Language Studies
 
Every student starts learning a foreign language in China after their primary school.
 
At my days we all were learning Russian, although China and the Soviet Union were fighting for more than a decade since the early 60's. Apparently there was no alternatives - english, german, french all capitalistic, Japan our traditional rivalry and what else ?
 
I don't have talent in language - I was a shy, taciturn and introvert boy. To speak chinese makes me even uneasy in some cases, not talking foreign languages. It is completely a mistake to work in that direction, but no other choices.
 
Enrolled at Tongji, I continued my Russian studies, and my scores were quite good. I was able to read some scientific literature such as math, physics. I studied for a semester then as you know I was regrouped in a german class. After the german class, I continued my Russian studies, and at the same time also my german studies during my bachelor studies from 1978 to 1983.
 
At that time, learning materials were scarcely to be found. I went to the foreign language bookstore at Fuzhou Road not far from the People's Square, and bought whatever was available. I also went to the Shanghai Library located at the end of the East Nanjing Road close to the Square to find any german literature.
 
About two years before graduation in 1981, I found people were all learning english, was also found that english is more popular and useful than my languages. If I couldn't learn english, it might be difficult to survive in the world. And I turned to english, and happily to find it much easier to learn, especially if you have already learned russian and german whose grammars were much more complex than english. For example, russian and german verbs, adjectives have to be changed along with the subjects, english have not such necessary or much simpler. The "Nebensatz" or subordinate sentences are very complicated in german, and many times I would simply forget to put the verbs at then end in speaking. The prepositions are also sophisticated, and even today they make me headaches.
 
There are no other tips as reading, writing, speaking and listening if you want to command a language. I read every book I can found, newspaper, magazines, radio and so on. And you must learn it in an intensive and fast pace - I remembered about 50 new words a day. And a book took me normally a week or so for a quick reading. Of course, I will come back later, perhaps more than once, or never if this is only a light reading. Nowadays, my learning speed is even faster. I remember the Spring Festival day in 1992, when I have to stay in Shenzhen, I managed to finish reading an english novel of 500 pages in a day or two. And in 1999-2000 period, very often I bought a IT book of 300 pages, and the next morning, it was a old book - hence I vowed never to buy IT books ever since.
 
If you try to learn a language by "Daily Collection and Monthly Accumulation" approach, I would say, the failure rate will be high. It is my firm view that to accomplish something you have to be quick and decisive. A moment's hesitation means a total retreat in many cases.
 
After six months' diligent studies, my english level caught up with others' and I was thinking about other languages - french. In fact, I tried japanese, but the strange characters (like old chinese signs) prevented my learning desire. French was much more difficult. Particularly the pronunciation. Without a good teacher you have difficulties to learn that language. The techniques in english learning cannot be simply implanted into french. I was too confident in learning languages so I attended no school and very seldom listened to radio, cassettes or conversed with french speaking people.
 
Nevertheless, I ventured to conquer that language, one year before my bachelor graduation. At the same time, I also started learning Esperanto, an artificial language invented by a polish doctor in the late 19's century. Esperanto combines the grammar, vocabularies and syntaxes of the major european languages and therefore is easy to learn, but easy to forget as well, because its use is rarely to be found. I have no single word of Esperanto now, as with Russian.
 
As your language base becomes larger and larger, your time spent on learning, maintaining and improving those languages will be more and more. More than 1/3 of my time has been devoted to languages and sometime I found it not worthwhile.
 
During my postgraduate studies, I continued my studies in English, German and French but forgot all others. I couldn't manage the others. If I don't want to be a linguist then stop there.
 
I have studied relatively more languages, not for immigrating to other countries. Like many other colleagues, I am also not keen to leave China for a better life in western countries. By mastering the prevailing world languages, I am freely accessibly to all information of the outside world so that nobody can cheat me. Just like mastering the IT technologies has opened the information age in front of me, although I don't need to be a linguist or an IT industrialist.
 
Now language skills are still one of my strong points and will remain to be one of my qualifications for my career and daily life. It's fun to learn a language and a culture.