Thoughts on Language Learning

There exists a stereotype of the tactless American, expecting a
foreigner to understand him when he speaks slower and louder.
Speaking slower and louder, however, can sometimes enable me to
understand a complex sentence that I could not understand at normal
speed (especially by breaking apart commonly elided words).
After finishing a discussion with my tutor (Wen Ting) on Sunday, a
first-year English student at BeiYu approached us, asking for some
help understanding his materials. He was reading the book Twilight by
Stephanie Meyer, and couldn't make out the meaning of "a still
figure." He was translating the words to roughly
"continuing-to-happen reckon/roughly-calculate," which are literal
translations of "still" and "figure" but make absolutely no sense
together when these definitions are used. Later, as I was walking to
lunch with Wen Ting, I found myself completely unable to adequately
describe why many people dislike Twilight – I do not yet know the
translations for phrases such as "flat characters" and "tedious
description" yet, though I can probably get at the individual meanings
of "flat," "character," "tedious," and "description," through long,
roundabout phrasing and luck.
Preserving short-term memory span is critical to learning language –
if you have to waste space in short-term memory on the definitions of
vocab, then you lose the ability to keep track of multiple nested
phrases and clauses, and thus the overall meaning of the sentence
you're trying to say/understand.
I had Beijing Duck at Chinese Table yesterday. Oily. Not really my
thing. I very much enjoy hot pot, though.
We first came across the concept of "face" in Chinese culture
yesterday. I've heard it said that there is no direct translation for
this concept into English (like the Japanese concept of zanshin, which
I came across in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash). This is perhaps so,
but it is possible to accurately describe what face is – I don't have
space/time to go into details here, but from what I've learned, it
roughly translates to one's reputation. Thus, though there is no one
word in English to describe "face," it is certainly explainable to
English speakers, and thus it is possible for members of each culture
to understand one another (as the main character also decides in Snow
Crash). This is a case where language doesn't constrict the
boundaries of thinking – it just makes this line of thought a bit
longer in one language than another.
On that note, I've been wanting to learn Lojban, a constructed
language that is grammatically unambiguous (an English example of an
ambiguous phrase being, for example, "the big dog catcher"). Though
it seems interesting, I have zero time to learn it.
Learning Chinese grammar is pretty easy – to my current
understanding, a given word can be used as several different parts of
speech, depending on where it is in the sentence, and the meaning is
easily understandable. Characters, however, are a major time sink,
especially since a character's appearance does not determine its
sound.