The African Bantu language Ga has a bad reputation for being a tough nut to crack. It is spoken in Ghana by about 600,000 people. It has 2 tones and engages in a strange behavior called tone terracing that is common to many West African languages. It also has many sounds that are not in any Western languages.

Ga gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Khoisan

!Xóõ (Taa) is a notoriously difficult Khoisan language with the impossible to comprehend clicks. Nguni and Xhosa, two languages of South Africa, are quite difficult, with up to nine click sounds in both. Clicks do not exist in other languages, and are extremely difficult to learn. Even native speakers mess up the clicks sometimes.

Taa, Nguni and Xhosa all get 5 ratings, hardest of all.

Zulu and siNdebele also have these odd sounds. These languages also make plurals by changing the prefix of the noun, and the manner varies according the noun class. If you want to look up a word in the dictionary, first of all you need to discard the prefix. For instance, in siNdebele, river = umfula, rivers = imifula; but stone = ilitshe, stones = amatshe; yet tree = isihlahla, trees = izihlahla .

Zulu has pitch accent, tones and clicks. There are 9 different pitch accents, 4 tones and 3 clicks, but each click can be pronounced in 5 different ways. However, tones are not marked in writing, so it’s hard to figure out when to use them. Zulu also has depressor consonants, which lower the tone in the vowel in the following syllable. In addition, Zulu has multiple gender – 15 different genders. And some nouns behave like verbs.

Zulu and siNdebele both get 5 ratings, hardest of all.

Eskimo-Aleut

Inuktitut is said to be extremely hard to learn. Inuktitut is polysynthetic, and roots can take many suffixes, in some cases up to 700. However, suffixation is extremely regular. In a typical long Inuktitut text, 92% of words will occur only once. This is quite different from English and many other languages where certain words occur very frequently or at least frequently. Certain fully inflected verbs can be analyzed both as verbs and as nouns.

Inuktitut is also rated one by linguists one of the hardest languages on Earth to pronounce. Inuktitut may be as hard to learn as Navajo.

Inuktitut is rated 5, hardest of all.

Paleosiberian

Chukchi is one of the few polysynthetic languages, so clearly it must be hard to learn. In polysynthetic languages, very long words can denote an entire sentence, and it’s quite hard to take the word apart into its parts and figure out exactly what they mean and how they go together.

Chukchi gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Basque

Basque, of course, is just a crazy language altogether. There are 24 cases, and the verbs are quite complex. This is because it is an ergative language, so verbs vary according to the number of subjects and the number of objects and if any third person is involved.

If you don’t grow up speaking Basque, it’s hard to attain native speaker competence. It’s quite a bit easier to write in Basque than to speak it. Nevertheless, Basque verbs are quite regular. In fact, the entire language is quite regular. In addition, most words above the intermediate level are borrowings from large languages, so once you reach intermediate Basque, the rest is not that hard. In addition, on the plus side, pronunciation is straightforward.

Basque is rated 5, hardest of all.

Did Barack Obama learn a word or two from his grandmother? Well, maybe not — he didn’t grow up with the gran pictured here (it’s his Kenyan stepmother). But many people did learn their very  first foreign words from their grandmothers. The Big Show’s Marco Werman learned a Dutch curse. Nina Porzucki learned a Yiddish word that speaks to a existential Jewish mindset: dafka. Nina’s grandmother didn’t think she was conveying such a Big Idea. She was just describing the stubborn behavior of her granddaughter.

Marilyn Chin learned insults, puns and tongue twisters, many of which later found their way into her poetry. Chin has published three volumes of poems. Many of her poems are linguistic investigations of her own Chinese-Americanism.  Now she’s published her first novel, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. It’s the story of two Chinese-American twins, Moonie and Mei Ling Wong,  and their search for double happiness. Or maybe single happiness. Double Happiness is just the name of their family restaurant (wordplay and irony abounds). Between episodes of Chinese food delivery gone hilariously wrong — thanks to Mei Ling’s souped-up American need for sex and drugs — the twins enter a mythological world of Chinese fable. From profane to sacred, and back to profane again. In the pod, I interview Marilyn Chin, who like the twins in her novel, had an overly protective Old World grandmother raising her. Chin can still recite her grandmother’s curses and sayings, delivered in the Toisan sub-dialect of Cantonese. She also recites a super-punning poem from her 2002 collection, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow.

Listen in iTunes or here.

Somewhat related to Hung ga, I wanted to mention a language course I’ve been using for a while now to learn spoken Cantonese.  I’m using the Foreign Service Institute Cantonese course, which in the first volume alone contains over 400 pages of text accompanied by over 10 hours of audio.  I’d highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning the language.  Best of all it’s free!

You can download everything here

Gám, ngóh yiu jáu laak.  Joigin.

Bilingualism is not uncommon in Malaysia. Many households are multilingual let alone bilingual. In my family alone we converse with each other in 4 different languages. I consistently speak to my mother in English and Indonesian, my father in Mandarin, Cantonese and English, and my brother in Mandarin and English. My parents however speak to each other exclusively in English as that is the language they used when they met.

It’s funny how I develop that kind of reference tag in me. I ‘contact-switch’, if you may, between languages just as easily as I switch from person to person. If I’m surrounded by a big group of friends to which I speak different languages to, my brain somehow adapts and is able to speak to that person in the language we are used to. It is pretty surreal. This has never really crossed my mind as being a talent. Living in Malaysia, almost everyone does that, I took it for granted. However, it has been a constant battle when speaking to a group of friends to whom I reference differently.

But ever since coming to Australia, those around me can’t stop but marvel at how naturally this comes to me. It’s just part of who I am, but to Australians in particular, most of which who speak dominantly in English, they find it extremely intriguing. Even my friends from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong find it awe-inspiring. As in their home country there is not a huge diversity in terms of culture.

In Malaysia, it’s not rare to find someone mixing and matching words from different languages into a sentence and the other doing just the same in reply. Say for instance if I want to say “Where should we go for dinner?” I would say “我门去那里 for makan?” Which literally translates to “We go where ‘for’ eat?” It’s quite weird but that’s how most Chinese in Malaysian speak. We call that ‘broken-English”.

This, again, only became apparent to me when I came to Australia and happened predominantly when I was talking to my Malaysian friend on the phone and some Taiwanese friends of mine were like cocking their heads to the side because they did not get what I said. Even though I used only a combination of Mandarin and English. DUH?!?!

It was really hard for me at first to speak primarily in one language and I often found myself pausing to find words in certain languages because I was so used to expressing myself in that context in another language. Context language is a very powerful and not easily reversible. Thankfully for me it was an easier transition as I have always found language to be one of my strong points. For my brother however, he is still constantly asking me for translations of Mandarin words to English, although I think that’s a result of him fooling around in English class when he was young.

How to say Merry Christmas in different languages. Send these to your friends around the world.

Afrikaans: Gesëende Kersfees

Afrikander: Een Plesierige Kerfees

African/ Eritrean/ Tigrinja: Rehus-Beal-Ledeats

Albanian:Gezur Krislinjden

Arabic: Idah Saidan Wa Sanah Jadidah

Argentine: Feliz Navidad

Armenian: Shenoraavor Nor Dari yev Pari Gaghand

Azeri: Tezze Iliniz Yahsi Olsun

Bahasa Malaysia: Selamat Hari Natal

Basque: Zorionak eta Urte Berri On!

Bengali: Shuvo Naba Barsha

Bohemian: Vesele Vanoce

Brazilian: Boas Festas e Feliz Ano Novo

Breton: Nedeleg laouen na bloavezh mat

Bulgarian: Tchestita Koleda; Tchestito Rojdestvo Hristovo

Catalan: Bon Nadal i un Bon Any Nou!

Chile: Feliz Navidad

Chinese: (Cantonese) Gun Tso Sun Tan’Gung Haw Sun

Chinese: (Mandarin) Kung His Hsin Nien bing Chu Shen Tan

Choctaw: Yukpa, Nitak Hollo Chito

Columbia: Feliz Navidad y Próspero Año Nuevo

Cornish: Nadelik looan na looan blethen noweth

Corsian: Pace e salute

Crazanian: Rot Yikji Dol La Roo

Cree: Mitho Makosi Kesikansi

Croatian: Sretan Bozic

Czech: Prejeme Vam Vesele Vanoce a stastny Novy Rok

Danish: Glædelig Jul

Duri: Christmas-e- Shoma Mobarak

Dutch: Vrolijk Kerstfeest en een Gelukkig Nieuwjaar!
or Zalig Kerstfeest

English: Merry Christmas

Eskimo: (inupik) Jutdlime pivdluarit ukiortame pivdluaritlo!

Esperanto: Gajan Kristnaskon

Estonian: Ruumsaid juulup|hi

Faeroese: Gledhilig jol og eydnurikt nyggjar!

Farsi: Cristmas-e-shoma mobarak bashad

Finnish: Hyvaa joulua

Flemish: Zalig Kerstfeest en Gelukkig nieuw jaar

French: Joyeux Noel

Frisian: Noflike Krystdagen en in protte Lok en Seine yn it Nije Jier!

Galician: Bo Nada

Gaelic: Nollaig chridheil agus Bliadhna mhath ùr!

German: Froehliche Weihnachten

Greek: Kala Christouyenna!

Hausa: Barka da Kirsimatikuma Barka da Sabuwar Shekara!

Hawaiian: Mele Kalikimaka

Hebrew: Mo’adim Lesimkha. Chena tova

Hindi: Shub Naya Baras

Hausa: Barka da Kirsimatikuma Barka da Sabuwar Shekara!

Hawaian: Mele Kalikimaka ame Hauoli Makahiki Hou!

Hungarian: Kellemes Karacsonyi unnepeket

Icelandic: Gledileg Jol

Indonesian: Selamat Hari Natal

Iraqi: Idah Saidan Wa Sanah Jadidah

Irish: Nollaig Shona Dhuit, or Nodlaig mhaith chugnat

Iroquois: Ojenyunyat Sungwiyadeson honungradon nagwutut. Ojenyunyat osrasay.

Italian: Buone Feste Natalizie

Japanese: Shinnen omedeto. Kurisumasu Omedeto

Jiberish: Mithag Crithagsigathmithags

Korean: Sung Tan Chuk Ha

Latin: Natale hilare et Annum Faustum!

Latvian: Prieci’gus Ziemsve’tkus un Laimi’gu Jauno Gadu!

Lausitzian:Wjesole hody a strowe nowe leto

Lettish: Priecigus Ziemassvetkus

Lithuanian: Linksmu Kaledu

Low Saxon: Heughliche Winachten un ‘n moi Nijaar

Macedonian: Sreken Bozhik

Maltese: LL Milied Lt-tajjeb

Manx: Nollick ghennal as blein vie noa

Maori: Meri Kirihimete

Marathi: Shub Naya Varsh

Navajo: Merry Keshmish

Norwegian: God Jul, or Gledelig Jul

Occitan: Pulit nadal e bona annado

Papiamento: Bon Pasco

Papua New Guinea: Bikpela hamamas blong dispela Krismas na Nupela yia i go long yu

Pennsylvania German: En frehlicher Grischtdaag un en hallich Nei Yaahr!

Peru: Feliz Navidad y un Venturoso Año Nuevo

Philipines: Maligayan Pasko!

Polish: Wesolych Swiat Bozego Narodzenia or Boze Narodzenie

Portuguese:Feliz Natal

Pushto: Christmas Aao Ne-way Kaal Mo Mobarak Sha

Rapa-Nui (Easter Island): Mata-Ki-Te-Rangi. Te-Pito-O-Te-Henua

Rhetian: Bellas festas da nadal e bun onn

Romanche: (sursilvan dialect): Legreivlas fiastas da Nadal e bien niev onn!

Rumanian: Sarbatori vesele

Russian: Pozdrevlyayu s prazdnikom Rozhdestva is Novim Godom

Sami: Buorrit Juovllat

Samoan: La Maunia Le Kilisimasi Ma Le Tausaga Fou

Sardinian: Bonu nadale e prosperu annu nou

Serbian: Hristos se rodi

Slovakian: Sretan Bozic or Vesele vianoce

Sami: Buorrit Juovllat

Samoan: La Maunia Le Kilisimasi Ma Le Tausaga Fou

Scots Gaelic: Nollaig chridheil huibh

Serb-Croatian: Sretam Bozic. Vesela Nova Godina

Serbian: Hristos se rodi. Singhalese: Subha nath thalak Vewa. Subha Aluth Awrudhak Vewa

Slovak: Vesele Vianoce. A stastlivy Novy Rok

Slovene: Vesele Bozicne. Screcno Novo Leto

Spanish: Feliz Navidad

Swedish: God Jul and (Och) Ett Gott Nytt År

Tagalog: Maligayamg Pasko!

Tami: Nathar Puthu Varuda Valthukkal

Trukeese: (Micronesian) Neekiriisimas annim oo iyer seefe feyiyeech!

Thai: Sawadee Pee Mai

Turkish: Noeliniz Ve Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun

Ukrainian: Srozhdestvom Kristovym

Urdu: Naya Saal Mubarak Ho

Vietnamese: Chung Mung Giang Sinh

Welsh: Nadolig Llawen

Yugoslavian: Cestitamo Bozic

Yoruba: E ku odun, e ku iye’dun!

“Bittersweet Bilingualism“. I always did wonder how parents make the conscious decision for their kids to be bilingual? To me, it’s always been a cultural thing more than an advantage. I am of Chinese descent therefore it makes sense that I should learn the Chinese language to better understand my roots and my culture. There are some parents who think differently. They have the full intention of allowing their kids to be bilingual so that they can have the advantage they never had.

Having grown up in a multiracial country where Malay is the national language, and each ethnic group speaks in their own dialect, it has always been just a distinction between the cultures. However, these days with the opening of free trade in China, more and more parents of different descent are putting their children through Chinese primary schools so that they would learn Chinese as their primary language – therefore setting themselves apart from the rest in their community.

Before I was unleashed into the main stream schooling system in Malaysia, I only knew English. I had the concept of ‘other languages’ but they were just another language. The concept of multiple ‘other languages’ completely deluded me.

My parents, in the case of me and my brother, made a conscious decision to do it that way. To them, who graduated from university in Canada, they wanted us to have the advantage of speaking English, which they reckon was the most important language, natively. It worked for me, but not so much for my brother. Interesting, considering we were brought up in the same environment by the same parents.

I then continued to pick up Chinese at my primary school where we were prohibited from speaking any other language other than Chinese. This rule did not apply when we were taking language classes. Through that strict regiment I picked up Chinese in a gusto. In Year 1, I was exposed to Chinese and Malay, then in Year 3 English was added as an additional subject. We were taught ABCs in Year 3. For me it was child’s play. Interestingly enough, English was taught in English, unlike in countries such as Japan and Taiwan where English is taught in their native language.

While at school, I also picked up Cantonese which is a Chinese dialect and can now speak fluently. Some of my Hong Kong friends even say that I speak it like a native. Later on in high school, I proceeded to learn Japanese as a fifth language. I find that bilingualism is not necessarily easy for everyone. I myself spent years at Chinese primary school, and I would not even endeavor to say that my Chinese is anywhere near satisfactory levels.

The point, however, lies with the fact of whether or not excelling at a language is important as opposed to being able to communicate effectively in it. To me, I think that’s all that matters. Communication, be it sign language or klingon, is just a way in which human beings interact. It is certainly a convenience, but also a convenience we can live without in this day and age where pocket sized translators exist.

More on “Being a bilingual“.

I was at a planning and transportation conference recently where a speaker made the following bold (but true) statement about combating gentrification – amid jeers and snickers (cause we were in Boston, and what city is more racist racial than beantown?):

In a neighborhood like Chinatown in Oakland, in order to keep folks from outside moving in and gentrifying the neighborhood, the City should make the amenities that attract outsiders more inaccessible. For example, making sure all the public signage around the parks are written in Cantonese.

My thoughts? Brilliant! I realize the use of public money to benefit a few and not all is a strange concept. But how is this different than having stringent design guidelines in historic neighborhoods? Am I crazy to think that its NORMAL to see Canto signs in a Ctown!? Would I be upset if Little Italy had Italian signs? NO! Keeping the character of a neighborhood is waaay more important than having folks from the Berkeley hills rolling down in their Priuses and using Chinatown parks and deciding to buy a summer apartment near Lake Merritt BART to use as an office for their online zines.

“Ola!” I had just landed at Macau airport and that was the first thing I said as I greeted the immigration officer who took my passport for inspection. It had been only a few days since I left Dili and there were still a few Portuguese phrases that had not gone to my brain’s recycle bin. Traveling to another city where Portuguese was the official language, I thought that my limited knowledge might still come in handy.

Dead silence. The immigration officer neither looked at me nor gave any semblance that he acknowledged my greeting. At first, I thought he was just being uptight in the way most immigration officers anywhere in the world usually are.  He handed back my passport after a few minutes and I said “Obrigado” (thank you) to which he flatly ignored me. He really had no idea that I was talking to him.

all the signs are in chinese and portuguese but it's useless to know the portuguese name as 99% of the people won't understand if you ask for directions

During my stay in Macau, I had encountered more of such problems. Mind you, I learned my lesson from the airport and no longer used Portuguese outside. It didn’t matter that all the signs – from the restaurants to the buildings and streets – were in Portuguese, 99% of the city’s population could not understand them. English was also useless. Fine, Macau was never under the influence of the Anglophone world so that’’s an excuse there. What was actually startling was that most of the local people also could not understand Mandarin – their national language for heaven’s sake! Some might argue that it’s only been 10 years since this small plot of land returned to the arms of the motherland (China) but Hong Kong, which has a similar recent history, sees a lot of fluent Mandarin speakers. Most locals in Macau are still monolingual up to today, and know only Cantonese.

Despite this, I find Macau to be the most European-looking of Asian cities. The territory has lots of winding back alleys, pastel-colored churches and buildings with ornate exteriors that are well-preserved due to the UNESCO World Heritage designation. One good thing to do while on a trip to Macau is to get lost exploring the cobblestone walkways.

except for the motorists, this scene could have been somewhere in Europe or Latin America

The free maps found in guesthouses and hotels usually have a few walking tour suggestions which are worth trying. These usually start in Largo de Senado and end at the southern tip of the peninsula. I did this on my first day there. My favorite stops were Guia Lighthouse which has a great view of the city, St. Joseph’s Church with its ornate facade and the Leal Senado (Loyal Senate).

the charming largo de senado

largo de sao domingos - just a few steps away from largo de senado

ruins of st. paul - perhaps the most well-known among macau's attractions

guia lighthouse

st. joseph's church

Macau has dozens of churches even though less than 10% of the people of Macau are Christians. Though well-designed and brightly painted, most are poorly attended by followers and mainly cater to tourists.

A visit to Taipa Village south of the peninsula is also a highly recommended stop on any visit to Macau. Many good restaurants serving Portuguese and Macanese fare are located in this area, and Taipa is generally not as crowded as the peninsula.

carmel church

villa de taipa

Overall, I believe Macau deserves more than just a daytrip from Hong Kong. Doing the cultural walk around the territory alone takes up one full day. Those interested in the casinos will find themselves preoccupied for one extra day at the very least. Knowing a bit of Cantonese can come in handy.

As an extra tip, do change your Hong Kong Dollars to Macau Pataca. The exchange rate is about 1.03 Pataca = 1.00 HKD. All establishments do accept Hong Kong dollars but they are taken on a 1:1 basis so might as well save 3% by converting it.

There’s not many music videos around these days where actualy Cantonese is used.  A lot of movie producers have fallen back to using Madarin, the official language of the People’s Republic of China.  Cantonese is of course the official language of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, of China.  After the take back in 1997, Kanton is producing less and less Cantonese, as free trade agreements mean that Hong Kong producers are trying to target the wider Chinese market.

That’s why Jackie Chan has made me proud in his new Mulan video, where he sings in Cantonese rather than Mandarin.

But you know…  I’m going to make my future Italian wife learn Cantonese… Muahahaha lol!!!

“May I have your visas please?” asked the friendly check-in clerk.

“Visas?” I said “No, you don’t understand. Let me explain – we’re British, we’re flying to Australia, we don’t need visas.”

How many of you know you need a visa to enter Australia? Well, how were we to know? Why didn’t you tell us! What ever happened to the British Empire and the map with a quarter of the world painted pink? You blink for half a century and it’s disappeared. Huh? We’re subjects of the same Queen! Isn’t Oz part of the Commonwealth for crying out loud?

We knew we needed extra security checks when travelling to the USA. The flight booking website informed us that the old Visa-Waiver system was no longer sufficient for Brits and that we had to apply on-line a month or two before with passport and travel details so as to get a Homeland Security check before entering the country. But you still didn’t need a visa for North America.

And so it was that we found ourselves at the Qantas check-in desk at Central Station in downtown Hong Kong, thinking we had timed things just nicely, early morning, a couple of hours to spare, we’d check in our bags at Central Station then take the MTR underground to the Airport and have a leisurely hour or so sipping lattes and espressos whilst waiting to board. Instead we had a rather sudden shock and a tense wait to find out if perhaps neither of us, just one or us, or (preferably) both of us could board the plane and fly to Oz!

I have to say the staff at Qantas Hong Kong were fabulous! On realising our predicament the check-in clerk informed us that they could apply to the Australian authorities on our behalf then and there, but could not of course guarantee whether we would be allowed visas. So they did, and whilst copies of our passports and documentation were made and quickly electronically whizzed into the ether, we were instructed to wait at Central Station. After about half and hour or so we were informed that Judith had been granted a visa but that they had not been informed about me.

Typical!

I remember once completing a life-assurance questionnaire; one of the questions was “Is your job dangerous?” I immediately thought of pastors and missionaries I knew who were daily facing persecution around the world, and hesitated for a moment before answering “It should be”. Perhaps this was now coming back to haunt me. Somewhere in the International Electronic Database there was an entry on Comrade Le Tocq J. P. which read “BEWARE: this man thinks he’s dangerous.” There’s only one thing worse than a man who’s dangerous and that’s a man who thinks he’s dangerous. At other times I would have been proud of this accolade but now there it was causing me to be barred forever from enjoying boomerangs in their natural habitat. Perhaps I would not be allowed back into the UK! Maybe I would end up marooned as some crazed, volatile, politico-religious exile in Hong Kong, without citizenship, lost in the maze of streets in Kowloon, trying to communicate in Pidgin-Cantonese “Oh Pea Roh… Me No Visa… Lob Loofah!”, proclaiming the end of the world, and thinking himself dangerous for the rest of his life.

We were informed that, because of time getting short now before take-off, we should make our way on the MTR from Central Station to Hong Kong Airport where we were to inquire at the Qantas desk whether I had been granted a visa or not. So off we went. And what a peaceful and gleeful train journey that was, as we calmly discussed whether just Judith should fly or should she wait in Hong Kong with me if it transpired that my visa was not issued in time, and whether we could afford the extra cost of new tickets. Of course we prayed a little too.

And so it was as the Qantas assistant at the airport desk recovered from the sloppy kiss I gave her (or was it ‘him’? – I never stopped long enough to check) having informed us that my visa had been granted, that Judith and I could be seen skipping through the Departures gate with time enough for a much desired espresso and a latte before we boarded the flight and headed south for the next part of our adventure towards Sydney, the land of Oz and Hillsong Church…

A: they all bind you through fear.

Pensées on Seeing the Effect of these Three Influences in Hong Kong

In the sense that Communism, Superstition and Legalism bind people through fear, they are all religious. Because of this they are also in a curious way attractive, at least to certain types of people, but maybe to all of us, just in varying degrees.

Many people like to be told what to do. They like not having the responsibility to think through things for themselves. I think this is a fundamental and perhaps universal human flaw.

Fear and faith also have a lot in common; in both cases you believe that what you cannot yet see will happen to you. The difference is that fear is not based on trust. In fact in many ways fear could be said to be the opposite of trust.

The word religion comes from a Latin root which means to bind. Under communism, superstition and legalism, human beings find themselves bound to act in certain ways, not in the end because they trust those who have dictated things to be so, but because they fear the consequences of resisting and not doing what they are told to do.

The kind of questions they are faced with are: What will they do to me if they find out? What will my fate be in their hands? What will others think?

Fear is not based on reason. In fact fear undermines reason to the extent that people who allow fear to dominate their lives eventually stop thinking reasonably for themselves.

Faith, especially the Christian faith, invites reason, encourages reason, is a healthy environment for reason to flourish. Faith is based on trust, and where there is trust there is progress. You can talk openly, you can even disagree. You confess that you are on a journey together and that you do not know all things but have much to learn.

A few Christians might subscribe to communism (but I don’t know any personally!) Some Christians are strangely superstitious in their behaviour. But there are many more Christians who remain sadly bound by legalism as if it were the acceptable face of being a Jesus follower. As if you blend in better with the religious world by so doing. The deeper sadness is that most do not even realise it, thinking instead that this is as good as it gets in the Christian life.

As we meandered around the Hong Kong and learned more of the diverse cultural history of the city and its environs it made me think about the legacy of these influences today. Eastern Mysticism in its plethora of manifestations, from Buddhism to Taoism/Daoism (neither of which incidentally is especially theistic) has held people in superstitious bondage to a greater or lesser degree for years; rooted in animism and with so often the common thread of reincarnation these -isms, religions and philosophies still focus on a human being’s individual moral obligation to do right things and abstain from wrong things in life in order not to be punished in the future. Thus this fear is a major motivation and the onus is totally on the individual’s responsibility to earn the right to a better life. Communism more recently has built on this culture of fear and perhaps even in its less vicious modern incarnation mixed now with the demiurge of materialism is still overshadowing Hong Kong’s future with its claws of control; in this case Big Brother is certainly watching, not only next-door but now lurking in the corridors of power waiting for an opportunity to inflict its crushing fear. It was indeed Mao Zedong who professed “Communism is not love. Communism is a hammer which we use to crush the enemy.” The fearful question is then ‘Who is the enemy?” and the supplementary one is “Have I become the enemy?”

Now the impact of Christianity sadly has also often done little to thwart, in fact sometimes it has added to, this oppressive weight of the culture of dos and don’ts, ask not and question not, tick all the boxes and feel proud; for this is the bewitching effect of legalistic Christianity, which can come in and immediately attract those who have grown accustomed to this lifestyle based on other fear-founded -isms.  The Apostle Paul goes so far as to call this “another gospel… no gospel at all” [Gal 1:6-7] It is surely not the Gospel, for it is not good news at all. And yet it has and still is masqueraded as the Gospel around the world by well-meaning ministers. It is not even new news, for it is based so much on the worldly concept of earning favour – do good = be accepted, do bad = be rejected. It just perhaps seems more holy when wrapped up in Christian paper.

The Gospel of Grace in the Lord Jesus Christ is the exact opposite. He gives rest to the heavy laden. We simply come to Him and ask. [Matt 7:7, 11:28; Luk 11:9, 13]

So it is basically this ungospel of legalism that Rob Rufus and others like him are vehemently seeking to see stamped out, and I for one am glad for it. We must pray for this glorious good news to go out far and wide, especially in a place like Hong Kong sitting, as it has for centuries, like a gateway into China and the East. But currently City Church International’s impact on Hong Kong, and on locals, let alone on China, is, in reality, minuscule. It is out of proportion to the thousands of downloads of Rob’s sermons in the rest of the world via the web. So we must pray too for churches like The Vine whose impact in Hong Kong is growing rapidly and currently have, I believe, at least the nascent strategic apostolic and administrative gifting to reach out and sustain evangelism and church-planting within Hong Kong and into mainland China. In my humble opinion these two mixed together would be a lethal weapon against the kingdom of darkness, much like Wesley and Whitefield might have been if they’d been able to work together more often!

I have always lamented my lack of self-discipline. I accomplish things better if someone is hanging over me waiting for something. I admire anyone who achieves for the sake of achieving and can do it on their own.

I am making another push for some self-discipline in my life. I don’t have grand aspirations. A clean apartment. Bills paid on time. A healthy eating and exercise routine. Regular reading. Regular Cantonese study, both spoken and writing.

Tonight I did pretty well. I cooked and washed dishes. I studied some Cantonese vocabulary and practiced my writing. And I watched a film in Cantonese. The only bad thing was that I ate too much. Still, it was a good evening.

As I learn more words, expressions, I hear them in the films/tv series that I watch. So one compliments the other which is very cool. I am even catching when they are slipping in an English word here and there, I used to miss those too, because the accent just made it sound Chinese to me.

I have been making some plans. I am going to LV for Thanksgiving. Rochester for Christmas. Sometime in January or February I will go to Florida to see my sister. Maybe later in the spring go to see T. in K’stan. But most definitely want to go to Hong Kong in June. For the month. I want to take classes and explore as much as possible, maybe catch a few Andy Lau events in there. He usually has the fan club anniversary and the 2nd quarter birthdays party in June. Those would be fun to go to. And maybe by then my comprehension will have improved further, so maybe I will understand him better.

I couldn’t make all those plans with Yardley. It would be too much to ask of I. to take care of her so much and Yardley would probably go back to feeling abandoned whenever I would leave her. It would have been awesome if I could have brought her with me, but she wasn’t a travelling dog. I am making up for some lost time in a way, I haven’t travelled much because of her and because of the time I was in school. And before I had this job, I really didn’t have much vacation time. Also now I make more $$, so I can afford to travel more. Although with this plan, I am going to need to start being more economical.

www.getoutthebox.org

Much like Hillsong only different… in Hong Kong, the singing city.

We were staying with Judith’s brother Graham and his wife Luise who were fantastic hosts. Since their arrival in Hong Kong some three years ago Luise has, for part of the time, been on the staff of the Vine Christian Fellowship which is where we decided to worship that afternoon, joining in with the third of their three services each Sunday. It was great to experience this church first hand; we had heard so much about it not only from Luise and Graham but also because of its support and connections with Care for Children – the Beijing based charity established and run by Rob and Liz Glover over ten years ago when they left our church in Guernsey with a call to the far East!

So after the morning with Rob Rufus at City Church International in Kowloon, then catching the Star Ferry back to Hong Kong island for a spot of lunch, we headed for The Vine Centre, which is actually not a separate building but a suite of rooms situated on the 2nd floor of Two Chinachem Plaza tower block and accessed by lift from the 1st floor office lobby. Complicated to find? Actually no, because a)

Two Chinachem Plaza - access to lifts to The Vine by the walkway with the Delifrance sign!

their church website has comprehensive directions for arriving on foot, by bus, MTR (metro) and tram, b) there is even an interactive google map on their site which allows you to put in your own address so as to produce detailed personalised directions, and c) there is a colourful band of welcomers you can’t miss in the plaza area where the lifts are situated ready to help you find your way up where you are greeted by more friendly welcome hosts. All in all they have done their best to ensure that their ‘Centre’ meeting venue, hidden as it is up a skyscraper, is as accessible and visible as possible.

Despite the fact that the location is clearly not ideal they have transformed the space in an incredible way! What they have done is to create a church meeting space using two or three floors of office space – amazing in itself that they got permission for this! They now have a vision to procure a purpose-designed facility in due course (the plans were available for viewing while we were there). In the meantime this office conversion gives them a theatre-type hall which holds about 150 people (looks like they knocked through two floors to get the height for this), and includes some clever sound-proofing, trendy unobtrusive lighting (there is no natural light), a smallish (in terms of depth) stage and excellent  AV/PA facilities. In addition there is an small lounge area, coffee-bar serving Starbucks-style drinks, reception area, and rooms for kid’s ministry, counselling, storage and a small suite of offices. It perhaps helps that one of the two leading pastors, Tony Read, was an Ove Arup engineer before entering full-time ministry!

So in order to grow and accommodate new growth the church now holds three services on a Sunday (9:30am, 11:30am – both with kids & teen ministries,  & 4:00pm – with kids ministry) We arrived with a few moments to spare and were warmly greeted by a group of teenagers who were manning the area around the access lift from the first floor walkway which is one of many walkways linking the plethora of high rise buildings in Hong Kong, and making it easier to get between one building and another without having to go down to street level each time.

There are many off-quoted urban myths about Hong Kong, such as the one about Hong Kong being so densely populated that the inhabitants would not be able to fit if they all had to stand at ground level. Clearly this is not exactly true, as there are huge areas of unbuilt space in the whole of the territory, but in a single section of the urban area like Mong Kok for example it might come close to the truth as the statistics show only 3.9 m² or 42 ft² per person, (whereas in Hong Kong as a whole it is 158 m² or 1702 ft² per person). This is certainly dense (compares to Guernsey’s around 1,190 m² or 12,800 ft² per person) and can truly feel so at certain times and in certain places, but the Hong Kong Government and planning authorities have been intuitive and forward-thinking in how they have allowed the city to be developed, especially in the last 40 years or so. As a result there are people everywhere but everything seems to flow much better than in a city like London for example. Moreover their public transport system is at least on a par with that in Paris; the trams, underground and buses coordinating seamlessly so that as long as you know where to get off and change it should not be difficult to find your way around in the urban area.

Having thus been flagged and greeted by a bunch of enthusiastic red T-shirt wearing youths we took the lift to the Vine Centre level and were similarly greeted and welcomed by more young people – the youth group were clearly on welcome ministry this week! We just had time for a brief introduction and chat with John Snelgrove one of the two Senior Pastors – who could almost be a body double for Hillsong’s Brian Houston in looks and mannerisms! The other, Tony Read was also present but already helping lead things at the front. John remembers visiting Guernsey 20 years ago and attending a Baptist church called Bethel (now Shiloh) while he was working around the UK. As the meeting hall is smaller and a more compact theatre-style than we are used to the feeling could best be described as cosy. I guess around 160 people were present as there were no empty seats visible, the rear doors were open and a few chairs spilled out into the lounge area.

The Vine band lead us in worship

The band struck up a song – I wrote in my journal “Hillsong style” – by which I meant it both looked and felt like I know Hillsong church ‘does’ worship; not in any critical sense, simply an observation: the singers were placed along the front of the stage, either side of the worship/band leader, four or five of them, a couple of yards space between each, encouraging and exhorting the congregation to enter fully into worshipping Jesus through their visible, heartfelt enthusiasm. It was loud, but not ear-splittingly. They sang familiar songs like Happy Day, Alleluia for the Lord God Almighty Reigns, God of this City (I found this quite moving to sing in Hong Kong!) After around 25 minutes the person we would call an “anchor leader” came on stage and brought the worship time to a close with some prayer, followed by a warm welcome to guests and visitors. He then announced the weekly news which took the format of an excellently presented video “Vine News” which was very funny too! So well produced – I think these are accessible on their website. Everything was on screen including a detailed ‘orientation’ for parents of their children’s ministry. Following this the anchor leader gave a short exhortation about giving prior to the offering being taken up (this was also very much in a Hillsong style). As the stewards took up the offering a moving testimony video was shown – an interview with a fairly new church member whom the Lord had healed miraculously. Matt Redman’s lovely song Befriended played in the background. We then prayed for the lady in the video who was present.

The preacher was Dawn Strachan and her text was Rev 3:7-13. If you’d asked me as she began what her profession was I would have guessed she was an unmarried school teacher. She was a good communicator, direct, made you feel like you ought to listen, funny at appropriate moments, spoke with a fairly loud voice and a fairly formidable presence on the stage. She was in fact an unmarried school teacher. Her text about Jesus’s message to the church in Philadelphia focused on one main point – that God is calling the greatness out of us; he is always in the business of doing this. She illustrated this ably from her own experience and of individuals in the church. There was a bit of camaraderie going on at one point with a few of the congregation members; being visitors we didn’t always get the joke, but it was not overplayed and demonstrated the strong sense of community and purpose that there is in this great church buzzing with potential.

There were lots of encouraging cries of amen! and right! during her preaching and it was here that I first noticed someone shout out “Come on!” – something I would hear lots more of in the following weeks at Hillsong in Australia as well as churches in America. I don’t know if this is a new phenomenon in terms of Christian affirmative quasi-imperative interjections but I certainly had not heard it in church before! And for a few moments I wondered if it was intended critically as in “Come on! Get to the point!” or even “Come on! No-one’s going to believe that!” I’ve heard many kinds of affirmative quasi-imperative interjections in my time in Charisendom, some carried over from Pentecostalism, others newly formed in the last thirty years (none as far as I’m aware from Methodism – we were lucky if we got a muffled amen after a corporate prayer back in those days!) So I was familiar with absolutely [very popular in the 90s], affirmative [Star Trek fans], agreed, all right [British], alright [US], alrighty [very US], as you say, assuredly [RSV readers], aye, certainly, exactly, good, hear-hear [slightly political], indeed, indeedy [British ex-pats in the US], ja [South Africans], most assuredly [NASB users], of course, okay, oui [Europhiles], positively, preach it [someone who's just woken up in the middle of a sermon], precisely, quite [very English], rather [Famous Five fans], right [Charismatic & Reformed], right you are [Archers fans], righto [Narnia fans], sure [middle-aged & trendy], sure thing [middle-aged & sad], true, verily verily [KJV readers], yay [teenagers], yea [teenagers trying to sound like KJV readers], yeah [thirty-somethings], yep [forty-somethings], yes, yessir [moderate Western fans], yessirree [serious Western fans], you bet [North American pentecostals], you betcha [British ex-pats trying to sound like North American pentecostals], you said it [probably either the most inane or the most profound comment anyone could make], and the like. But I had not yet come across come on! Nevertheless it grew on me and I began to practise it from time to time as we travelled. By the end of my sabbatical I was a real come on-er!

But enough of that.

Mine's a skinny grande caramel latte, half caf and half de-caf, with mocha shot and room for whipped cream and sprinkles on top...

The service finished with prayer and one final song before we followed the crowd out into the packed lounge where visitors can get a free coffee at their Starbucks-style coffee-bar, newcomers can chat to leaders and parents are reunited with their kids. We were introduced to Nathan and Amy Sarchet-Waller, a great couple who have a connection with Guernsey as Nate’s father’s family was from the island, brought up in the Elim Pentecostal Church. Paul (Nate’s dad) planted Elim Full Gospel Church a thriving Cantonese-speaking Charismatic church with a base in Hong Kong, as well as dozens of other churches planted in neighbouring SE Asia. Nate is a qualified teacher and together they serve as youth leaders at the Vine. It was fun talking with him about Guernsey, a place he obviously loves too – they usually visit once a year – so we hope to see them next time!

After a long day, we made our way back out into the humid heat of the city in search of some supper. Graham and Luise took us via Hong Kong’s great electric ladder, the Mid-Levels Escalator, to one of their favourite

Soft-crusted crustacean

Vietnamese restaurants where soft-shell crabs were on the menu – a first for most of us and a real winner – absolutely delicious!

This was then followed by a long journey – about 4 metres – across the road to a restaurant which served only desserts. Of course all the girls were in heaven, whilst Graham and I humoured them and forced ourselves to eat some fruity syllabub or other. Whilst we sat their licking our lips we observed what looked like a Hong Kong Chinese family group setting off a small incendiary device across the road on the edge of the pavement. This turned out to be a religious ritual including chants and prayers to ward of evil demons and invoke ancestral gods, after the death of a family member and the closing of a business nearby. It made a huge mess and I’m not sure what our Health and Safety officers would have said back home with cars and pedestrians passing so close by.

superstition is alive and well in Hong Kong

Nevertheless it emphasised for me the massive opportunity as well as the massive and essential mission that the Christian Church is faced with in this singing city where the temples to hedonism, materialism, consumerism as well as paganism are not hidden but there for all to see, painted in garish colours in honour of the known and unknown gods who bind this people, packed so tightly together in their cosmopolitan millions.

Absolutely disgusting... but I forced it down as a necessary sacrifice to maintain family harmony

Thank God for Hong Kong, and pray God that he moves in great revival power there!