So I was on a bus, minding my own business. I was going shopping and had pulled out my little note pad and paper and started making a list. The old woman sat down next to me and immediately started talking to the woman across the aisle and then she turned to me and she did something not a lot of people do here: She started talking to me in Chinese.

Now, I tried my best to understand her, but I could make nothing of it. She sounded like she was saying that ended in "senme guaijia." And for the life of me, I was stumped. I kept repeating, "senme guaijia" as if it were an incantation and by simply reciting it the meaning would magically appear. It was a strategy I had seen my only Chinese students adopt in conversation with me when they didn’t understand what I had said. She pointed to my pad of paper, and started writing something down not in the romanized pinyin but in the Chinese script, hanzi. Now, in most cases, this would be absurd, since most people who study Chinese do not really bother to learn hanzi but pretty much stick to the pinyin, which is enough of a problem. But I have actually been studying the Chinese characters so I thought might be able to figure something out. But no dice. It was all Greek to me. Worse than Greek actually, because I can read Greek, but I could make neither heads nor tails of what she had written. The fact that she was writing on a moving bus didn’t help matters, of course. Out of nowhere the young woman sitting behind me said, "she is asking where you are from." God, how did I not get that. So I told her in Chinese, and then she asked another question, which I could make no sense of and which she proceeded to write down which of course did not help. And then the young woman again translated: "she is asking what you do." I replied again in Chinese. Then the young woman took over and asked a few questions of her own, like how long have you been in China. When I told her six months, she replied, "Six months, and you know so little Chinese." Yeah, so shoot me.

Now in fairness, the old woman was speaking the local dialect. And the term for "what country are you from?" in the Mandarin that we learn is "shenme guojia," which sounds distinctly different from "senme guaijia." But the young woman had a point. By this time, I should have been able to understand this even in the Sichuan dialect. It’s not that I am not putting in a lot of work on the language. I am, usually averaging a couple of hours or more a day. The problem is that I am approaching the language in a purely theoretical way, working my way through a series of textbooks. Indeed, just before I boarded the bus I had finished off a section the "resultative complement" but yet couldn’t exchange the simplest greetings with someone on the bus. There is a disconnect between my theoretical and practical knowledge of the language. I should say this is not unusual. This is actually the state of most of my lower level students, who have had English drilled into them for years but who do not have the opportunity to speak it. It made no sense to learn how to the two languages I learned in college–Latin and Ancient Greek–because, well, their aren’t a lot of Romans or Ancient Athenians around. But this is different. Chinese won’t work in that way, much as I would like it to.

My tutor (yes, I do have one) and a couple of other folks pointed out the obvious. I need to go and start talking to Chinese people. It’s that simple–and that complicated. I mean, I don’t talk to salespeople in America when I shop, yet if I am going to learn Chinese with more than a theoretical understanding I am going to have to go out and speak to salespeople and others in Chinese. But I am committed to making the effort. So as a start I have vowed to at least once each day have a GE (genuine encounter) with a Chinese person in which I actually try to speak Chinese. I had my first one today when I went to the bakery to buy some bread, which I usually do just by picking the bread I want and bringing it to the counter. But today I actually tried to engage the salesperson. I won’t bore you with the details except to say that it didn’t go well. But that wasn’t the point, of course. The point was to start a process, which I refer to as Adventures in Language Learning. I’ll keep you posted.