Classrooms Beneath the Himalayas: Why China’s “Migrant Learners” Are Turning to Nepal Zheng Yiwen, The World of Chinese (8/13/25)
As a former Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, I find this phenomenon of Chinese going to Nepal to learn English to be somewhat cognitively dissonant.
Here's what goes on in one such Kathmandu crammer:
Inside, around 10 young Chinese students sit in a classroom, hunched over as they complete English listening exercises. Leon Row, the school’s British founder and lead instructor, steps out of the classroom, and with a crisp London accent, gently asks the crowd outside to keep their voices down—the noise is disrupting them.
Kid's T-shirt in a Carrefour, downtown Taichung. (I think an English-speaking kid wouldn't be seen dead in it.) [VHM: American English: "wouldn't be caught dead" — usually, in my experience]
Cantonese, Uyghur, Mongolian — they're all threatened. And you can be sure that if China invades and occupies Taiwan, Taiwanese (and all of the aboriginal languages of the island) will be under duress. What is being done to Cantonese, Uyghur, and Mongolian is the way the CCP deals with the majority languages of its various cultural regions, which together constitute approximately half of China's total land area. Tibet alone occupies roughly 13% of the total land area of the PRC (Xinjiang is 1/6th [16.6% of the whole of China]. Since seven of Asia's major rivers (the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, and Indus) originate in Bod, and "The Roof of the World" possesses many other valuable natural and strategic resources, what happens to the native tongue of its inhabitants is no mean matter.
At the Swarthmore Farmers Market this past Saturday morning, I came upon a new stall selling onigiri, which are Japanese rice balls, a popular and versatile snack or meal component. They consist of steamed rice formed into various shapes, often triangles, and typically filled with savory ingredients like pickled plums (umeboshi), salmon, or tuna with mayonnaise. They are often enclosed in nori (seaweed).
These onigiri were wrapped in cellophane and had a label stuck on the side. As soon as I saw the design on the label, which looked like a human face, I found that I could "read" it:
The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (TPC) was first planted by British missionaries in Tainan, which later expanded to all southern parts of Taiwan, constituting the present Southern Synod of TPC. The most important pioneer among them was the Scottish missionary Rev. Thomas Barclay who worked in Taiwan-Fu (the present Tainan). He was born in Glasgow, and matriculated at the University of Glasgow. While there, he studied under Sir William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin [according to Wikipedia]. The celebrated Lord Kelvin reminds me of the absolute zero degree in physical chemistry and the electric cable equation as the underpinning of the Transatlantic cable as well as the conduction of electric impulses along nerve fibers.
Today I'm bringing you this short article for LL. A Korean pop idol, Solar — that's her stage name, Mandarinized as 頌樂; her real name is 김용선 (Hanja: 金容仙), romanized Kim Yongsun) — has made headlines for speaking very fluent Mandarin after just 7 months of learning it. She has also released a full song in Mandarin with Taiwanese artist 9m88 and taken countless interviews with Taiwanese media in Mandarin as well (see this "What's in My Bag" interview with Vogue Taiwan.)
Yes! I won't mince words. At least in my case, multilingualism has been very good for my brain.
In my rural Ohio high school, I took Latin and French, which is what were on offer. I enjoyed both of them immensely, but they were almost strictly for reading and writing, so they didn't have much effect on the way my brain worked, at least not that I could discern.
In college, I added Italian and German, both with reasonable spoken components, so my brain began to warm up.
BOPOMOFO CAFE draws its name from the phonetic Traditional Chinese Alphabets. ㄅ, ㄆ, ㄇ, and ㄈ [bo, po, mo, and fo] are the “ABCs” of the Mandarin Chinese alphabet symbolizing nostalgia and strength as the building blocks of Mandarin language mastery. Co-founders Eric and Philip, both "American Born Chinese" (ABC), chose the name to reflect their heritage and shared pride in their culture.
I happen to know a few students (of varying ages and learning experiences) who want to learn (or re-learn, for some of them) Mandarin the "right" way (that is, focusing on speaking and listening before reading and writing, unlike what is prescribed by most HSK courses). Right now, I've got them chewing on the revised Pinyin edition of Princeton's Chinese Primer (which is in pure Pinyin — not a single sinograph until halfway into the course), but they obviously need something outside of a textbook to read.
I'd planned on giving them a Pinyinized Kong Yiji as a "goal text" to read once they have a firm command of the spoken language, but thinking back this seems like a bad idea because of how flowery Lu Xun can get.
In almost perfect Taiwan Mandarin, you can see and hear Song Meina deliver her graduation speech here. A transcription of her speech may be found in this newspaper article. The article has four pages, and her speech begins at the bottom of the first page. It is sprinkled with a small amount of Korean and a bit of Taiwanese, but it is otherwise fluent, idiomatic Taiwan Mandarin.
Particularly noticeable was that the transcription wrote the Mandarin phonetic symbols bo po mo fo ㄅ、ㄆ、ㄇ、ㄈ as the beginning of her learning Mandarin at an overseas elementary school in Korea. I was also struck by the use of the phonetic symbol "e ㄟ" several times, once as an exclamation and the other times as the Taiwanese grammatical particle indicating possession pronounced ê [e].
While attending an international conference on the application of AI to the study of the Silk Road and its history, at which most of the papers were delivered in Korean, I was struck by the frequent occurrence of one distinctive word: hajiman. For some speakers, it almost seemed like a kǒutóuchán 口頭禪 ("catchphrase"). I had no idea what it meant, but its frequency led me to believe that it must be some sort of function word. However, the fact that it is three syllables long militated against such a conclusion. Also its sentence / phrase final position (though not always) made me think that it wasn't just a simple function word.
I kept trying to extract hajiman's purpose / meaning from its position and intonation (usually not emphasized, almost like an afterthought).
When, during coffee / tea breaks I asked some Korean colleagues about it, their reply — "Oh, hajiman" (with an offhand smile) only added to the word's mystique.
I am the proud possessor of the complete run of Mangajin (pun for "magazine") from #1-#70 (1988-1997).
Mangajin was the brainchild of Vaughan P. Simmons, whom I had conversations with at several meetings of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and corresponded with for a dozen years. I have utmost respect for him as someone who had the vision and fortitude to make a truly effective pedagogical tool for learning Japanese a reality.
I dare say that I learned more Japanese language from Mangajin than from any other single source — just as I learned more Mandarin from Guóyǔ rìbào 國語日報 (Mandarin Daily), the Republic of China newspaper that had furigana-like bopomofo rubi phonetic annotations for all hanzi, than from any other single source.
The gap between spoken and written Sinitic is enormous. In my estimation, it is greater than for any other language I know. The following are some notes by Ľuboš Gajdoš about why this is so.
The issue of choosing language data on which synchronous linguistic research is being done appears in many ways not only to be relevant to the goal of the research, but also to the validity of the research results. The problem which particularly concerns us here is the discrepancy between speech on the one hand and written language on the other. In this context, we have often encountered in the past a situation where the result of the research conducted on a variety of the Chinese language has been generalized to the entire synchronous state of the language, i.e. to all other varieties of the language, while ignoring the mentioned discrepancy between the spoken and written forms. The discrepancy between the spoken and written forms is likely to be present in any natural language with a written tradition, but the degree of difference between languages is uneven: e.g. compared to the Slovak language, it may be stated that the situation in Chinese is in this respect extraordinary. Nevertheless, it is surprising that the quantitative (qualitative) research on discrepancies between different varieties of the language has not yet aroused the attention of Chinese linguistics to such an extent as would have been adequate for the unique situation of this natural language.
