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Mandarin Lessons In Life, Love, And Language
Walker & Company
September 2010
On Sale: August 31, 2010
208 pages
ISBN: 0802779131
EAN: 9780802779137
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Deborah Fallows has spent much of her life learning
languages and traveling around the world. But nothing
prepared her for the surprises of learning Mandarin, China's
most common language, or the intensity of living in Shanghai
and Beijing. Over time, she realized that her struggles and
triumphs in studying the language of her adopted home
provided small clues to deciphering the behavior and habits
of its people,and its culture's conundrums. As her skill
with Mandarin increased, bits of the language—a word, a
phrase, an oddity of grammar—became windows into
understanding romance, humor, protocol, relationships, and
the overflowing humanity of modern China. Fallows learned, for example, that the abrupt, blunt way of
speaking that Chinese people sometimes use isn't rudeness,
but is, in fact, a way to acknowledge and honor the
closeness between two friends. She learned that English
speakers' trouble with hearing or saying tones—the
variations in inflection that can change a word's meaning—is
matched by Chinese speakers' inability not to hear tones, or
to even take a guess at understanding what might have been
meant when foreigners misuse them. In sharing what she discovered about Mandarin, and how those
discoveries helped her understand a culture that had at
first seemed impenetrable, Deborah Fallows's Dreaming in
Chinese opens up China to Westerners more completely,
perhaps, than it has ever been before.
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