I don’t understand Mandarin
I want to write in Mandarin because I have the intention to build a Taiwanese audience for my potential future education renovation in…
I want to write in Mandarin because I have the intention to build a Taiwanese audience for my potential future education renovation in Taiwan. For instance, the post, I don’t know shit. People don’t either, is meant for Taiwanese, meaning that the language should be Mandarin.
Today, when our house is discussing writing for Asian audiences on Facebook, I told myself, “Yes! It’s easy. I already have my ingredient all in the post yesterday. Now, I just need to translate it into Chinese!”
But when I pulled out ChatGPT, it was nothing like this. After being translated, the post looks stupidly long and scholarly, I will not even read it myself for 10 seconds.
And then I told myself, “It’s okay. Maybe the translation is bad. Let me pull out some examples of good posts and learn from them.” And then I opened some famous writers and bloggers on Facebook, like 龍應台, but it just didn’t click. I read the sentences and kinda know everything, but the sentences don’t really make sense.
Let me try… again.
I pulled out posts that I have read and strongly resonated with before, but still the same. It takes me an unreasonably long time to process the information and even the emotions of the texts as if I’m back in my first year studying abroad in English, I know all the words, but the words don't click together when they are combined.
In short, damn. I cannot understand Mandarin anymore. I realized.
I think about logic, reasoning, and scientific mindset in English, so I find it so difficult to express it in Mandarin because this language might not be made to be logical. It’s intricate but not straightforward. It’s rich but mostly emotional. I find my post unreadable and pretentious in Mandarin.
My housemate told me I became illiterate after studying for four years in English. I don’t think I’m illiterate but just severely impaired. I don’t know if my language system or cultural knowledge is impaired. Maybe both. Good night.
This is the 21th post from my 30-day writing challenges. I was inspired by Tung Nguyen, a friend who is a famous blogger. He overcame the fear of creation through mass-producing blogs and eventually found his own niche audiences.