 Aloha, thank you very, very much, everybody, for tuning into China, Hawaii, and you. My name is Andrew Zermann, and I'm very, very happy to be live with you. This is our first episode of 2022. We hope that everybody had a wonderful and safe Christmas and New Year's. And today we're going to be talking with a very, very good friend of mine, in China, who is, has the, probably the most proficient Mandarin that I've ever met in terms of foreigners. And we're very, very thrilled for everybody to get to know him. His name is Akeel. Really quickly, Akeel, do you want to give yourself a little bit of a self-introduction and say what you do up in China? And maybe how long you've been there? Anything else you want to say? Sure, sure, sure, sure. Well, thank you again, Andrew, for the introduction and thanks for inviting me to be on the show, especially the first episode of the New Year. I'm really excited. I know you've been talking about this a lot and we were talking about trying to do something together while you were still here in China. So I'm glad we finally got the chance to connect and do it. As far as my introduction, my name is Akeel Aline. I'm from the United States. Obviously, born in New York, raised in Maryland. And I graduated from the University of Maryland with a bachelor's degree in Chinese. And after that, I came to China and did what most foreigners do when they come to China. They teach English. So I came to China about five and a half years ago and was teaching English for about three of those years, three and a half of those years. And then eventually I switched jobs into my current position, which is I'm a learning and development specialist at a debate and public speaking training facility. And we do debate and public speaking training for middle, high school, and now even elementary school kids. I'm also currently the president of Shanghai Imagine Toastmasters Club, which is a Toastmasters Club here in Shanghai. Yeah, one of my biggest regrets when I was in China is I never actually made it out to one of the Toastmasters sessions because it's a really, really important skill of public speaking now more than ever. In this technological age, they keep talking about how what's gonna become more and more important is our interpersonal skills. And I think what ties really closely into that is speaking their mother tongue. You wouldn't, you would be amazed, well, not you obviously, because I'm sure you know more than most people, but people would be amazed how much more warmly you're received, so to speak, if you don't make people speak English. Yeah, yeah, it's true. I mean, like you said, particularly for me working in learning and development and HR in general, this idea that these, what we call soft skills, but really these interpersonal communication skills are becoming increasingly important because there's so many things that we're dealing with in our lives on the day-to-day basis, and there's so much more that we're bringing into the workplace and being able to communicate what you're feeling and how you're feeling effectively and clearly is, as you said, becoming increasingly important. It doesn't really matter what language you're speaking in, but definitely being able to do it in your mother tongue, obviously will help communication across, even across languages. So yeah, it's definitely becoming more important. So I'm sure you've gotten this question probably thousands of times, but what possessed you to think, to take the hardest language in the world by, if you ask some people, I don't think it's the hardest in the world personally. I think I've gotten a sense of some others, and I think that there are definitely contenders for that, and I don't think it's Chinese, but it's up there. So what strange ghosts possessed your body and made you think like, yeah, this absolute hieroglyphic of a language, I'm gonna make this my college major? Yeah, that is the question, right? I think for me, I actually had started studying Chinese when I was in high school. I was doing French first, and then we heard that there was going to be a pilot program for Chinese language. And I thought, well, you know, French, I took it because everyone said French was harder than Spanish. And so far, I'm doing pretty well with one another challenge. And as you said, I heard that Chinese was supposed to be the hardest language to learn. So I figured, why not? It's a pilot program. And I jumped in and decided to just start learning it. And so from, I believe it was my junior year, not to be my sophomore year, sophomore or junior year of high school, I started learning Chinese and I just fell in love with it. And part of it was also just, you don't have a lot of exposure to Chinese in the US, or at least where I was growing up, I didn't have a lot of exposure to Chinese, but I had a lot of exposure to Japanese anime, right? And so I figured, okay, well, Japanese, Japan, that's kind of close to China. And so what I'll do is I'll start off learning Chinese and then eventually get into Japanese and then maybe when I'm done, I'll start off with Korean. So it was kind of like this path for me to be able to explore a little bit more about the East Asian language and culture. And then when I jumped into Chinese, I was like, wow, this is, there's so much to learn here. Like, I don't know what I was thinking, thinking I would do all three. But when I went into university, I wanted to do computer engineering. And I figured that I could still do both of those things, Chinese and computer engineering together. And those hopes were dashed very, very quickly. Computer engineering was very, very difficult for me. But Chinese had always been something that came very easily to me. And I figured at the end of the day, as long as I graduate with something that I'm like and something that I know I'm good at, I'll be able to find a job and I'll be able to make it work. So I ended up switching into Chinese as my major for the last, I think the last two years of university. And that's what I graduated with. Yeah, you know, when I was in college, I got completely obsessed with Duolingo. And, you know, it's really funny that now that the new year has started, one of the most common New Year's resolutions that people will make just in, there's like, statistics on one of the most common people make is that they're going to learn some kind of language, right? And the immediate intuitive thing to do, if you're not a college student, because if you are a college student, well, then you know exactly what to do, right? Well, if you have the time for it, which I certainly didn't, because I was in like a STEM field too. So I didn't really, I was trying to sort of self-learn the whole thing. And, you know, I'm sure you can kind of attest to the fact that like you're not going to, at least in the initial stages of Chinese, you're not going to get very far without like really intense time. And it's may not be realistic to like carry an engineering load along with that. But, you know, for most of us that like have jobs, have families, if we do want to pursue learning a new language, right? The first thing that we tend to think about is just sort of downloading an app, right? And sort of going off that. Do you think that this is, that there is, now clearly this is not enough, right? But do you think that there's good in just people kind of giving it a try, even if they never really get that far? Or do you think that there's harm in, which my criticism of something Duolingo would be, in sort of giving people these absolute buffet of languages that they could do as long as as often as they want and just sort of repeating drill after drill. And, you know, the thought can easily become like, oh, if I spend just enough time on that, before I know it, I'll be flowing in like 40 languages. Yeah, I think it's difficult because like you said, the idea, for me the flaw comes in with the marketing, but then also just the way that we understand languages, right? Like thinking that you will become fluent in language from just using an app in and of itself is flawed. Because that's not how you became fluent in your own language. It's not like you were just using an app to learn. There are so many different factors. And I think that those are the things that people just kind of neglect. So I think that the marketing of the way that the apps are marketed in addition to the way that we think about the apps is the real problem here. That being said, I don't think that there's any problem with people getting started with an app or thinking that like, this is a good way to break into the market of learning this language, right? Because you use whatever resources that you have and knowing, hey, I'm gonna use Duolingo because I'm gonna try to learn the basis of this language or I wanna learn Duolingo in order to build up my understanding of the vocabulary and the sentence structure or the grammar of this language. Like that is totally, totally fine. But also acknowledging the fact that like in order to get actually fluent in this language, you're going to have to start talking to people. You're going to have to start listening to things regularly on a daily basis in order to make sure that you're listening is being improved and stuff like that. Like I think that is the next step that people need to take. And that's oftentimes not factored in when a lot of people start making these news resolutions about learning language. So I don't think there's anything wrong with the apps themselves. I just think there's something wrong with the way that we market and think about learning language. Yeah, I'm inclined to agree. I think that there is a problem that we sort of kind of take to the app and it's not necessarily like the app's fault, right? But that kind of transitions me into my next question. When you were talking about growing up with anime as most of us did, or at least with some exposure, you said like, oh, I'm going to do Chinese and then maybe I'll get Japanese and Korean later, right? But then with the further we go down, right? The more we realize like this is an extremely deep hole and I still am not at the point where I can like comfortably read a book, which is sort of my standard for it. I'm thankfully at that point now in my Chinese. And so I've kind of allowed myself to start with Japanese especially because it's very common in Hawaii, right? But I now realize that it wouldn't have been possible or feasible to do that had I not spent the last two years in China and being extremely intensive, probably to an unhealthy point on how I was taking one specific language of Mandarin. But the question basically that I want to ask you about that is when we're in the West and we think of why people pick up Japanese and Korean, it's very obvious to us with the anime and K-pop. And now Korea's actually been putting out really, really interesting and popular TV dramas recently. It's not just Squid Game. The Squid Game is the big one, right? But there was one about like people that get condemned to die by a bunch of like hell monsters or something like that. And there's another one, space. So Korea is gonna be really picking up in terms of its kind of presence that it's taking in the West. But all of this time, there hasn't really been that equivalent in China, right? There is a CPOP industry, but it hasn't, nobody really thinks about Chinese pop when they're thinking about what music is popular in foreign countries. So why Chinese of all things? So you mean like why specifically that I said to go into Chinese? Right, it's like people usually get into Japanese because there's like anime or this like media that they've been exposed to that really pulls them, right? But Chinese didn't have that, right? And so why even when you had anime right there, did you ultimately decide was it just like the experimental class you took in high school and that's what made you think like, yeah, I'm gonna make this Chinese even if it's like, I can't watch anime out of it? Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question, right? And I love how you've kind of broken down a lot of the different factors that oftentimes influence our decision or like how we understand these different languages, particularly Japanese, Chinese and Korean. I think for me, it was twofold. I mean, obviously initially it was just the fact that I wanted to learn a language and at that point in time, I had never really thought about learning a language from anime or anything like that. The only ways that I knew to learn a language was through a class. And so I was like, oh, I'm being offered this class that's obviously I don't need to pay for it because it's part of my high school curriculum and I can just take it. And so I just started Chinese in there and I was thinking about doing Spanish at the same time because I really love languages. And to me, it's just being able to become proficient enough to communicate with somebody in their native tongue and make them feel like, yeah, I get you. That's something that I didn't wanna pass up. And so yeah, I mean, Chinese, first of all, it was just barrier to entry was very low. It was right there. But secondly, as I got into it and one thing that I've noticed is for better or worse, a lot of our understanding of Chinese comes from martial arts. A lot of the martial arts influences that you see in the US are actually very specifically Chinese. And maybe a lot of people don't actually realize that they're Chinese, they might not know the difference, but most of them are Chinese. And you look at Jackie Chan, you look at Bruce Lee, you look at Jet Li, Crouching, Tiger, Hidden Dragon, all of those movies that we see, they're all Chinese. And so for me, as I started to continue to learn a little bit more about Chinese culture and Chinese history, while learning Chinese, I realized that there's also a certain level of like discipline or like mysticism and discipline that comes with this idea of martial arts. And for me, I've always been drawn to things that kind of require you to be a little bit more disciplined of the mind and the body because I realized that that's something that I kind of lack in myself. Now it's funny, ironically enough, I found that in boxing and not in anything related to Chinese, but still, I think that that was also a big thing for me. I was like, oh, there's a lot of respect for the culture and the history. And you start to learn that a lot of Chinese language and culture is deeply rooted in the culture and the history. And so it's kind of like this idea that you have to respect this and you have to follow this path, you know? And I was like, okay, cool, that's easy for me. I can just do that. I don't mind doing that. Yeah, I really love the analogy that you brought up with discipline because it's funny, you know, two years ago, for me, a disciplined act would be reading like a very basic Chinese BBC Zhou Wen article like because the BBC put it published that there's like really short digestible things in Chinese, but it would still be really, really hard for me to kind of go through all those dictionary plecho. And so to me, I think that was sort of an active cultivating discipline. But, you know, now you've started to fish over to the box and I've switched over to other things too. And the reason is Chinese doesn't require discipline for me anymore, right? It's just something I get, something I understand, something I can read. So if anything, it becomes almost, it can become just a distraction for me to say like, oh, I have a pilot school exam on Wednesday, which I do, you know, but I'd like distract myself and say like, well, I can keep reading Santi, which is a really famous Chinese novel, right? I can keep reading that. And hey, that's productive too, right? But in the deepest part of my heart, I know that like this is comprehensible 99% to me, right? And this is not really what I would consider discipline because it's not something that I know needs to be done. It's kind of like a fake productivity, I think would be, it's a really good analogy for it. Yeah, I mean, it's like, I mean, it's with anything, right? Like once you get to a certain level, in order to discipline comes with continuing to challenge yourself and being okay with being challenged, right? And once you get to a point where you're like, yeah, I mean, I can read this, you need to, like if you don't have harder things to digest, then it becomes very easy to distract you, right? Or not necessarily distract you, but it becomes very easy. It's a, there's less thought and there's like you said, less discipline required to consistently be involved in it, yeah. You know, kind of going off of what we've been talking here about, you know, the sort of the content production from Japan and Korea, like, you know, do you think that Chinese as a language is suffering from a kind of, you could call it like a content famine. So what I would describe what I defined by that, I think you know what I mean, but I'm gonna define it for our listeners. A content famine would be a situation in which the given language does not have readily accessible stuff for new learners to watch because maybe it's too small or in China's case, it's a little bit too centralized and moved out from the West. So what I mean by that, at least you explain a little more is like if you go on Netflix, it's very easy for you to find dubbed versions of most movies. It's actually shocking to me, like with Squid Game, right? You could watch it in Spanish, Japanese, I believe German, but Chinese is notably absent from it, right? And, you know, I think one of the problems, and this is what I think there's a content famine, but I think one of the problems that Chinese has, right, is that all of these things that we tend to think of that people are recommended to do when it comes to learning a language, like, you know, watching movies and stuff, the only thing that you can watch is locally, sort of locally produced Chinese stuff, right? Which is not always the most intuitive stuff to understand. I managed to find some Disney movies on ITE, the, you know what I'm talking about, the video site. I managed to find some Disney dub, some Disney Chinese dubs, and those were a lot more helpful for developing it, but even still it was much, much harder than someone would have in Spanish, for example. And I think that broadly speaking, Chinese content just hasn't kind of pushed into the world in the way that these other countries have. So do you think that that's a real concern, this content famine that I'm talking about? And if so, why do you think that is? Yeah, I think that's a good question. And you brought up a lot of really, I think a lot of the weaknesses there that it comes with finding Chinese content that I've run into. I think that there is Chinese content and there actually is a lot of Chinese content, but it's not as easy to find or it's not as intuitive to find as the other, as content for other languages. And like you said, like on Netflix, I mean, there are things on Netflix, but you can't really necessarily find Chinese shows. I mean, there are some Chinese movies or there are movies that have come out of Hong Kong or China and that are more famous that you will be able to find and then you could watch them in Chinese, right? There are also a lot of older, I mean, most of the movies that you probably would be able to watch are things by like Zhang Yimou or like other really big like producers that have come out of mainland China would have had like a lot of Chinese like Hong Kong influence. And so you can find movies like that, but then even then there's probably like, I don't know, 20 movies that people would consider classic movies, right? You know, that you would actually want to watch and you can watch them over and over and over again, but eventually then you want new content. When it comes to TV shows, I think that we're even more limited in that sense because like you said, a lot of the TV shows are, they're more removed from the types of things that a lot of like people from Western culture would interact with. That being said, it's interesting because I feel like, I mean, that is part of the reason why you watch shows as well, right? Because part of learning the language is learning and understanding the culture. And so while the culture itself may not necessarily be accessible to you, that's the point. The point is to watch the show and understand about the culture because it is very different from you. And just to link back, I think that's part of the reason or I'm pretty sure that's part of the reason why so many people say that Chinese is so difficult because for English speakers, the gap, the language gap from like going to Chinese to going to English is much larger than it is from English to French or English to Spanish or English to any other Latin based or Germanic language. And so it's not that it's more difficult to learn necessarily, it's just that the gap, the language gap is much bigger. But by extension, the culture gap is also much bigger. That being said, I think that again, to re-do my first point is that the content is out there. It's just not as accessible. Like you kind of have to already know where to go and find Chinese based information or Chinese based media. And then you also have to be okay with the fact that this is going to be different from what you're interacting with. But my approach to it is always like, okay, cool. I'm learning a little bit more about history. I'm learning Chinese history, right? Or I'm learning a little bit more about just like how people like interacted or interacted in China or interacted in China earlier on. Now to answer the second part of your question, why that is a thing, I think part of it honestly is just because China's been developing, China's gone through like three major revolutions, right? In the past 100 years. So like as far as like Chinese culture itself, like the grandparents of people who are alive right now have a completely different experience than the parents of the people who are alive right now in China. And they have a completely different experience from their own children who are alive right now. You know, like these three different generations have very different experiences of China. And then China as a country has also been developing very, very differently. And so like there was a point in time when they were not pushing content. They weren't really worried about how the West was thinking about them. In the Seneca podcast, it's a podcast that I recommended to you, you know, while we were talking individually. They go and they talk about this. They talk about how the fact that like, there are so many different concerns from these different parents. And like China wasn't really focused on creating their own narrative of who China was. Like the narrative of China was being influenced by everyone who left China or who came to China and left or everyone who's looking at China from afar. And China didn't really care. And so part of that in them not really worrying about cultivating their own narrative is that they weren't pushing out their own content. Mainland China was not worried about people seeing movies about China. They weren't worried about people watching TV shows about China. They were like, we're gonna make content for the people within here. And so I think that's part of the, also part of the problem, part of the dearth that you find of this content. But that being said, there's also like, obviously like Taiwan and mainland China have different types of cultures and different ways that they see things. But there is a lot of Taiwanese media that you can find online. And that's also a really good way to access, at least being able to speak like Putonghua or like, you know, some form of Mandarin. Now, obviously it's different, but it's still the access is there. And I think that's also a good place to start. But there are a lot of really, really great Chinese TV shows and excuse me, Chinese movies that are coming out. Like you see a lot more collaborations with Chinese movie stars coming appearing in like actual like Hollywood films, right? You had, oh gosh, what was it? The, there was this movie with this guy on a, this like young boy who was on a boat and he was like gambling and the whole, I think it was like Animal House or something like that is what it was called. But there was that movie, there was the latest like Godzilla movie, Zhang Zi, oh, who's a very famous Chinese actress was in it. Yeah, there are a lot of, there are a lot of like people breaking through this period. I didn't know that they had Chinese actors in the new Godzilla movie. The one with Godzilla versus like King Kong. Godzilla versus Kong. Yeah. Yeah, my students were obsessed with it actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, everybody was all just out in like Godzilla and they were all drawing him on the whiteboard. It was actually really funny. Yeah. We're actually running a little bit low on time because we, you know, we do have, we are really continuous broadcast, but I was thinking that we should speak a little Mandarin before we had, we had off. So what do you think? I think it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. What do you think is the most important part of learning Chinese? Learning Chinese is the most important part. This is very difficult. It's a very difficult question. Very difficult question. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It's okay. I think this may be one of the most ideal, for me, the most ideal point, but I don't think you, actually, this is not just a part of Chinese. I think you choose to learn any language. The most important thing is to respect. When you start learning this language, you have to respect and respect the basic language, the basic language, right? Yeah. Yeah, his background, his culture, everything. You don't just say, to learn, you have to learn, and then if you meet some of the things you don't know, yeah, I think this is not possible. Yeah, personally, I think the most important part is, of course, everyone has their own answer, but I think the most important part is you have a willing heart. You are willing to learn for the rest of your life. Because Chinese is very difficult. But if you are willing to, because you are willing to take Chinese as a tool, you can take it as a tool, then you have to realize that Chinese is really useful. And if you really, even if you say, you really respect Chinese, other Chinese people may respect you, because they have to know, they have been learning Chinese since childhood, right? So they already know this language is very difficult to learn. So if you are an outsider, an adult, you have already learned Chinese, then there must be someone else who speaks Chinese. No matter who he is, he must have a good sense of our culture. All right, we'll probably stop there. And I think the audience is a little bit too confused. But we are right about out of time. Is there anything that you want to say to the audience as far as like where they can reach you or any kinds of products or services that you want to show? This is just your showing out, basically. Oh, wow. Yeah, I mean, I'm not really on social media or anything. There is a YouTube video where I talk a little bit more about my ideas of Chinese. Oh yeah, you're one with Rita, right? Yeah. Yeah, I watched that actually. It's a very good listening practice for me. So yeah, if people are interested, I would highly recommend looking up Akil, A-K-E-E-L and Rita, R-I-T-A, should pop up immediately. Yeah, you guys did, that was a really, really good talk in your, yeah, you taught Chinese the whole time for, what was it, like half an hour, an hour? Yeah, the whole thing was like an hour and a half actually, but you cut it down to, I think, jeez, Louise. Yeah, well, let me tell you something. You know, a lot of people, they think that it's just not something that, it's not for them, but, you know, my goal in bringing on fluent foreigners is to kind of sort of give people the hope that, even if you are well into your 30s, 40s, 50s, never think to yourself that it's too late or that language is only something that a five-year-old can learn, you know? It's, your brain is constantly just hungry for this kind of stuff. So thank you very, very much, Akil. We're gonna be signing off now, and I just want to say, 好好学习天天想想, it means good, good study, study day by day out. Thank you very much, everybody, for tuning in. We'll see you in two weeks. Thanks, Angie, thank you. Thank you, Akil.