I called Kinokuniya today (I have their number on speed dial…) and it turns out that the sea shipment of Suzuka Vol.10 just came in today! But it has yet to be processed and I’ll only be able to collect my order tomorrow. :(

That’s not what I want to rant about today.

Anyway, I had been reading two semi-biographies by Richard P. Feynman recently, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” and “What Do You Care What Other People Think?”. Mr. Feynman was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during the war and later won a Nobel prize for his personal work. His stories are full of humourous anecdotes that really given you an unique perspective of the world from the eyes of a genius in the real Einsteinian sense of the word.

So, there I was dozing off during Chinese lesson as lines of proverbs flickered in and out of my semi-conscious mind. I was suddenly reminded very strongly of a statement made by Mr. Feynman about his dislike for the compulsory English language courses at MIT back in his college years. He said that language, or rather the study of language, to him was too arbitary. Unlike the sciences, there is nothing physical about English and it is simply a set of standards decided based on usage.

I agreed with what he said but didn’t think much of it, until today. You see, Chinese education in my school is basically about forcing as much vocabulary down the students’ throats as possible year after year. We memorize hundreds and thousands of classical proverbs and sayings that are forgotten the nanosecond we recieve the graduation certificate. The 1% of the school population that actually learnt something ends up not getting to use them because those people would otherwise have a hard time communicating with the other 9%. I say 9% because the remaining 90% just sticks to English, but that’s beside the point.

My point is that these “high-level” proverbs that we are forced to memorize are useless fluff. It seems to me that a language should be a mean and not an end. We use words to convey ideas, we don’t create ideas so we can put them in words. Therefore, it seems quite foolish to me to place so much emphasis on vocabulary. Grammar is important because we need to a common foundation to base our information exchanges on, but vocabulary is only useful when it means something, either a concrete object or an abstract concept, to the speaker and the listener. And since the primary function of language is to facilitate communication, there is no reason why you would want to make its task more difficult by making the vocabulary unnecessarily complex. That is what proverbs do. Proverbs in Chinese are basically complicated anecdotes distilled into a few characters to have a meaning that is often completely unrelated to the words themselves. In order to understand their meanings, you have to either be born a few centuries earlier or memorize a good-size dictionary dedicated to nothing but proverbs. The worst part is that the ideas expressed by these overly-complicated phrases can usually be put into a single word without any loss of meaning, but a teacher will always prefer that you use the most complex expression available to show your l33t proverb skillz.

Proverbs are counter-productive by nature. Even if two parties can understand what the other is saying, proverbs still slow down communication unnecessarily by virtue of the fact that they are usually goddamn long. And there is always the chance that the listener does not understand the meaning of a particular proverb, slowing down the process even further.

If you ever asked any teacher why one should study proverbs, you would no doubt be told that the proper usage of proverbs makes one sound more cultured and refined. Some teacher might even add that you ought to be ashame of yourself for questioning your great heritage. Some would go mumbling on about the beauty of the language and how you ought to appreciate it like a work of art. But no one will ever, ever tell you that you need them to get your ideas across to other people, because you don’t. In fact, they might even prevent you from doing so.

My theory is that the learning and speaking of proverbs is one huge game of “one-upness”. It’s like those games that children play where they challenge one another to do silly things and the losers get ostracized. The rules involved in language are as arbitary as the ones in such games. So what if you finish first? It seems quite unfair to me for such a person to be given equal credit for mastering a bunch of rules built on nothing but air as compared to a person who excels in sciences based on the rules that govern the universe. I would personally place language on the same level as mathematical notations. It’s necessary for the exchange of ideas, but there’s no point making it overly complicated and it certainly should not be a whole subject by itself, as least not in any standards higher than elementary school.

Oh well, maybe I am just bitter that I’m going to fail today’s Chinese proverb test because I did not bother to revise for it.

Speaking of language studies, I have not been reading much Japanese lately. Ahhhh! I have a bad feeling about this year’s JLPT.

P.S. Fate/Stay Night episode 5 rocked! :)

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