WGBH Forum Network; Deborah Fallows on Dreaming in Chinese
Description:
Deborah Fallows explores her experiences as an American living in China in her new book, 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 people. As her skill with Mandarin increased, bits of the language--a word, a phrase, an oddity of grammar--became windows into understanding romance, humor, protocol, relationships, and the overflowing humanity of modern China.Here she shares what she discovered about Mandarin, and how those discoveries helped her understand a culture that had at first seemed impenetrable, opens up China to westerners in an entirely new way.
