For the past few years I have been learning Mandarin Chinese.  Many, many things have struck me, one of them being that my mistakes in Chinese are usually a mirror image of the mistakes my Chinese friends make in English.   Another striking thing has been the detailed attention the language pays to family relations.  In Greek or in English, we have single words for brother (αδερφός in Greek), sister (αδερφή), as well as sibling (αδέρφι in Greek, using the neutral gender).  Not so in Chinese.  There are distinct words for older brother (哥哥, gege), younger brother (弟弟, didi), older sister (姐姐, jiejie), and younger sister (妹妹, meimei).  You cannot directly ask someone whether they have brothers, sisters, siblings, you have to be specific.  There are of course terms for brothers (兄弟, xiongdi – 兄, xiong, being another term for older brother, and 兄弟 being the title of a beautiful novel by Yu Hua), sisters (姐妹, jiemei) and siblings (兄弟姐妹, xiongdijiemei), but are not typically used to find out what siblings one might have.  For that, one asks generally about family, 你家有几口人 (ni jia you ji kou ren = how many people does your family have?) or 你家有谁 (ni jia you shei = who are your family?).

The language extends this fine discrimination further, to uncles, cousins, grandparents, placing special emphasis on the male side of the family, consistent with patrilineality, and a strong preference of boys over girls – a preference that shows up in the highly skewed male-female ratio in areas of China.

This preference shows up in an interesting way in the terms for grandparents.  English, as well as Greek, have single words for grandfather (παππούς in Greek) and grandmother (γιαγιά in Greek).  Chinese on the other hand distinguishes between paternal grandfather (爷爷, yeye), paternal grandmother (奶奶, nainai), maternal grandfather (外公, waigong), and maternal grandmother (外婆, waipo).  What is particularly interesting – and the Chinese themselves joke about this – is that the first character in the maternal terms, 外 (wai), carries the meaning of ‘foreign’, ‘outside’, as in 外国 (waiguo = foreign), 外国人 (waiguoren = foreigner), 老外 (laowai = foreigner), 外面 (waimian = outside), 外空 (waikong = outer space).

Preference notwithstanding, Chinese nouns do not have genders, and even the pronouns for ‘he’ (他) and ‘she’ (她) are pronounced exactly the same, ta.  Which sheds some light on the common mixing of ‘he’ and ‘she’ by my Chinese friends in English.

And all this reminds me of the beautiful opening by Michel Foucault of the preface of “The Order of Things”:  “This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

We have all learned through instruction, when being taught our first words by our parents, how to say ‘hello’ or ‘thank you’, how to sit ourselves in a chair or on our haunches, how to hold a fork or a pair of chopsticks to eat, how to brush our teeth, wash ourselves, and so on.  Later, as we grow older, we may be instructed how to ride a bicycle or how to drive a car.

All this learning involves the all-too-familiar trial and error process, we are shown how to do it, try it out, get corrected as necessary, try it out again, practice, and slowly get the hang of it.  We end up learning how to perceive and do things.

But we are also familiar with another type of instruction, sitting in a room with our peers, listening to a teacher, watching their writing on a board, or their show and tell.  On the face of it, it looks passive, the teacher instructs, the pupils listen and watch.  But, especially when we were younger, the teacher would ask us to repeat, recite, sometimes in unison, sometimes one-by-one, would conduct regular drills with multiplication tables, ask us to go to the board and write words out, or do it at our desks, frequently give us exercises in class.  We would take homework at home, to practice with the material we covered in class.  We would write short compositions, write out answers to questions, write essays on topics.  And when studying alone, we would frequently repeat out loudly to memorize what we wanted to learn.  Even when we would try to repeat in silence, our lips usually would move.  And we would check, a friend or our parents would check, and the teacher would check as well, whether our trials demonstrated that we had learned or not.

We sometimes tend to focus and remember the passive aspect of that classroom instruction, of just sitting in class, and we forget the extensive trial and error activities that went on behind the scenes.

During my years in Baltimore, I worked with several Chinese and Japanese colleagues, and we frequently went to eat together at Chinese restaurants – the greater Baltimore area has several excellent ones.  We always shared dishes, whether whole entrées, or dim-sum, small plates with 3-4 pieces of delicacies – dumplings of all sorts and shapes, steamed or fried, sweet and savory cakes, stuffed buns, rice wrapped in lotus leaves, and so much more.  To properly eat Chinese food one has to use chopsticks, which I had never really used before.  With communally shared food, to manage to feed oneself requires efficient use of eating utensils, and my friends found this a great motivation for me to learn how to use chopsticks.

When I began my tries at holding a pair of chopsticks, my fingers did not know what to feel for, what was relevant for the hold and what not.  When trying to imitate how my friends were holding their chopsticks, my eyes did not know what to look for, to see the important part of the hold and ignore the unimportant.  I tried to copy the way my friends held their chopsticks, my eyes looking at their fingers, then at mine, adjusting, registering what my fingers felt, then try to use.  Reach to grab a dumpling with the chopstick tips, use the tips to tear a piece of cake, try to bring the piece over to my mouth, registering what my eyes saw, what fingers felt.  Sometimes I held the chopsticks too close to their tips, sometimes they were not stable enough and the morsel of food would fall off, sometimes too stable and could not open to grab.  Amidst my friends’ mirth and guidance, there was a clear criterion for whether I had learned how to use chopsticks: could I feed myself?  could I grab a piece of food and bring it from the plate to my mouth?  For the first few outings I did go a bit hungry, but eventually I began to get a feel for holding the chopsticks, one always held stable, the other mobile, controlled by the thumb and index finger.  My fingers learned to recognize the chopsticks, adjust them, coordinate with my eyes.  And with practice I got better and better, and now can comfortably hold and use different kind and size chopsticks, long, short, thick, thin, very thin, wooden or plastic or even metal ones.

It is through such trial and error processes that we develop abilities, learn, acquire knowledge.  Sensations – from the eyes and fingers in the case of the chopsticks – come together with muscle movements (hand and fingers).  Muscle movements and their effects on the world result in a change in sensations, adjustment of muscle movements, and this back and forth continues, until a goal is reached – in the case of the chopsticks, get to grab a piece of food, get the food into the mouth.  This trial and error process brings together our body and the world, and as the back and forth of sensory input and muscle output goes on, our sensations are organized into perception of objects and our movements into discernible actions directed toward these objects.  The objects we perceive in the world emerge through the feedback provided by the results of our actions.  An important feature of this trial and error process is that the more we do, the better we become at doing, at integrating perception and action.  Practice makes perfect.

This is also how we begin to learn a language, through a trial and error process, under someone’s guidance, pointing at the world, hearing a sound, vocalizing (moving lips, jaws, tongue, vocal cords), hearing our own sound and receiving feedback from our guide as well.  And in this way we organize our perception of the world into objects, objects we associate with specific sounds, and it is an organization compatible with that of our guides and teachers.

With trial and error, we learn and develop abilities on our own, by engaging with the world on our own, but also by copying others (sometimes even animals).  We also learn through socialization, under the guidance of others.  We learn because we may be driven to satisfy a need (eat or drink), be praised by a tutor, feel good about mastering something, or we could be just playing, getting our senses and muscles to work together.

We are all of course intimately familiar with what I have written above, with how we develop abilities, how we acquire knowledge, how we link our perceptions and actions.  We do it all the time, but usually we do not spend much time reflecting and thinking about it.  But our knowledge, our abilities, provide the basis for our experience of the world, how we perceive and act.