The Chinese language is both extremely difficult and very simple to understand. First, the difficult part. The Chinese write in characters, as I am sure you have seen. These characters are very complex and the slightest wrong stroke changes the word all together. Also, there are many different characters for the same word. I have seen four different characters for the same word within one paragraph! The Chinese do have a method of writing using the English alphabet, called Pinyin, but it is not widely used. Most shops and products you come across will have the characters, and will only have the Pinyin about 30% of the time. This is really interesting, because when the Chinese are learning to write and read, they learn both characters and Pinyin.

Something else interesting is how the Chinese read the characters. If you ask a Chinese person what something says, don’t be surprised if it takes a minute for them to be able to rely the information to you. The Chinese must first decode the characters into Pinyin words in their minds, and then translate them to English. It makes me wonder why they characters are used, since the Pinyin is what they really understand, but who knows why the Chinese do anything!

The simple part of the Chinese language is the grammatical structures. I, me, my, and mine are all the same word. The same with you, yours, etc. This makes saying simple sentences very easy to do. How is my Chinese language learning going along? Well, not very well unfortunately. Even though there are only about 50 foreigners in the city, and the majority of Chinese people in Hohhot can only say “Hello” (which they love to do to us on the streets, and then laugh and feel cool), it is easy enough to complete daily tasks with only the knowledge of a few words. Knowing how to say “This” and “That” and give directions to a taxi driver makes everything a lot easier!

The Chinese calendar is interesting because they have a different one than we use in the Western countries, but they use both. If you look a calendar, it will have both the western date and the Chinese date for each day. Technically, to simplify things, it could be said that the Chinese calendar is about a month behind the one we use. However, it is more complicated than that. The Chinese year aligns more with the phases of the moon. The Chinese New Year varies in date every year, but is always around beginning to mid February. This year it is the first week in February. The few western holidays the Chinese do celebrate are mostly celebrated on the same day we have them, with the exception of Valentines Day (theirs is in August!) and possibly a few others. The translation of the words the Chinese use for their days (instead of Monday, Tuesday, etc) are the equivalent of day 1, day 2, etc. The same is for months- month 1, month 2. It is very hard for Chinese children to learn the days and months with their weird names and confusing orders!

While China has happily adopted some Western holidays (mainly Halloween and Christmas), Thanksgiving is not one they celebrate. A few of my students surprised me by knowing when the holiday was, but they nothing of the history about it (not surprisingly, most American students don’t know the true history either!). Myself and the 3 other American teachers were very eager to celebrate though, thus our one-of-a-kind Thanksgiving dinner in China.
Keep in mind; none of us have ovens, so everything we cooked had to be done in a pot/pan or the microwave. Now, there are lots of recipes out there to help you create a traditional feast, but the process was made even more difficult still thanks to a lack of supplies, or in most cases, the comprehension of what was being sold to you. So, our dinner consisted of dishes of sweet potatoes, corn, and mashed potatoes, yes, but we had to resign to turkey legs, a watery gravy-like substance, and egg tarts for dessert. Our feast also consisted of burritos, much to our delight, but the confusion of the Thanksgiving-newbies. This was many people’s first Thanksgiving dinner, including some Brits and Chinese people. A moment of satisfaction came when, after we finished eating, many people exclaimed “I can’t move, I’m too full!”. This to me was proof of a Thanksgiving well done.