A dream in Chinese
I had my first "Dream in Chinese" the other night. This is a milestone of any language learner, when the other language seeps into the subconscious. It can be a victory or a surrender, depending how you look at it.
There are a few things that were a little off, though, about my Dream in Chinese. First of all, I'm not currently an active student of Chinese language, unless I count the time I spend working with Myles on his own Mandarin homework from his tutor. It isn't that I don't want to study, but right now it is hard to schedule and Changping, having few foreigners not already enrolled in a full-time Chinese program, isn't quite teeming with experienced, capable Chinese tutors. Further, as I approach my fifth anniversary of coming to China, it seems a little late in the game for me to be experiencing only my first Chinese Dream.
However, what was really odd was what happened in the dream. I was having a conversation in Mandarin about something someone said to me in Cantonese but then mid-sentence I could not recall the Cantonese word for little sister. I turned to someone else, one of my friends back in Shenzhen, and asked them (in Mandarin), How do you say little sister in Cantonese? She answered back, ong.
This is where this dream, my first in Chinese, is really strange. I don't know more than a handful of Cantonese words, but in real life I know that little sister is mui mui. So why I didn't know it in the dream, and why my friend said the wrong word, I have no idea.
It all leaves me wondering if it really counts.
There are a few things that were a little off, though, about my Dream in Chinese. First of all, I'm not currently an active student of Chinese language, unless I count the time I spend working with Myles on his own Mandarin homework from his tutor. It isn't that I don't want to study, but right now it is hard to schedule and Changping, having few foreigners not already enrolled in a full-time Chinese program, isn't quite teeming with experienced, capable Chinese tutors. Further, as I approach my fifth anniversary of coming to China, it seems a little late in the game for me to be experiencing only my first Chinese Dream.
However, what was really odd was what happened in the dream. I was having a conversation in Mandarin about something someone said to me in Cantonese but then mid-sentence I could not recall the Cantonese word for little sister. I turned to someone else, one of my friends back in Shenzhen, and asked them (in Mandarin), How do you say little sister in Cantonese? She answered back, ong.
This is where this dream, my first in Chinese, is really strange. I don't know more than a handful of Cantonese words, but in real life I know that little sister is mui mui. So why I didn't know it in the dream, and why my friend said the wrong word, I have no idea.
It all leaves me wondering if it really counts.
Comments
When I was working with English language learners in Japan, they would often say that they would like to have a dream in English. To them it clearly represented a final cross over into some kind of deeper understanding of or fluency in the language.
I've also heard it said, however, that when you dream of something that means it is passing out of your concious and into your subconcious. For example when someone is trying to quit smoking they say that a good sign is when they have a dream about smoking indicating that the desire to smoke is migrating from the concious world into their subconcious.