Wanna learn Chinese? Ride the Metro.

For most expats who live in China, learning Chinese can be a daunting undertaking: all those characters, strange sounds, and those tones (!!) make you wonder if it's even worthwhile.  Well, to any expat living in Shanghai, I've found a way to learn Chinese in a very simple, almost passive way: ride the Metro.

Impossible you say?  不是！(no way!).  It has worked for me, so of course it can and will work for you!  Let's face it: most of us are way too busy or too broke to take a formal Chinese class, but on the flipside pretty much everyone who lives in Shanghai uses the Metro as their primary mode of getting from Point A to B.  Why not make most the most of your time in the subway and learn some Chinese! 

Before we begin, keep a few things in mind:

• Although you won't become fluent overnight, you will learn quite a few characters and how they are pronounced.  
• It will be helpful to be familiar with pinyin; that is, the system of phonetics using the Roman alphabet.  However, most sounds and vowels are similar to English pronunciation, so for now it isn't necessary. 
• In Standard (aka Mandarin) Chinese, each Chinese character stands for one syllable, regardless of how many syllables a Chinese word has: e.g. 上海 is ShangHai; 红桥火车站 is HongQiao HuoChe Zhan -- Hongqiao Railway Station. 

Now let's begin!

Lesson 1 - Matching syllables to characters.

• Most of the Metro stops are named after the roads they are on.
• 衡山路--HengShan Lu -- Hengshan Road.  
• Remembering the rule one character-one syllable, you now have 衡 (Heng) 山 (Shan) 路 (Lu).  
• You may have also picked up that 路 means road, which is definitely a useful character to know when navigating the city.  

Lesson 2 - Matching English translations to characters

• In other cases the name of a Metro stop is translated fully into English.
• 人民广场 -- RenMin GuangChang -- People's Square
• Looking at the characters, you have 人民 (RenMin) meaning 'people' and 广场 (GuangChang) meaning 'square' or 'plaza'.  Throughout China you will find 人民 on things related with China or the Communist Party, whereas you'll find 广场 in decidedly less politically-charged places, like shopping malls.  

Lesson 3 - Listening to the Metro loudspeaker

• To the untrained foreigner, the omnipresent woman who announces Metro stops sounds as if she's speaking unintelligible gibberish.  Who could possibly figure out what she's saying?  Ah, but there is a way!  You just have to listen for what you need to hear, and tune out everything else.  
• In the Metro, the most important information you need to know is what the next stop is, and when you arrive.  The phrase下一站 (XiaYiZhan) means 'next stop' and 到了(DaoLe) means 'arriving' or 'arrived'.  

Keeping everything we have learned so far in mind, can you figure out what the following phrases mean?

• 下一站：衡山路。
• 人民广场到了。

The next time you ride the Metro, read the signs in Chinese closely, and keep your ear tuned to the Metro announcer.  It will take some time, but before you know it you will be able to read quite a few characters and understand some spoken Chinese.  And hopefully for you, Chinese will become less and less of an "impossible" language to learn.  

好运！(HaoYun--Good luck!)

"You can transfer to Magic Line 4..."

Many of you who know me know about my obsession with airplanes.  A close second obsession would be with trains, particularly metro/subway/tube lines (from here on out, I'll be using the word "metro" for the universality of the term).  In Chicago, where I'm originally from, our famed mode of public transport is the 'L', which stands for Elevated.  Those of you not from Chicago may nonetheless be familiar with the L, as it appears as an ever-present backdrop in movies filmed and set in the city.  Those of you fortunate enough to live or visit Chicago know that it is one of the best ways to see the city, given that most of it is, appropriately enough, elevated.  However, as lucky as Chicagoans are to have the L (compared to most of America, anyway), the L pales in comparison to other metro systems around the world.

Up until I moved to Shanghai, my benchmark for metro trains was the Madrid Metro.  Unlike Chicago's L, which only covers barely 2/3 of the city (and thus making a car still a necessity), with the Madrid Metro you could go anywhere you wanted without a car.  The trains were clean, stations were well-lit, and signage straightforward.  When I left Madrid in 2010 many lines had since been either renovated or expanded, and continues to be in expansion.  Adding to it my schtick for languages I always found myself lip-synching to the lady who so politely reminds you: "Atención! Estación en curva.  Al salir tengan cuidado para no introducir el pie entre coche y andén!" ("Attention! Curved station.  When exiting the train be careful not to insert your foot between the car and the platform!").  I measured the quality of a city's public transportation to that of Madrid's, and thought no other metro network could surpass it.  That is, until I moved to Shanghai...

As you may have read in my very first blog entry, I first came to Shanghai in 2009 to visit a friend (coincidentally, from Madrid).  Back then Shanghai Metro only had five lines in operation, and wasn't as far-reaching as the Madrid Metro at the time.  Despite that, I was more than impressed with the Shanghai Metro.  Compared with the much smaller stations in Madrid and Chicago, Shanghai's Metro stations are big and wide, being able to accommodate everyone in the busiest of rush hours.  ("Busy" doesn't seem to be an accurate description of a typical rush hour commute, as the photo below illustrates.)  And as busy as Shanghai's metro can get, I have yet to experience a situation where I could not get on a train because it was full.  Whomever designed the Metro must have had this in mind.  It still amazes me that when I have to change trains at People's Square, the busiest station of the network and follow a sprawling anthill-colony of people to the next line, there is never a bottleneck that prevents people from going where they need to be.

In the fall of 2010, when I decided to move to Shanghai, things had definitely changed a lot in that amount of time.  Shanghai played host to the Expo 2010, and to prepare the city for the event, the powers that be invested hundreds of millions of dollars (if not more) transforming Shanghai into a world-class city.  Along with beautifying the Bund and constructing a whole smattering of glitsy, gleaming new buildings, underneath Shanghai's streets nonstop tunneling took place to expand the Metro network from five lines in 2009 to 13 as of this blog entry's publication, with more expansions and lines planned before this decade is up.  Like the Madrid Metro, with Shanghai's network you can go pretty much anywhere in the city without a car.  And considering that a single ride can cost you a mere $1-1.50, there's no better way of getting around.  My only gripe about the Metro is that it closes rather early compared to Madrid or Chicago's metro systems; last trains depart from end stations at 10:30pm, so before midnight you're at the mercy of taxis to get you around.  That notwithstanding, Shanghai's metro has become my benchmark for quality public transport.  America, take note.

And just as I've combined my thing for languages with the Madrid's Metro, I've done the same with Shanghai's.  As I will demonstrate in a future blog entry, listening to the announcements by the omnipresent Chinese lady has helped me pick up a lot of Mandarin.  But perhaps one of my favorite quirks of the Metro is when announcer switches into English for us laowais; whenever a train stops at a station with more than one line, the following announcement is broadcast in English: "You can transfer to Metro Line 4" but due to her thick accent it sounds more akin to "You can transfer to Magic Line 4".  Intentional or not, given the pace that the Metro has expanded in the last few years,  the Shanghai Metro truly is magic.

*My thing for automated metro announcements have had me combining Madrid and Shanghai announcements in my head.  For example:  "Próxima estación: Xujiahui.  Correspondencia con: Línea 9.  Atención! Estación en curva...you can transfer to Magic Line 9".

Yeah...I'm a weirdo.

Roots here, roots there.

The biggest highlight of the end of 2011 was my trip to the Philippines, where I spent Christmas and New Year. Since I wasn't able to afford the ticket back to Chicago for the holidays, I did the next best thing: spend it with my aunts, uncles, cousins and of course, my cooky but loveable Lola (grandma in Tagalog). As I tend to do, I made some grandiose plans to travel around the Philippines, hopefully to go to a nice beach and just lay there. Alas, the most I traveled in the islands was to Tagaytay, where Taal Volcano is located. Now if you haven't been there, it's the only place in the world where you'll find a little lake on an island (Volcano Island) on a bigger lake (Lake Taal) located on a bigger island (Luzon) on an even bigger body of water (the Pacific Ocean). Photo attached to explain:


The rest of the time I stayed in Manila, spending much quality time with my family. It was nice hearing Tagalog again, since it's the language I grew up hearing and at times speaking growing up. Along with being able to eat the delicious and artery-clogging foods I enjoyed growing up (sinigang, lechon kawali, pancit, et al), it was the closest thing to being at home than I could have ever imagined. The weather was wonderful, a lot sunnier than I expected, and the first time I celebrated Christmas in a place that wasn't freezing, much less have a traditional white Christmas. And come New Year, my cousins and I lit fireworks outside their house, along with the rest of the neighbors. It was a nice change from my yearly routine: boozing it up and getting completely hammered before midnight. I became so attached to the Philippines that I was truly sad when it was time to fly back to Shanghai. I have to admit, hearing people speaking in Mandarin at the airport was a bit of a reverse-culture shock for me, as I heard myself saying "what kind of language is that?"

I must say, in the last few times that I have visited the Philippines I have gained a better appreciation to where my family originated. Compared with the first time I remember visiting, in which I was an immature 14 year old spoiled American brat that complained about everything, the islands are an amazing place and am so proud to have roots there.

Speaking about roots, a month before I went to the Philippines I met with my auntie and a college friend of hers in the southern Chinese city of Xiamen. As I had previously mentioned, this is located where my maternal grandfather was from originally (although the actual place he grew up in is still to be determined). On this trip, aside from Xiamen City and Gulangyu Island, we visited the interior of the surrounding Fujian Province, visiting a traditional tulou community and staying overnight. Declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, a tulou is a circular, communal building (think of a huge circular condo or apartment building) built by the Hakka people. Made of fortified earth and stone, these buildings were virtually indestructible, and during attacks, these buildings turned into forts and had some ingenious ways of protecting themselves from invaders.




Knowing that I also have ancestral roots in this part of the world and being able to explore this place firsthand has given me more of a personal connection to China than when I first moved here. If anything at all, it's given me the motivation I need to learn Chinese and fully appreciate the culture, both the good and bad.