#Reverb12 Day 14: Learning

For the month of December, I'm working on doing the daily series of Reverb prompts to help me reflect on the prior year and hope/plan for the upcoming year. If you're interested, join in; I found this to be a very useful exercise when I did it two years ago.

#reverb12 Day 14: The path that brought you here?

My question is: what was the most important thing you learned in 2012?

It seems like this question about the most important thing you learned is almost an exact repeat of Day 6's prompt about what new skill you learned in 2012.  I'm not really loving these prompts...  Anyway, I'll try to think about something else that was important that I learned in 2012, something that brought me to where I am today. 

I know you're supposed to learn something new every day.  Last night, I was at this annual holiday lights social run, and after a couple miles with friends, I hung back to run with someone who I didn't know but was with our group and running alone.  I asked him what he thought of some nativity figurines in a yard we were passing, and he gave a very diplomatic answer.  So I asked if he was a lawyer, he said no, then I asked if he was a politician.  He said no, he was an architect.  We talked for a while, passing houses with pretty lights.  Turns out he's from St. Thomas, moved to the US in 2000 for school, then moved to Dallas for work.  He had some trouble on the run, he was just getting back into it, so he slowed to walk leading up to an intersection and I stayed with him.  When it was clear, we started running again but slowed down a bit.  I knew the route, and knew we were almost done -- I could see where the street ahead would form a t-intersection, and from that point, it's just a couple more minutes.  And the t-intersection looming ahead was easy to see this time of year -- the house directly in front of us (on the T street) had lights along its frame.  So I said to my running companion, we just have to go to that house with the white lights in a peak.  Better than what I was thinking, which was house with the white lights in an upside down V.  And der, he was like, that's a gable.  Oh yeah, somehow I'd forgotten that it was an ARCHITECT to whom I was attempting to describe a house.  If I'd been thinking even a little, though I wouldn't say the term gable would have come to me, at least I would have made some effort to phrase it a bit better.  So gable was my new word for the day yesterday.  I'm sure he was irritated within moments because then I kept counting and pointing out gables. At least he humored me and kept laughing. 

But that's certainly not the most important thing I learned in 2012. 

I would say the words of Chinese I learned were the most important thing I learned in 2012.  While communication in China was difficult, we managed without any real disasters.  Having some very basic vocabulary, as hard as it was, was helpful.  If nothing else, it broke the ice and allowed me to ask in Chinese if the person spoke English, which I think is much more polite than just asking in English (though obviously that would accomplish the same thing!).  But there were many times that we were relying on my basic Chinese.  Getting cabs to an airport or train station, asking directions, making small talk, engaging in commerce, etc. 

The Chinese language is an interesting mix of easy and difficult.

The things that make it easy:  there are no verb tenses; there is no such thing as subject/verb agreement (the verb form is invariable); there is no gender.

The things that make it hard:  there are at least 4 possible tones for every sound, each with a different meaning; the written language bears very little resemblance to the spoken language (so you have no hope of sounding something out); there are dialects within the country and some people (mostly older) do not speak Mandarin. 

But I am proud of myself that after months of studying on my own and with a tutor, I knew enough that we were able to get by -- though I'm sure sign language, smart guesses, etc. also helped.  And of course it helped that we were trying to find people who spoke Ying-wen (English), as opposed to something like ... Italian, which is significantly less common (but didn't stop my husband from trying on a few occasions).