When there is sorrow it is a great shock to the nervous system, like a blow to the whole physiological as well as psychological being. We generally try to escape from it by taking drugs or drinks or through every form of religion. Or we become cynical or accept things as inevitable.Can we go into this question very deeply, seriously? Is it possible not to escape from sorrow at all? Perhaps my son dies, and there is immense sorrow, shock, and I discover that I am really a very lonely human being. I cannot face it, I cannot tolerate it. So I escape from it. And there are many escapes—mundane, religious, or philosophical. This escape is a waste of energy. Not to escape in any form from the ache, the pain of loneliness, the grief, the shock, but to remain completely with the event, with this thing called suffering—is that possible? Can we hold any problem—hold it and not try to solve it—try to look at it as we would hold a precious, exquisite jewel? The very beauty of the jewel is so attractive, so pleasurable that we keep looking at it. In the same way if we could hold our sorrow completely, without a movement of thought or escape, then that very action of not moving away from the fact brings about a total release from that which has caused pain.

I missed an appointment with my friend Ray today.  My meetings with Ray started out with him tutoring me in Chinese and have now morphed into me tutoring him in Australian culture. Which leads me to the problem of learning languages.  I do claim that I have been half successful 50% of the time with learning Chinese.  It’s just that I lack application.  I have heard that it takes ten years to get good at Chinese (spoken and written).  That is way too long for me.

               It's my learning material,Ed gave me this.

Some of my friends complain that learning Chinese is difficult because there are so many words that read or sound the same but mean different things.  What about “desert” (dry wasteland) which sounds different from, but is spelt the same as, “desert” (run away from the army)?  Also, consider “dessert” meaning pudding etc which sounds the same as “desert” (run away from the army).  Note that “desert” meaning something you deserve also sounds the same as the pudding “dessert” and the run away from the army “desert”.  This is not to ignore “close” (near) and “close” (shut).  If you look at an English dictionary you will find many, many, many other examples of two or more words that sound the same, or are maybe spelt the same, but which have different meanings. I think I am talking about homophones and homonyms.

My point is that it is not just in Chinese that you find these homophones and/or homonyms.  They must make life difficult for learners of English as a second language.

I believe that what really makes Chinese hard to learn is the writing system.  No one can look at a Chinese character they have not learned and really figure out what it means.  The most one can do is figure out what radical is being used and possibly work out what it just might sound like. But, beyond that, most of us ordinary people may as well be looking at a sentence written in Martian.

As a result of this failure with Chinese…  Actually, I would not class it as a failure, more a realisation that I do not possess the drive to learn the language properly.  Maybe “laziness” is the word I am looking for. However described, this problem has caused me to start to study French. (By “study” I mean occasionally to listen to a few sentences in French and sometimes read a few lines of French, with an English translation, naturally) So far, this has proven much more suitable to my listless language learning style.  I have found that lots of French words look like English words. These words sometimes have the same (or at least a similar) meaning as in English. Apparently, you just have to pronounce them with a French accent.  How hard can it be?  Time will tell although the verbs seen to keep changing and the word French people use instead of “the” or “a” seems to change from “la” to “le” with no apparent rhyme nor reason.  It is something about masculine and feminine nouns.

These features vaguely remind me what little I recall of the Latin that I failed to learn so many years ago. I am rather proud of my obstinate refusal to apply myself to Latin.  I had to learn some phrases parrot-fashion in my capacity of an altar boy in a Catholic church. Eventually, however,  my one-boy stand against Latin (demonstrated by my persistent and repeated failure in the subject) was gloriously vindicated when the Church, the last bastion of the language, gave it up (except maybe in the Vatican) in favour of the language of the place, the lingua loci, if you will.

I have heard it said that it is harder for a non-native speaker of English to learn English than it is for an English speaker to learn… some language or other. Well, I have, more or less, mastered , or, if not mastered, gained a working knowledge of, English.  This happened with very little effort, I may say, although I must concede that spending my whole life in Australia probably helped.

Nevertheless, I will continue to plod along in Chinese.  I am sure a smattering of the language will come in handy sometime. (Incidentally, do you not think that “smattering” is a funny word?)