Chinese Language Torture

In the past nine years of attempting to learn Chinese, I have finally come to this conclusion: Mandarin Chinese was made to make people feel stupid – particularly me.

The thing about Chinese is that it’s not like English. In fact the only thing it has in common with English is that English is really hard for Chinese speakers to learn. You see, Chinese has these things called tones. What that means is you can say the exact same word but at a different time of day, and it will change from “ask” to “kiss.” Which meant I made my teacher less than excited every time I raised my hand.

With tones you can attempt to say you ate some dried fruit and end up copulating with it. But more likely you’ll confidently try out some new phrase and end up spouting complete gibberish, which will garner a few polite nods and glossy smiles. Like I do every time I go out in public.

Luckily I have two expert helpers: my eight and 11 year old daughters. My wife, who’s Taiwanese, gave up helping me a long time ago, but my daughters are in public school and so they sympathize. They patiently tell me to stop being naughty with fruit and then translate to stupefied neighbors. It’s helped me navigate the supermarket, but I have yet to look seriously at a newspaper.

You see, as hard as speaking Chinese is, it’s as easy as a Texas gun license compared with writing. Chinese don’t have letters; they have lots of pictures that are so badly drawn you really have no idea what they are. A picture of a pig looks like a sea monkey, not the kinds on back of comic books, but the real ones, you know, brine shrimp that look like baby tapeworms. Those pictures are combined with random lines in such a manner so that no human, except my eight-year-old daughter, could ever remember them. Writing them is humanly impossible – with the exception of 1.2 billion people who don’t count because they had Chinese Tiger Moms.

Needless to say, I’m not the best student. Luckily the Taiwanese are nice enough to smile glossily and nod instead of shake their heads. They understand because they are all required to studied English starting in the 3^rd grade, and they know how stupid English spelling iz. Now pass the dried fruit, I’m in the mood.  

Cut the Military

Cut the military! Cut the military! Cut the military! I'd like to say that so loud it would start a war. I’d like to put it to a song and sing it on YouTube, but it doesn't fit with Lady Gaga’s tunes.

Want to save money? Why hack social security? Why slash education? Why indeed when the US spends more money on our military than the rest of the world put together? Cut, cut, cut, like a rabbi with a new born son, cut, cut, cut that military budget. Why not?

Why not stop shoving money down a toilet in Afghanistan? Why not pull the plug on military bases like Japan? Remind me, why are we in Japan? Didn’t that war end with sock hops? And what are we doing in Germany? staving off the Soviets? What about terrorist? How are we doing against Osama Bin Laden? Not much better than the war on drugs. Well, at least we won in Iraq, so…why doesn’t it feel very good?

It’s time to stop this nonsense. We ship off our young so they can have their limbs blown away and come back psychotic. And what is it all for? When we help, everyone hates us. We don’t help, and everyone hates us. We win, and everyone hates us. We lose; we hate us. We can’t please any of the people any of the time. Why bother?

Let’s build up our infrastructure. Let’s make sure our bridges don’t collapse. Let’s finally figure out how to stop using oil. It’s a much worse drug addiction than crack-cocaine. Let’s do what we are good at. Let’s make more cool movies, awesome video games, and ridiculous apps. Let’s go to Mars. Let’s pay out record bonuses to teachers. Let’s take all the money we blow up on the military and give it back to the people.

Oh sure, there are all sorts of reasons we should spend money on the military. But it’s time to face the fact that most of them are psychotic. We have this illusion that we are running around solving the world’s problems and the world would fall apart with out us. Who is going to make people like Israel? Who is going to foil Kim Jung Ill’s diabolic plan to rule the world? Who is going make the Moslems shop at Walmart? Probably not us. We can’t even balance our own budget.

Let’s face it; no one really likes us. We run around with our big guns, big boats, and unmanned drones attempting to solve problems, but people just put up with us because it’s easier than making us upset. People have to solve their own problems. It doesn’t work if we try to solve them for us. And right now we have a bunch of problems at home. It’s time to make like a Catholic and withdraw. Tea Party superheroes, stop attacking unwed mothers. The real Cadillac is the military. It sucks up a quarter of our budget and gives back a massive world headache. You really want to cut spending, cut bombs. Sure someone is going to hate us for doing it, but they already do anyway. It’s time to retreat and get back to reality. Sing it with me to whatever tune you like, even country.