num_pages: 208
description:  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 peopleand its culture's conundrums. As her skill with Mandarin increased bits of the languagea word a phrase an oddity of grammarbecame 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 tonesthe variations in inflection that can change a word's meaningis 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.
language: English
title: Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, And Language
publisher: Walker Books