I have an unrequited love for languages. They are the fickle objects of my pathetic longing. It started when I was a teenager. Funny to think of it; at about the same time that the opposite sex began stirring vague but powerful longings, I set myself the baroque task of learning the Latin declensions and conjugations from a 19th century primer. I remember sitting in the back seat of a rented car on one of our rare family vactions, trying to grasp the distinction between the dative and ablative as the landscape of Florida flowed by the window. I took a semester of Japanese in the 7th grade, which after Latin was hilarious fun. Later, I set out on a 4 year relationship with German, and a yearlong flirtation with French. But Chinese was my undoing. Yes, I've been a slave to Chinese for longer than I care to remember. People ask me sometimes how I became interested in Chinese, and my reasons are typically whimsical. One night, at the movie theater at the Portland Museum of Modern Art, I saw a movie called "A Chinese Ghost Story," a lawless, gorgeous, ridiculous amalgam of martial art flick, romantic comedy, and supernatural thriller. I saw that movie, actually, 3 times in 4 nights. And when I returned to college a few weeks later and enrolled in first year Mandarin. I studied Chinese for two years in college, but with my disdain of the daily grind of homework, I got very poor grades. But I really wanted to learn this language. I even hired a personal tutor from Heilongjiang who would sit on the grass and read newspaper articles about the annual watermelon competetition in Harbin.

After that I went to Taiwan to "really" learn Chinese. This idea, as it turned out, was based on the false premise that one could ever escape the long arm of international English: everyone stubbornly refused to speak Chinese with me, even the clerks in convienence stores. My most satisfying linguistic encounters were with infants under the age of six. We shared a similar range of vocabulary and syntax. And so I remain, trapped in the linguistic realm of a kindergartener, innocent of the higher emotions, of irony and rhetoric, business and technology. Maybe someday I'll grow up. M.G.

Learning Chinese - Recollections of a personal encounter with learning Chinese