(no subject)

In the course of my Chinese learning, I've often referred to David Moser's essay on Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard, partly for reassurance that my own flailing -- and ability to read everything on the subway in Spanish better than everything on the subway in Chinese -- was a problem that every serious student of Chinese had, and not just a problem of my own laziness or bad study methods.

I would put a "Well, yeah, but...." against almost every single one of this points, but in the end, you just need an enormous amount of reading to make word recognition turn automatic without the help of roman letters and easy cognates. And Chinese characters are a road block when it comes to extensive reading. In languages that are written phonetically, once you get to the point where you can understand 98% or so, you can just barrel along guessing unknown words from context and you'll be fine except for when you don't realize it's a silent "g" in "paradigm." In Chinese, you can make a guess based on a character's phonetic components, and certainly in Japanese I had some words where I basically knew the meaning but was vague on the pronunciation, but it's bothersome to have that link between the written language and the spoken language obscured.

Still, I get to something like this:

Someone once said that learning Chinese is "a five-year lesson in humility". I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility.

And I can't help but thinking that this is a guy who's doing too much studying and too little easy reading. Which I can't blame him for. 1991 was before miles and miles of online text, before Amazon.cn, before ChinaSprout, before online dictionaries and electronic dictionaries with handwriting recognition. Between lack of resources specifically for second language learners and the fact that (mainland) Chinese children's books seem to assume that young children know a hell of a lot of characters, it's really hard to get a toehold in extensive reading. But once you do... your Chinese starts to become not-abysmal. You finish a novel (for six-year-olds, granted). And then you start to read even Taiwanese romance novels and realize that you basically understand what's going on. And you measure your 5-year-progress not against scholarly books but against the kind of books that a 5th-grade kid might be reading, because the capacity to read scholarly books is a product of years and years of extensive, not-too-hard reading.

Well, I guess I still have some years to go on the "lesson in humility" thing.

But I've done this in Japanese, and that means I realize that the farther you go, the more you feel like you have to learn: the words that are common in historical novels but describe things that aren't in daily use anymore, classical language, the (truly endless) learning of vocabulary words, and so on. And once you accept that you aren't on a set timeline to where you can be perfect, or conquer the language, or achieve some mystical level of "fluency at the level of a highly educated native speaker of the prestige dialect," then you can get down to the far more interesting question of what you can do, right now, with what you know.

(no subject)

My frustration with arguments about the literary value of YA is mostly that usually the most highbrow YA book that comes up in the discussion as a thing people have read is "The Fault In Our Stars." And -- it's kind of silly to pretend that there's some contest to read the most highbrow books possible, right, instead of reading what makes you happy (or gives you whatever you want from a book at any given point in time), but as somebody who really likes good sentences, and likes a lot of things that are deemed by the literary establishment to be "good literature," I can't help but feel like a lot of authors who are doing great work get erased.

There was some discussion over at the "Someday My Printz Will Come" blog when TFIOS didn't win a Printz award or honor, and there were lots of people who thought it should have won something and there were lots of people who thought it was right that it didn't -- because it was too sentimental, because the arc with the author character wasn't handled well, whatever. I liked it well enough, but I had to give "Code Name Verity" and "Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe" an edge in the plot-construction department and the prose department, respectively. TFIOS is not the beginning and the end of "literary" YA, and if you think it is, I WILL GIVE YOU A READING LIST.

It's a complicated thing to talk about because as a reader and as a librarian, I firmly believe in reading the things that you want to read for whatever reasons you have, and in not shaming people for their reading choices. But as a writer, I think it's necessary for me to hang on to my own not-objective sense that some things are better than other things -- that I have some sense of what craftsmanship looks like, what carefulness looks like, what creativity looks like. And there are so many YA books that I didn't read because they were easy, because they were fun, because they were escapist, whatever. I read them because they pricked up my sense of "this is what a really good book looks like."