Dreaming in Chinese

Chapter 10: “I Don’t Understand.”

“The language reforms of the twentieth century represented a massive, daunting linguistic engineering task.” (Fallows 133.) Fallows’ spends this entire chapter discussing the complexity of the Chinese language, the differences of their conversations, and how the Chinese nation has arrived at where it is today.

All of the teachers or tutors in China seem to fall into two categories: professionals and amateurs. Fallows’ begins the chapter reliving a tutoring session she had with an amateur tutor. He was more into the teachings of antiquities and Confucius, where on the other hand, Fallows wanted to learn language and grammar that would more help her with her everyday life and experiences in China.

From this, the author more looks into the historical events and challenges that the Chinese nation went through while trying to decide the pros and cons of enforcing a national language. In 1912, the Chinese language took a sweeping turn. This marked the end of the imperial era and founded the Republic of China. They realized that the current language situation was dysfunctional and unintelligent. Thus, it was time for a change.

Between the early 1920’s and the late 1940’s, China’s people went through many debates over the language controversies. There were intense arguments especially between the Beijing people and the Shanghai people stemming from feuds going years back. In 1949, Communists came into power and ultimately reduced the amount of words that were used and lowered the number of strokes that were necessary in the writing process. These series of events led us to Mandarin Putonghua. Even with this being their most commonly recognized national language, the Chinese natives still have a large variety of individual languages that they use in their everyday lives. Mandarin is reaching beyond the Chinese people, replacing Cantonese all across the globe,