Learning Chinese for Kung Fu?

[Drake]

In a very non compassionate moment, I killed one of the dogs that attacked me by collapsing it's airway with a well placed and hard kick. In my opinion, it was dead when it decided to attack me.

I am just typically very merciless in combat. I used to tell people I was going to kill them as I had them in a submission. I asked them to look at me so I could see their eyes, so I could know what a man who knew he was going to die looked like. Told them I fed off their fears.

Then I joined the army and became a p*ssy.

[SPJ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhhDp...eature=related

if a Japanese girl may sing Chinese

i will learn a Japanese song myself

a challenge sort of

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECi3x...eature=related

learning a few words every day,

challenge yourself.

[Drake]

I was taught in college that songs, particularly children's songs, were best for learning a language.

[SPJ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2L2eL...eature=related

this Canadian girl speaks perfect

wow.

[GeneChing]

I searched Confucius Institute on our forum and this thread popped because of this. This morning's newsfeeds are full of Confucius Institute 10 year anniversary celebrations. Even my master Shi Decheng is involved with the celebration in Florida. In fact, I was searching for info on him when I stumbled across this Forbes article.

8/31/2014 @ 12:17PM 5,678 views
Is This American Academe's Most Shameful Moment?
Eamonn Fingleton Contributor

Later this month the Chinese government will celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of its worldwide network of Chinese-language training schools. Big deal, you might think, but not everyone is greeting the event with a yawn.

Far from it. In an illustration of how complicated our globalized world is becoming, the anniversary is posing an acute dilemma for universities across the United States. More than ninety U.S. universities now host Beijing’s language training schools, which are known as Confucius Institutes. In so doing they accept Beijing’s money. They also cede control of their curriculums and allow Beijing not only to appoint most of the teachers but impose a regimen of self-censorship in discussing “sensitive” issues such as the Tienanmen massacre. For two previous articles I have written on the institutes, click here and here.

Administrators at such universities are now evidently under strong pressure to participate in Beijing’s rather synthetic anniversary celebrations. The problem is that in doing so, they will engage in the academic equivalent of a perp walk. Meanwhile if they ignore the anniversary, their Beijing paymasters will probably not be gruntled.

What is undeniable is that the Confucius Institutes are highly controversial. In the view of many American critics, the institutes’ relationship to the Chinese government is far too close. Not only does this raise questions about the future of academic freedom at host universities, but there have long been suggestions that the institutes have been engaging in industrial and military espionage, as well as surveillance of Chinese students abroad.

Greatly compounding American academe’s discomfiture is that the Beijing government seems hell-bent on making the anniversary a high-profile statement of the speed with which Chinese influence is spreading in Western intellectual life.


Confucius reinterpreted: you are free to say anything you want — so long as you agree with Beijing. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

All this notwithstanding, at least eleven American universities that host Confucius Institutes have already sufficiently swallowed their pride to announce plans to celebrate the anniversary. They include Michigan, Purdue, Florida, Rutgers, North Carolina, Arizona, Idaho, Texas (Dallas), Texas Southern, San Francisco State, and the University of California-Davis. Elsewhere Sheffield, Manchester, Leeds and Strathclyde in the United Kingdom and both La Trobe and Melbourne in Australia are also joining in the Made-in-China festivities.

As Perry Link, emeritus professor of East Asian studies at Princeton, points out, there is something “embarrassing” about American universities being expected to celebrate this anniversary. After all, what is being commemorated is not the establishment of any U.S.-based institution but rather the world’s first Confucius Institute, established thousands of miles away in Seoul, Korea in 2004. He adds: “In any case there is no tradition for American universities to celebrate the founding of their departments, and most academic staff are only vaguely aware, if they are aware at all, of when their departments were founded.”

For American university administrators perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of the whole affair is that Beijing has reversed itself on the hot-button issue at the center of the entire controversy. After vehemently denying for years that the Confucius Institutes have any kind of censorship agenda, Beijing has now tacitly acknowledged that this was false. The admission came in July at the annual conference in Portugal of the European Association for Chinese Studies, an event organized in part by a Portuguese Confucius Institute. On the orders of a top Beijing official, pages were ripped out of the conference program before it was distributed to participants. The offending pages bore references to Taiwan-based organizations that she considered “inappropriate.”The official who gave the orders was Xu Lin, worldwide head of the Confucius Institute network.

In the view of Christopher Hughes, a top British China watcher who is based at the London School of Economics, Xu’s intervention marks a new, much more interventionist stage in the development of the Confucius Institutes’ censorship program. He comments: “Even if Confucius Institute staff have not been prepared to admit it, everyone knows that they have been under pressure all along to censor themselves on sensitive issues. The Confucius Institutes are not academic institutions and in the wake of what happened in Portugal, it amazes me that anyone might continue to believe that they do not have a political agenda.”

[Faux Newbie]

I can only say how it worked at my university.

The Confucius institute and the Chinese department are separate entities. There is overlap, but mostly in that some professor's from the department (and other department's professors whose expertise relates in some way to China) are asked to speak or participate in forums. But the curriculum for the Confucius center has more to do with community classes in Chinese and things related to China. I don't know of any classes for college credit done at or through the Confucius center. The Chinese language courses of the university were not taught by the instructors at the Confucius center. In fact, in seven years there of undergrad and graduate work, the only contact I had with that center was attending an erhu performance, I believe the performer's name was Xing Ke, but this was a long time ago. I took every for credit class available on the Chinese language at both graduate and undergraduate level, and all but a total of three or four courses related to China, in fields from poli-sci, geography, culture, religion, sociology, anthropology, and business. None of my professors that I can recall were part of the Confucius Institute.

Just looked at their website. Not one member of their staff is from the Chinese Language and Culture department at KU.

The curriculum for students studying Chinese language or culture was not defined by the Confucius center, but driven by the department chair, himself an American China scholar. His wife, another of the professors, who did research work in Tibet, like all the professors and teachers, spoke freely about Tiananmen Square, Tibet, Xinjiang, etc.

In fact, all sources I ever read in college on Tiananmen Square and the autonomous regions were far more detailed than what you will find in the news, not exactly pulling punches in regards to the Chinese government, and at least two of the professors were frequently asked to speak to groups of U.S. military officers on specific topics related to China. One professor's wife was actually part of the demonstrations at Tiananmen, and, in fact, most Americans who have seen pictures of that event will have seen her work at the event.

Beyond that, since I had little contact with the center, I couldn't speak more on it. The center itself was forty minutes from the campus, and since Chinese students usually didn't go to that area, I'm not sure it would have been an effective tool for keeping tabs on them. Local associations at the college were mostly organized by students, and many of those were more broadly based around East Asian affiliation than specifically Chinese.

In seven years of studying Chinese language and culture there, I knew almost everyone who taught about China at the university, and knew no one from the Confucian Institute, nor did they frequent our department. The overall head of the East Asian department is now an American Japan expert, the language classes for Japanese, Chinese, and Korean are formatted similarly, the books for the Chinese department are not PRC ones, and, in general, the contact is minimal except for college departments provided professors as experts for forums at the Confucian Institute. In general, the institute was far more dependent on the college in terms of content and experts.

[Faux Newbie]

Actually, come to think of it, in regards to Tiananmen, when speaking just of the media, not including academia/scholarly sources, Chinese sources are least informative, U.S. sources are least informed. The absence on one end is filled by the near mythology level strangeness of the other.

Reminds me of watching footage of news from when Kwangju's protests occurred. Almost surreal in hindsite.

[mig]

The question I ask myself is how important is for you to know the Chinese language to learn the Chinese fighting arts depending which area those fighting arts are practiced. In the past, very few people learned the Chinese language and all they learned about martial arts were by the very few translations we found in magazines or books. Don't you need to understand the cultural implications and linguistics intricacies in martial arts as also in many other aspects of life. I will certainly hear from some people, you don't need to learn the language to know the fighting applications. Just wondering.

Mig

[Faux Newbie]

The question I ask myself is how important is for you to know the Chinese language to learn the Chinese fighting arts depending which area those fighting arts are practiced. In the past, very few people learned the Chinese language and all they learned about martial arts were by the very few translations we found in magazines or books. Don't you need to understand the cultural implications and linguistics intricacies in martial arts as also in many other aspects of life. I will certainly hear from some people, you don't need to learn the language to know the fighting applications. Just wondering.

Mig

If there are enough qualified practitioners to translate key materials, then it doesn't matter if one individual doesn't speak the language.

For the most part, that is still in development, so it is pretty important for the arts that some people do learn it, I think. This doesn't mean it has to be any particular person, as it's a ****-ton of work.

[David Jamieson]

Punching someone hard in the face requires language skills?

Hmmn. Ain't that something?

[Jimbo]

I don't think developing true CMA skill necessarily requires fluency in Chinese. My CLF Sifu is not fluent in Cantonese, but he knows the CLF terminology, and more importantly, he really knows his stuff and is very effective with it. He also has about 50 years' experience in CLF, and prior to that, Kajukenbo. Has a lack of fluency in the Cantonese language hindered him in his development? Absolutely not.

Also, learning a language for the specific purpose of studying CMA is not practical, IMO. If you want to learn Mandarin or Cantonese, it's better to have a real need for it, such as living in a Mandarin or Cantonese-speaking locale, and using it on an everyday basis, not just for kung fu. I studied Mandarin in Taiwan for only five months, but what really improved it was the long period I spent living there and speaking it every day. I became fluent, and could even read magazines and books. Since I left Taiwan over 20 years ago, my conversational Mandarin has gone way down, and my ability to read Chinese even further down. I can still carry on a simple conversation, but some things are halting and poor now. I can still understand it better than I can speak it now. If you're not constantly surrounded with Chinese-speaking people and using it, you lose it if you aren't a native speaker.

Did the Mandarin help my Tanglang training? It helped make my life there a full one, but one can develop very good kung fu without being fluent in Chinese. OTOH, one can speak perfect Mandarin or Cantonese, or even be a native speaker, and not develop a good understanding or ability in CMA. IMO, it's way more important to have a good teacher, with a good method, an aptitude for the art, and long-term persistence at it.

[ShaolinDan]

Haha. Well, since I started this thread and have since learned (some) Chinese[mandarin], I guess I should respond to myself.

I never did take any formal classes, but I did spend a year in China, and managed to learn enough to get around, though my skill still falls far short of conversational.

It's certainly not necessary to learn Chinese to develop in CMA, but that was never the original question. The question was, what is the payoff for the investment?

And now I can say, "It's all situational."

Learning Chinese helps. It can help clarify all kinds of things---even as simple as knowing that "bu" is really 'step' not 'stance'. It's also way easier to remember all those Chinese terms if you know what they actually mean. And, of course, it's really useful for dealing with Chinese speaking teachers and practitioners, and for any training related travel in China, BUT...

Learning Chinese is hard. Is it worth it?

For me, it was totally worth it...but I was living in China. Can't say I've continued learning since I've been back. Making the time just isn't a priority, and now that I'm home, I can't learn just by living.

In the end, it's a question like, "Is it worth it to learn to play guitar?" It all depends.

[GeneChing]

Fluency is relative. I'd argue that most of you here barely speak English. For many of you, your posting prose leaves much to be desired on a fundamental grammatical level.

When I was studying for my Fencing masters examination, our textbooks were in French, Italian and German. I don't speak any of these languages, but I had a glossary of fencing terms in all three languages (note that the dominant language of Fencing in America is French) and with some dictionaries and some help, I got by. And that was long before the interwebz and all of the free-access online translators.

If you were studying something like French cuisine, it really helps to know some French. You don't have to be fluent in Chinese to study Kung Fu. Lawd knows I'm not. But the study of Kung Fu is a lifetime undertaking, so every little bit helps. It's certainly not going to hurt.

[bawang]

its helpful to learn chinese in kung fu because the form means jack sh1t.

it would also reduce amount of "hay gays wat do application <punching the face> do? is it a leg touch uproot small join qinna?"

when you dont know chinese, every single kung fu technique is weird leg touch uproot small joint qinna.

[Faux Newbie]

If you do not have translations of key boxing manuals and texts for western boxing, your culture probably does not have a strong boxing community.

Same with kung fu.

Most of us are familiar with a great variety of things because of those in our midst who are bilingual.

This does not mean you have to be bilingual, but if your area is producing good kung fu people consistently, then odds are good someone is doing it for you.

If you have kung fu around you, someone who knew the language probably helped get it there. Cross cultural interest drove its movement and enabled it to thrive.

If you are relying only on a teacher's cribbed version (even for Chinese teachers) of key texts, then you are working at a hopefully temporary disadvantage. The source is not the sifu alone, and never was, and without some translations, you have to recreate the wheel.

So, people who can work in both languages are essential, but of course that will not be everyone.