Show description

Long thin fingers like that are made for playing. I bet you can. ’ So saying, he reached up, took down his satchel from the window hook and rummaged around inside. (Ah Cheng 1990:30) An exchange along these lines could have taken place between two English speakers and its main terms come across well enough even in translation. It is this ‘naturalness’ or legibility which foreign learners or readers can trust, even if they may not read such passages in the original language. In this exchange, neither participant says ‘ni hao’ .

In the first lesson in Elementary Chinese Reader, another popular Beijing textbook, it is A who says ‘Ni hao’ and B who responds, under a drawing of a young Western male shaking hands with a young Chinese male (Li Peiyuan et al. 1980:13). Before the appearance of these two readers, the most widely used Chinese language textbook for foreigners was probably the set by DeFrancis, who also begins Lesson 1 with a ‘Greeting Friends’ dialogue, though he introduces a more formal, polite form of greeting (DeFrancis 1976:3).

Such culture-bound patterns which are rarely made explicit in language learning are discussed in some depth in Chapter 2. This chapter also looks at some other codes which are important in Chinese social semiotics, again using Ah Cheng as a semiotic guide: calligraphy as an important source of information about the self; accent and dialect as signifiers of class and regional identity; and literary and artistic styles as potent ways of negotiating ideological affiliations in the uncertain environment of modern China.