 Hello, I'm Michael North, and welcome to another episode of Understanding China. In this program, we try to portray ideas and images from China in a way that people outside of China will understand it, and we try to portray China from the inside out. We rely a lot on the generosity of highly qualified professionals, both in America and China, to help explain the mysteries of how America and China fit together and how they don't. One of the people that we're really honored to work with is Cindy Ning. Cindy, I don't want to embarrass you, but you're probably one of the leading teachers of Chinese in America, active. You head the Confucius Institute at University of Hawaii, and you've written textbooks, and you've been head of teachers' associations in this area, so I'd like to proclaim you as one of the top practicing experts in Chinese in America. How did you get into that field? Probably because I didn't know Chinese. My parents are from China, but I was born and raised in Pakistan, and I was the only one in my family, one of four children, who was born and raised in Pakistan. I always felt that everybody else had something that I didn't. They had a connection to China, and I didn't know what China was, except through the stories of my parents. Except there it is on your face. Yes. Well, I didn't discover that until I was about seven or eight years old, until I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, yeah, I am different than other people. But anyway, it was that lack, that something that everybody else had that I didn't have that drove me to find out what it is. And so I basically spent my whole life trying to find out what it was that everybody else in my family had that I didn't. And you found yourself in Michigan, and you went to school there and got a degree there. Yes. How did that happen? How did your whole family get into Michigan? My, well no, my family ended up in Rochester, New York, when my sister was working at the time, and my parents ended up working for the University of Rochester Strong Memorial Hospital. But I had a cousin who had been teaching at Western Michigan University, and I was trying to go to a small liberal arts college, and he told me about Kalamazoo College nearby, in the same town as Western Michigan University. So I applied, and they accepted me, but I didn't have a scholarship package. And I realized now how much it cost, and I don't understand how my parents could have afforded to send me there. But one of the things they offered to have me do was teach Chinese. And so it was only to a couple students at a time. So you had an aptitude for teaching Chinese. So basically I said, well, let me take a look at your textbook. And I read the textbook cover to cover, and I thought, hmm, I have a feeling for what his language is like. And so that's how I got sucked in. And then University of Michigan used to send faculty down to test the students I was tutoring to give them a grade for the semester. So then University of Michigan recruited me for their program. So you're involved in establishing standards and textbooks and tests and so on to make sure that people know what they've learned. And that's a lot of your job at University of Hawaii. You work a lot with, of course, students at the university, but there's youth programs as well, where we bring people from China to America, and you're teaching both languages to two different groups of students. More Chinese to Americans than English to people from China. Although if we did bring people in from China, I would make use of the rich resources of the Department of Second Language Studies upstairs, which is one of the best in the world at teaching foreign language and they would. Well, we have a video of UH. Can we roll that video? And Cindy, you can describe what people are seeing as it's playing. Okay. This is a drone shot of the Manoa campus of the University of Hawaii. Looking towards Waikiki, there is the Center for Korean Studies funded with money from the Korean government and right across the street is Warhol. And Warhol is the language and linguistics building and that those people running and these people are an annual summer camp and teacher training institute we've had for, I think this is a 12 year now, with funding from the US government. So the camp goes all day long and begins at nine o'clock in the morning, ends at five in the afternoon, and they are immersed in learning Chinese language. But since Chinese language is set in culture, they have to learn a lot about Chinese culture too. So our approach is to do things very hands on. They don't sit and read, they sing, they do exercises, they do projects, they make presentations, they figure out things, they practice calligraphy, they try, this is a tofu unit. And the kids used to be from all over the country now, we're trying to open it only to kids from Hawaii. But the teachers, there's almost a one on one ratio of teachers to students. The teachers come from all over the country. And the teachers are here practicing different approaches to language teaching and that's them saying goodbye to us. So it's going to happen again this coming summer, month of July, if you are. That's beautiful. That looks like a really fun program. It is a fun program. It lasts three weeks for the students and three and a half weeks for the teachers. Okay. I want you to give me a short lesson. A short lesson in Chinese? Yeah. Just a few. Just pretend that I don't know anything and you'll be almost completely right. But there's some key words, some key expressions that anyone who's say a business person or somebody who's welcoming someone from China here would need to know. So how do I say hello? Ni hao. Ni hao. So it's ni hao. And the inflection is very important. Right? I can't say ni hao. That'll be completely. I can't say ni hao because that will mean something different. So you should try your best to get the inflection right. But if you don't get it right, it's not as dire as if you say ni hao, everybody's going to know what you mean. Even if you get the tones a little wrong. So how do I say how are you today? Ni jing tian hao ma. Ni jing tian hao ma. Ni jing tian hao ma. Yeah. And these tones, you know, they kind of exist in English too, right? It's not as impossible as people sometimes think. For example, if I would say yes, versus if I would say yes, is there a difference? Yes. Big difference. Yes. Those are two of the four tones. Right. There's four tones in Chinese. Those are two. Yes versus yes. So yes is dui. Yes is hao. Hao is the third tone. So there's four tones. Yes is tone four. Yes is tone two. And then tone one is high level, which is what you do when you like are playing hide and seek and you go, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, eleven, eleven, eleven, eleven. Ready or not, here I come. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's first tone. Okay. So what are the three forms of yes that you can say in Chinese? Of yes? You can say yes, yes. But in Chinese. Of yes? Oh, no. There isn't a direct equivalent of yes in Chinese. You repeat the verb. You repeat the verb. Okay. So if the verb is like, you say like. If the verb is go, you say go. That's yes. If the verb is are, are you American? You say, to say yes, you say are, am. And the verbs don't decline. Isn't that simple? I am, you are. It's all sure in Chinese. And there's no future, no past tense. There's ways of indicating that, but not by declining the verb. Right. So grammar in Chinese is much simpler than grammar in many other languages. How do I say goodbye? Zaijian. See you again. Zaijian. Okay. Which is four, four, yeah? So falling, falling, like yes, yes. Zaijian. Zaijian. How do you say I like you? I like you and be careful with that. That's as intense as you want to go with Chinese to express that. That's as much as you want to say. I like you. And you don't want to say that to everybody. Right. Yes. I like you. I like you. It's perfectly fine to say I like you. This and I like you. That's fine. But if you want to say directly to somebody else. I like you. That's a little touchy. A little personal. Yes, a little personal. So there's a cultural message in there, right? Definitely. Because there's a great reserve in the Chinese personality. Everything is changing. And China is very diverse. And young people in certain situations might act much more like American young people. But generally it wouldn't hurt to think that be careful. How do you say China in Chinese? China. China. China. Yeah. The Middle Kingdom. The Middle Kingdom. And America is the beautiful Kingdom. And how do you say Hawaii? Hawaii, that is transliteration. It's Hawaii in Mandarin. Because originally it was Hawaii in Cantonese. Which sounds a lot more like Hawaii. But the characters for Hawaii is Xiaowei. Well, no, it's the same characters. But it's pronounced Xiaowei, which is a little more distanced from the sound of Hawaii. So interesting. How do you say, I'm hungry? 我饿了. 我饿了. Sounds like you're rolling marbles around. Yeah, just pretending. Pretend that somebody's punched his stomach. Break it down, of course. Very carefully. There's three sounds there. 我, I, to be hungry. And l is a little particle that goes on the end after a verb to indicate that this is something different. I wasn't hungry before, and now I am. So now I've become hungry. And these little grammatical markers happen all over the place. And they stand in place of a verb. They may not be a verb, really, in that expression. Well, they stand in place of declining the verb. In English, you could say, I am hungry. I was hungry. I am now hungry. The verb is these things that change. But in Chinese, there's other ways of indicating the same thing. L is one of those ways. How do you say, I'm full? 我饿了. So, 饿 is to be full. And 饿, again, is the change. So the only difference, you start with 我. You end with 饿. And there's a 饿 in the middle. I'm full. You can say 我病了. I'm sick. I've gotten sick. 我病了. 我好了. I've gotten better. Right. Chinese people always say to me, our language is so simple, you can learn it overnight. I'll give you a very simple example. In a Chinese class, you can teach the numbers one to 10,000 in a day. And you can't do that in all languages. But Chinese is so organized. Actually, in the summer start-up camp, we use an abacus. We have students work on abacus to reinforce math concepts. Because Chinese is so logical and so organized. You know the numbers one to 10? And then it's 10, 1, 10, 2, 10, 3. And then it's 2, 10, 1, 2, 10, 2, 10, 3. 3, 10, 1, 2, 10, 2, 3, 10, 3. It just repeats at an infinitum. So if you know the numbers one to 10, basically, you can count as high as you want to go with certain numbers for certain terms for the really high numbers. I find this fascinating, because I think you really can get some insight into the country and the people, the history, and the culture if you're listening carefully to the language. Yeah. We're going to take a break on that note, and we'll come back and pick it up from there. Do you want to be cool? Watch my show on Tuesdays at one called Out of the Comfort Zone. I sang this song to you because I think you either are cool or have the potential to be seriously cool. And I want you to come watch my show where I bring in experts who talk all about easy strategies to be healthier, happier, build better relationships, and make your life a success. So come sit with the cool kids at Out of the Comfort Zone on Tuesdays at one. See you there. This is what I got. How come he can still go in? He's a service dog. Well, I could get a vest, too. You're not even a service dog. He's trained to assist his owner. Well, I can do whatever he can do. Wow, did he just open the door? Yep. I can't do that. I can't do that either. He's trained for over two years to become a service dog. Man, I wish I could be a service dog. So we're back with Cindy Ning here, and we're in the middle of our Chinese lesson. So let's get back to it here. OK. The written form of Chinese is, of course, pictorial. There's no letters. There's no ABCDE in China. It's controversial to call it pictorial, though, because. At the root, there are images. Well, OK. The letters are also, I mean, the Western letters are also images. The thing about Chinese characters is that a very small subset of them derive from direct pictographic depiction. But most of them are put together. There's a sound component. There's a meaning component. So more than 85% of them are that. And some people have argued that Chinese is as sound-based as any other. It's just not entirely sound-based, like a letter and alphabet. Take the word China, for example. How do you write the word China? And explain to us what that shape and that gesture. You can see the word for middle, zhong, is one of the ones that's derived pictorially. So you have a block, and you have a line that goes directly through the middle of it. And that says middle. So and then the word for guo, in the two forms of written Chinese now. There's the simplified form that mainland China uses, and there's the traditional form that Taiwan, Hong Kong, a lot of Chinese communities in the diaspora use. And the original traditional form, there was an enclosure. So country, there's an enclosure. And inside that enclosure is me holding a spear. It's like, I'm the space that I'm defending. So just that character is kind of a history lesson in itself of China. So written Chinese is very interesting. There's people who wish that Chinese characters would just go away. Let's just move to an alphabetic system. And then there's another whole group of people who say that it's all about characters. It's all about characters, the reason why I want to learn. Just the science of calligraphy itself is an art form. You would very rarely see just a word put up in an art gallery, like alphabet, and present that as a piece of art. But you very often see a poem or a thought expressed very gracefully in Chinese calligraphy. And I think that one of the reasons why a lot of the Chinese population would be rather reluctant to give up Chinese characters is that it's so much of the lived experience. And some people would argue that it helps form the Chinese character. The people who want characters to go away is why put in all the effort to learn the 5,000, 10,000 characters that you need to communicate. But some people say that it's putting in the training, the discipline at a very early age without really knowing what the reward is going to be, just doing it. And then all of a sudden, after you've accumulated a lot of skill, know-how, all of a sudden, it's like, this is beautiful. I can communicate. I understand the beauty of it. I can connect 5,000 years backwards to my ancestors. I connect horizontally to all these people. There's a very powerful message there. And some people who say, no, characters is the Chinese culture. We will never drop it, is that we want to train our people to be disciplined like that, to put off delayed gratification, to work really hard, to trust other people who tell you, this is the way to do it. OK, I'll just do it. And it'll all just trust me. It'll all come together later. Well, now let's take it to another level here, Cindy. We have another short video from a friend, Lawrence Brahm. And he's talking about Chinese culture. Can we roll that video now? And then we'll talk about it afterwards. The Chinese culture is incredibly rich. But what's very important to understand about China's culture is over its 5,000 years of evolution. It has been the recipient of many different cultures. So we talk about Buddhism in China. It came in from India. We talk about many aspects of art and architecture. A lot of that was Arab-influenced. Because China threw out the period of way before the Tang dynasty, we had the Silk Road system. Effectively, the Silk Road was the economic order of the day for well over 1,000 years. And if we think about that, that was only temporarily disrupted by colonialism and the neocolonial period. And so the interaction of China with other cultures has always been very, very, very rich. And when we look at Chinese culture today, it is an amalgamation. It is a fusion of many different cultural inputs that have become Chinese. So in this case, I think what's really important is to recognize the value of this. And so when we think about this also, why are Chinese so fast advancing on technology, on AI, and on space? If you look at the history and you look at the culture and you look at the way of perceiving the world from the Yi Jing, which is one of the oldest written scriptures in the world, it is all about non-duality. It's all about the combination of yin and yang. It's all about people and nature and universality. These ideas are cutting edge in the West right now. No wonder they're advancing so quickly on AI because it's about that philosophical root. That wisdom, that knowledge is in the DNA. It's something that was programmed in centuries and centuries and centuries ago. It's not coming from YouTube. It's not coming from Twitter. It's not coming from Facebook. It's not coming from any of those things. And so I think it's really important to recognize the value of China's culture and to call for an Asian set of values. We're talking about environmental protection. We're talking about eliminating gaps between rich and poor. We're talking about trying to create harmonious society, about preventing conflict, rather than dealing with it after it's happened. These are core concepts which are part of an Asian philosophy. And as soon as we start to talk about that as something that's a shared philosophy across the Asian region, then we have to start thinking about what is universal, recognized human rights? What are universal, recognized values? Those are rights for everybody to have clean water, clean air, to be able to have sustainable income, to be able to have a future. These are things that are a broader matrix. Lawrence is talking a little bit about the inherent creativity of Chinese people based on their culture. Maybe you can reflect on that a little bit with us. It's very interesting, very thought-provoking. I have no facile comments to make. It's sort of ironic. I guess the Chinese belief always has been, I think, when a child is young, you train them, sort of wrote memory fashion. When the child is young, it's too early for them to be creative. You pack all this stuff, all the everything that's come down to us from the past and from contemporary civilization. You take it in, take it in, take it in, take it in, take it in, and just regurgitate it. But then there comes a point where that stops. And you sort of take a stand and you think, OK, who am I? And what am I going to do now? And then I guess that's the point at which your creativity, if you have it, would make use of everything else that's already in your head. People who are against that say that in the formative years, students are stifled by all this information that just pours in on them. And they also say Chinese people can't be creative. They can't create anything new. They can only remember other things. And that's really not true, especially among young people now that I've found. They're as creative as young people you find anywhere in America or Europe. And the wellspring of their creativity is a little different because of the history and their culture. My most recent trip to China, they were very proud of the four new major inventions. The way you're wasting the WeChat that is used ubiquitously. And people don't need cash anymore. Vendors selling goods on the ground will have a QR code that you pay with. And China feels that it has taken a lead in the shared bikes, the shared transportation, bikibike experience. And anyway, internet biking and what was the fourth one? Those are three really good ones though. And they show a great amount of creativity. Weixin is far superior to Facebook, for example, in its utility and the type of tools and the style of interaction that you can fashion. I find it much easier to use than Facebook, much more powerful. It's becoming a little challenging if you're not up with that technology to get along because it used to be that I could hail a cab on the street in China. Well, now everybody, you know. I have to tap in. You tap in and a car arrives. And if you don't have that, you can't do it. Cindy, we're going to have to pick this up next time. I really think there should be a next time. And we can go to the next level. So I want to thank you for your attention on this episode of Understanding China and look forward to seeing you again soon.