The Power of Babel

Posted on September 16, 2015 by James Thomas Snyder

Tower of Babel, woodcut, M.C. Escher, 1928. Via Wikipedia.

For most of the last nine months I have had the extraordinary benefit of intensive foreign language training. I had resources, faculty, structure and time all to my benefit: online and computer resources, a diverse faculty from many countries to learn different accents and idioms, day-long small group classroom work and and intensive one-on-one training. That I speak a new foreign language at all I owe to my instructors. But the undeniable fact that I am not native, or even fluent, I can blame only on myself.

I can’t blame everything entirely on myself, but rather, on mysterious components of myself that seem to be beyond my conscious control. I found that the most difficult, most unfathomable, most unpredictable aspects of my training came entirely from the cubic foot of space inside my head.

Your brain is not your friend

Perhaps the most astounding and frustrating aspect of language training was the involuntary reaction my brain had to responding to this new input. In short, I found myself inadvertently speaking or substituting prior languages I had learned for the new language I was trying to learn. This could be as vague as mispronouncing homonyms or cognates or as physical as substituting the word with the rudimentary sign language I learned 15 years ago. It seemed, then, that my brain was resisting the “overwrite” my previous non-native languages, or confused anything “non-native” in my head. I was not alone. For anyone with previous language instruction, however old it was, the brain had a tendency to reach back and substitute old French, say, or Italian, for the new language.

This goes quite against everything I had heard or thought about new language acquisition, at least when I was much younger. Knowing a foreign language helps acquire new foreign languages. Indeed, the friends and family who speak many languages find it considerably easier — or they at least learn more successfully — to acquire more. And for myself this is true as far as it goes: my prior language provided a context for understanding structure and grammar, recognizing cognates, memorizing words and verb tables, and so on.

It goes without saying that I never contended with the active opposition of my own brain to absorb a new language.

Immersion is a myth

This may be the result of being a native anglophone in a world that increasingly uses English as a common second language. I benefited from intense, immersion-like training during which my colleagues spoke nothing but the foreign language for hours. This helped, as far as it goes. Because once we left class, we were back in our native language environment. I feel like there is a switch in my brain that toggles between “native” and “foreign” languages and it is thrown one way or another depending on my environment. When the switch is off, I’m not learning.

It’s certainly easier to learn when the switch is always on “foreign” and indeed the gold standard is simply living, learning and speaking in the country you expect to travel to. But now that I am abroad again, I see how difficult it is to achieve a totally immersive environment. English is used everywhere, on the radio, on billboards, in magazines, songs and movies. Every time I recognize a new word in English, that switch in my head gets flipped back from “foreign” to “native”.

There is no substitute for long, hard work…

In the end, unless you are innately gifted, acquiring a new language takes long hours of concentrated effort. It is a methodical and slow process. There is nothing quick or simple about it, and those language schools that promise acquisition in six weeks strike me as fraudulent. I never could see progress from week to week. Day to day was worse — fall-backs and regressions more than outnumbered the minor triumphs. That’s because real progress comes over months. For example, one day, about three months into my training, I realized I could recognize all the individual words in a foreign language broadcast. That helped my verbal acquisition (not to mention confidence) immeasurably, but I had to work a long time to get there.

…except using your language in a real context every day

That said, there is nothing like using your new language in real-life context every day. Real life forces you to do things you never trained for in the classroom. It is virtually impossible to explain the difference, particularly to those slogging through the middle part of their language training, but using your language in a real context is both liberating and more challenging than the classroom. That is as it should be.

People are forgiving

One of my favorite stories about foreign language acquisition involves Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. His wife’s family is Chinese and he made a concerted effort to learn Mandarin. He deployed his new language before a Chinese audience in Beijing in 2014. The reaction of the audience struck me — they were delighted that he made the effort. More importantly, when he persisted in speaking Chinese, the interviewer and the audience adapted and eagerly helped him where he struggled. The interviewer kept the questions simple. The audience shouted out words to Zuckerberg when he got stuck, urging him on. The audience was clearly deeply flattered (and entertained) that he completed the 30-minute interview in Mandarin.

I hope this story provides some solace to my colleagues who learned Mandarin. But I’ve found that, again, real life mirrors this story. When you learn a new language and are struggling to use it, people recognize the effort and try to help. People are forgiving. In the end, the real goal is not a perfect, grammatically correct, fluently pronounced sentence but understanding. Understanding always involves at least two people and in my experience most people want to understand and will help you reach that ultimate goal.

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Politics, Propaganda and Pornography on the Web in China

Posted on July 12, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

China Daily front from May 2012

A recent New York Review of Books post by Perry Link is worth reading to learn the lengths and depths to which the Chinese government will go to control content and opinion on the Internet in that country. China has learned to embrace the Internet in some ways, recognizing that the government in some sense can’t live without it and can’t deprive the people of it. But the central authorities view the Internet in much the same way that the Nazis and Soviets viewed the emerging art and technology of the movies in the 1930s: as a powerful tool to augment propaganda, which is, in the mordant definition of Hitler message man Joseph Goebbels, “a means to state control”.

Link is drawing attention to the work of his colleague Xiao Qing at the University of California, who has received, archived and catalogued thousands of “directives” from China’s propaganda officials to central and regional news and Internet officials to play up, play down, censor, muzzle, close comment, applaud or condemn various bits of information that are vacuumed up in the social space of the Chinese Intranet. It is impossible to read these directives and not think of Winston Smith, alone at his cubicle next to the memory hole, carrying out similar directives in the Ministry of Truth. Indeed, Xiao calls his unofficial repository the Ministry of Truth. He provides an extraordinary glimpse inside perhaps the largest and most sophisticated propaganda machinery in the world.

Link, an academic and translator of Charter 08 into English, provides some additional insights based on a conference that Xiao hosted last month in Berkeley that included several additional scholars who helped analyze his archives. The insights they brought are additionally worth reading, if for no other reason than it is an additional reminder that we do not bring every perspective required to this material. Perhaps the most important insight rendered is this:

“One of the principal aims of the government directives is to prevent unapproved groups from organizing through the Internet (noted as “incitement,” “gatherings,” etc.); some of the scholars argued that this goal is even more fundamental than prevention of negative comment about the Party.”

That is, among the government’s top priorities in Internet control is not censorship for its own sake but to break up any nascent attempts at independent organization, which is the true and ultimate threat to the government’s control. Information, opinion and communication do not undermine the government on their own, but by how they help individuals understand, come together, and take collective action. No wonder, as Link notes, the government has lumped “political speech” in the same web category as pornography as “unhealthful to society”.

Another chilling observation in the age of the NSA revelations relates to the activity of Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency. In a country where all media is state-controlled, Xinhua is effectively an open-source intelligence agency. The Internet has changed that, Link notes. Ten years ago, Xinhua’s mission, in part, was to report to China’s leadership on its own population. In the Internet era, it no longer needs to do that – the people are in effect reporting on themselves through social media, chat rooms, comment boxes and microblogs. The government only needs to read them to understand their subjects.

That’s a Thought Police even Orwell didn’t imagine.

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What The Washington Post gets wrong about The Daily Show in China

Posted on April 10, 2013 by James Thomas Snyder

The April 9 Washington Post ran this blog post by Max Fisher about the unprecedented number of video viewings in China of a recent Daily Show segment on North Korea. (You can watch the original clip Daily Show clip here. I’m having trouble embedding.)

The Chinese web portal Sina reposted the segment, importantly with subtitles, racking up more than three million views (and counting) – more than any other Daily Show segment short of a 2008 bit about Sarah Palin.

Unfortunately Fisher draws exactly the wrong conclusion about Chinese public opinion and viewing habits based on this single data point. He suggests that the surge in popularity indicates the average Chinese citizen’s frustration with the country’s belligerent ally, and insinuates a popular divergence from official foreign policy supporting North Korea and its young leader, Kim Jong-Un.

This is far too much to draw from this incident. Fisher is first of all comparing China’s viewership to the Daily Show’s normal audience, which is mostly American and at 300 million its fullest potential is almost a quarter the size of China’s population. Also, a cursory glance at the Sina site shows that the most popular segment on the site has views of nearly twice The Daily Show’s segment at around six million views. (I would nonetheless discount some comments in Fisher’s thread that three million views is a tiny slice of China’s population because that is not a statistically relevant or sound measure of the Chinese population in any event. It can only be measured against other views.)

But most important, Fisher provides no context or public opinion data for his assertion that this viewership represents a particular rancor about a specific policy. In a country where corruption, pollution, economic inequality, poverty, censorship, arbitrary seizures and state surveillance are pervasive, China’s policy toward its small, pugilistic neighbor cannot rank very high in public concern. It is not even clear from the Sina site that the Chinese people are even particularly well-informed on this issue. (If China’s English propaganda mouthpiece, China Daily, is any measure, the government has not spoken often or very directly about the mounting crisis in North Korea recently.)

So why is The Daily Show segment suddenly so popular? The important context to understand this phenomenon is the Sina site itself, China’s great Firewall, and the government’s total control of all media, including the Internet, inside the country. This segment was not posted freely – that is, it was posted for a reason – but that doesn’t make its existence in China any less interesting or exciting. Another cursory glance at the Sina site makes The Daily Show stand out even more: this is satire – cutting, anti-authoritarian satire – in a country that brooks no political dissent.

Given that context, Jon Stewart practically explodes off the Chinese web. Against the drab greys of state propaganda, The Daily Show contrasts in psychedelic Technicolor. This is the Web-TV equivalent of stumbling across jazz in 1960s Moscow or rock’n’roll in 1970s Prague. The Daily Show perfectly captures what’s missing in a society where the government dominates all creative and political expression.

That is why this segment is so popular: it is so unusual in a country that normally does not tolerate questioning of authority, much less mocking it. Fisher gets this very wrong, and it is important that we don’t draw the wrong conclusions about what the Chinese people think and know and feel.

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How to Watch Propaganda

Posted on November 27, 2012 by James Thomas Snyder

Certain parts of the blogosphere are atwitter about China’s announcement that it has commenced flight tests aboard its first commissioned aircraft carrier. You can watch this five-minute newscast on the PLA Navy’s Liaoning from CCTV:

I’m personally less alarmed, and as this post will indicate far more skeptical of Chinese claims, than others by China’s growing military modernization. A single operational carrier of this type places China on par with other medium powers such as France, Great Britain, Brazil, Thailand, Spain, India and Italy, all of which deploy at least one carrier. Italy and Spain both have two. China wants two by 2015, four by 2020. That means one thing if China contributes to regional stability as it has off the coast of East Africa. It means something else if the country continues to squabble over rocks in the South China Sea.

Others are better suited to point out the strategic and operational significance of the new Chinese carrier. Nonetheless, some background is required. China has long expressed a desire to develop an aircraft carrier and saw an opportunity when it bought the ex-Varyag, a former Soviet vessel built in the 1980s and transferred to Ukraine. Non-operational, essentially a hull, China bought it for $25 million in 1998 and hauled the hulk, harrowingly, from the Black Sea to China over the course of 2000 to 2002 for refitting during the next decade.

But I hold no ambivalence about China’s triumphant unveiling of their achievement: the bold television debut of the Liaoning‘s seaborne fighter squadron is a put-up job and a farce, more video aspiration of what the country would like to be very soon rather than what it actually is today.

And herein lies a lesson in real propaganda. A close viewing demonstrates how much mileage Central China Television (CCTV, the state-run broadcaster) could get out of so little real footage; how little of their naval hand they showed for all that bluster. Only someone with experience in naval affairs or video editing (hopefully both) can parse what’s really being seen — or more specifically, what’s being allowed to be seen — on the Liaoning.

At first glance — and especially if you don’t speak or read Mandarin Chinese, as I admit I don’t (but this isn’t nearly as important, remember, as what the video shows) — the ship is a dynamo. It’s shown underway at sea, then as a hive of activity with sailors scouring the flight deck. Then the aircraft: a J-15 (a carrier version of the J-11, and a Chinese copy of the Russian Sukhoi Su-33 carrier aircraft), approaches for the landing. Following that, another aircraft takes off from the flight deck, and then there is a lot of pirouetting of aircraft and flight personnel waving arms before the segment ends.

Let’s be clear about exactly what the viewer really sees. Most of the long views of the Liaoning are of an empty flattop. At no time are there more than two aircraft on the flight deck. I am willing to assert that this newscast documents no more than one landing of one aircraft (#552) and one launch of another aircraft (#553). Cutting together footage of three cameras shooting the landing of a single aircraft can make it look as though multiple landings occurred. One sequence (shot of aircraft #552 I believe) is made to look like a launch, but the carrier deck is nowhere to be seen, so I think this was a shot of a flyby. I believe that aircraft #553 was likely preloaded for launch from shore. At no time do we see more of the ship below decks, use of the elevator, the hangar deck, or the air traffic control center (“the island”). We have no sense of how far the ship is out to sea. It’s quite possible the carrier is within sight of shore.

This fairly and in practical terms defines what I mean by propaganda. CCTV is China’s state-run television – there is no other media allowed in the country without censorship – and it is directed entirely for the benefit of the state. Although appearing to be fairly straightforward reporting about an advance in China’s naval arms, a frame-by-frame analysis demonstrates this is an artful exercise in falsification, fabrication and obfuscation. Although I can’t understand the narration (which, nonetheless, includes no interviews), a reasonable guess would include veiled or direct references to rivals in the Pacific Rim. And with that my definition would be complete.

To get another sense of how state-run media propagandizes, you can watch the entire, exhausting CCTV documentary on the Chinese Shenzhou manned space program produced and released with dubbing and subtitling in English. It’s a feat that something as legitimately exciting as manned space exploration can be as dull as this series. But again it’s at least as revealing about the nature of state media and propaganda in a country like China to see what they release for the Western public. Of course nothing goes wrong, everything goes perfectly well (except the weather, which of course the Chinese meteorologists predict). The taikonauts are China’s strongest and the best, their positive feelings never waiver. But in the end, virtually the entire “documentary” relating to the mission itself – including the launch sequence, flight and recovery – is computer-animated. It’s not like the producers didn’t have the time – this documentary is dated a full year after Shenzhou 7’s maiden flight. There’s no explanation except for the regime’s paranoia and instinct for secrecy.

This isn’t to claim China didn’t fly, just that there is far more the country wants to hide than it wants to share. An historical analog for this is the first Soyuz launch, which was organized in secret and caught the world by surprise. Virtually the entire flight profile was hidden from the public until after the collapse of the Soviet Union. To maintain the people’s faith, and to show strength to the rest of the world, no cracks in the façade of regime competence must show.

By contrast, the Mercury program inaugurated the American civilian space program in full daylight – in Tom Wolfe’s words, “the greatest death-defying hell-driver stunt ever broadcast” – and Neil Armstrong landed Eagle on the moon with a billion people watching on Earth. Even the U.S. Navy’s greatest recruitment ad ever produced, Top Gun, showed more launch-and-recovery operations than CCTV revealed from the Liaoning. The 1986 film’s plot hinged on some throwaway melodrama — the squadron’s best aviator loses his nerve after being lit up by an adversary — a kind of weakness impossible to imagine on Chinese television.

You can watch much of this on at least two CCTV channels contracted by Verizon cable at least in my region in the United States. RT has two channels on Verizon as well, one in English, the other in Spanish. Their offerings are about the same as each other. Meanwhile, the Broadcasting Board of Governors has cut broadcasts to China and Russia, so they can’t even get unfiltered, bias-free, US-funded news broadcasting in those countries anymore.

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