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你好,欢迎收听随行汉语。 Welcome to Takeaway Chinese.
I'm Niu Haolin with Steve Heatherly in the studio.
Hello, Steve.
Hi to you.
Thanks for having me back.
Always a pleasure having you on the show talking about learning Chinese.
I think for many people, learning a language is part of their hobbies, isn't it?
It can be.
It can be really fun.
It can be a little bit hard, arduous.
When you get to a certain point, you have to put in a lot of work, but it can also give you the drive, the enjoyment of knowing something and when it clicks in your mind.
I always, when I was teaching university, I always tried to deliver that message to my students, because students, it's a different game when they are learning languages in school, because it's forced upon them.
For the most part.
You get later in your school days and then you can choose languages, but you still have to choose.
So it's kind of pushed upon you.
And when something is pushed upon you...
It takes the fun element out.
Exactly.
You know, it really does.
I remember I was an English major in university and I was forced to read and write for four years.
All I did was read.
All I did was write.
And now the hobby of reading.
I'm starting to slowly get it back, but I was gone for me for a long time because the pure joy of reading had disappeared forever.
For my life.
And I think that's true for languages, too.
So I always tried to tell my university students don't look at this as something that you have to learn.
Look at this as something that you are acquiring that allows you to communicate with other humans more.
On the planet.
And how cool is that?
The changing of perspective definitely would help.
And especially when you consider the fact that it can be really useful and it can open the door for you to another culture that you would never ever really get with merely translation.
Yeah.
But for our generation, we often asked the question in a lot of different scenarios.
What is your hobby?
你有什么兴趣爱好?
你有什么兴趣爱好?
So 兴趣 carries the meaning of interest.
You're interested in certain things.
And 爱好 is love and like to do.
So what is your hobby?
We get this question in, for example, when we are doing an interview for the next level of education or the kind of interview, job interviews.
True.
Or simply... Dating interviews.
Yes, yes, all kinds of interviews.
So 兴趣爱好 is something we're asked.
And I realized that different generations have different 兴趣爱好.
They have different hobbies.
They have different things they would love to do in their free time.
For my generation, I think the most common ones would be music.
It's very general, also because we didn't again.
My generation was the very first generation that acquire access of internet in our teenage years.
So it was not that common, which means that music means you listen to music on like tapes.
Yeah, records.
Yes, and you would even write down the lyrics.
我们有手抄歌词本。 手抄。 手抄。 手 is hand, 抄 is to copy, so handwritten.
歌词 is lyric, 本 is a textbook.
Or a notebook.
So goods, but you would write down the lyrics so that you can learn to sing it.
And at that time, I think concerts are definitely popular.
It's just as a student, especially primary school, secondary school student, you don't really have the money to travel to places for concerts.
You do it in your own cities.
You do.
Do it in your own bedroom.
That's true.
With your friend.
And if you're really talented, you would also have the ability to, for example, play some music instruments, sometimes self-taught, sometimes you go to 兴趣班习 兴趣 again.
兴趣 carries the meaning of your interest, of your hobby.
And 班 is a class.
So if It's the extracurriculum classes teaching you how to play music instruments, guitar.
Did you ever learn anything?
I learned guitar in my summer holiday.
I think that was the...
Summer holiday of the junior school, end of junior school when I graduated.
So I had enough time.
So again, 音乐 and also 读书, reading.
Like you said, reading was one of the hobbies.
Very, very popular one for my generation.
Comic books.
I grew up reading comic books.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
I used to think comic books are immature, but no, no, no, no, no.
Some of them are very deep and very fun.
Yeah, some of them.
Mine were immature.
They were.
I wasn't into the superhero ones.
We had one called Archie.
I don't know.
I know Archie.
Archie is the funny one, right?
You know Archie comics?
Uh-huh.
Yeah, it's about five or six high school students or something.
Archie and his friends Reggie and Jughead.
And there were a couple of girls.
Veronica and Betty.
And I used to read those because my sisters read them.
And then when they were done with them, I would take them.
That's how I grew up.
I grew up with things that my sisters liked after they didn't like it anymore.
Then it became my thing.
Yeah, so I grew up reading those, too.
Yeah, and reading was one.
And besides that, for generations a bit younger or when we grew up, we started to say, traveling became one of our hobbies.
Yeah.
That's 旅行.
And I somehow feel like, for my parents' generation, one hobby that we didn't used to have, or that was not as popular, would be collecting stamps.
Ji carries the meaning of collect, 收集, putting things together, collecting.
邮 stands for 邮票, 邮票 is the stamp.
I never got into stamp collecting when I was young.
I think even when I was young, stamp collecting was considered something that maybe older.
Oh, no.
Really?
The opposite.
Huh.
Yeah.
Oh, was stamp collecting considered cool in China?
For my parents' generation.
And maybe a bit later.
Right.
That's what I said.
But not my generation.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
So that's something that the older generation would do.
But I just I think it kind of faded away.
I was aware of it, but I didn't know anyone who used to do that as a hobby.
But but that being said, collecting other types of things.
When I was a kid, I used to collect hockey cards.
Ah, my favorite players.
When I was a kid I didn't collect anything, but my classmates used to collect the kind of hero cards, heroes of traditional Chinese novels, Chinese classics, the kind of heroes with good martial art talent uh-huh, and you collect them.
So, and for journey to the west you also collect the deities and also the main characters and just everybody right.
So you would keep buying the card packs, trying to get all of the collectibles.
You know, the thing in China is that the collectibles are included in instant noodles.
Yeah, I was going to ask where they were.
The kind of instant noodle that you can chew directly, kind of like chips, not the one that you have to use boiled water.
Mm-hmm.
So it's easier to buy and consume them as snacks.
But it's also easier that if you only want the collectible, you can share the snack with your classmates.
So I didn't collect, but I ate a lot of instant noodles.
The hockey cards used to come in a pack of like five or six.
And in there would be a piece of bubble gum.
So I would go, I would save up my quarter, 25 cents.
That's how much they were.
And I would go and buy like five or six packs at a time.
And then I remember that would give me five or six pieces of bubble gum.
And I would put them all in my mouth at the same time.
You didn't share?
Well, remember, I had two older sisters.
You never.
And I spent a lot of time by myself when I was growing up.
Don't feel bad for me.
It taught me how to become independent.
And I very much enjoyed my time.
Good.
I think that's good to see the silver lining there.
My wife says to me sometimes, she's like, you never feel bored, do you?
I was like, never.
I could be anywhere doing anything and not feel bored.
And I explained to her.
That is actually a very, very valuable trait.
This is how I grew up.
I had to create my own fun because my sisters are seven and eight years older than me.
So they were kind of doing their own thing.
They were very, very nice to me.
Sure.
But I didn't want to hang out with them.
But you cannot play together.
They were doing girl stuff.
And so, yeah, I would just go off and do my own thing.
Speaking of girl stuff and boy stuff.
I think one hobby or one type of hobby that can definitely be a little bit gender concentrating would be sports related hobbies.
You think so?
Yeah.
I think so.
I think it can be, especially for my generation.
Yeah, I don't think maybe that's so true anymore, but maybe at a time.
At that time, for instance, girls would play rope jumping.
And the kind of rope jumping, in the sense that you jump the most amount of ropes in certain period of time, or you can create different styles.
Sure.
The double rope thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And besides that, there's also the elastic rope.
That is very flexible and you have certain pattern that you should be following.
If you miss a step, you lose and the other team would get the chance to play.
And that, in my memory... was very much popular among girls, not among boys.
Well, you may be surprised or not surprised to know that the young Steve that was Romeo, or hoped to be, took a jump rope class in elementary school, because that's where all the girls were.
I remember telling my dad, you'll be home for dinner today.
And I said, no, I have a skipping class after school.
And he said, what?
I said, yeah, I'm taking a skipping class.
He's like, why?
I was like, I don't know.
I just want to.
He's like, okay, have a good time.
But I had my, I had my motives.
It's very smart.
But like you said, it's for my generation, our generation more or less.
Nowadays, boys and girls, they play these things together.
They do.
And also for example, football, basketball, you see young girls play football very, very well.
They're smart.
They're fast.
They're very strategic.
Yeah.
Better than the boys sometimes.
Yeah, sometimes.
And for boys, for instance, ballet.
Ballet.
Oh, by the way, it's a good and easy word to learn in Chinese because ballet in Chinese is ballet.
Yes, it's a literal translation, so it's easier to remember.
And the one we mentioned, rope jumping or skipping, would be 跳绳.
跳绳.
跳 is to jump.
Sheng is rope, so rope jumping.
And the other one, the elastic ropes, the one that you can jump in certain mode, or from very low from your ankle to very high to your neck.
So that one is called 跳皮筋.
Pijing is the elastic, flexible one.
So these are the kind of hobbies in our days.
Yeah, I mean, these are kind of the traditional ones.
But now young people seem to be getting more creative with their hobbies.
They are.
And it's not only in school.
It's not only for teenagers anymore.
When we talk about young people's hobbies these days, it's more in the sense that for, for example, university students or even for young professionals who enter job market.
In their free time they created a lot of hobbies that I didn't even understand at the very beginning.
But once you get to know them, you see the fun, you find the fun.
For example?
There are so many.
Let's start with different type.
Let's start with sports.
So besides the traditional sports, they're still popular.
Don't get me wrong.
It's not like nowadays young people in China do not play football or basketball.
They still do.
But there are many new ones as well.
For example, Frisbee.
Frisbee.
How do you say frisbee in Chinese?
飞盘 飞盘 飞 is fly.
盘 is a plate.
It's a flying plate.
Frisbee.
Is that a new hobby in China?
It's getting popular in the past couple of years, so relatively new.
And I think one of the reasons that young people really enjoy it is it's got rules.
But it's also quite free in the sense that you have to respect the rules.
All of the team members respect the rules.
They do not really need a judge.
Yeah, right.
They just judge among themselves.
I think that's true even at the pro level for Frisbee, that they just make the decisions themselves.
I think that is something that they really like.
They do not want an authority on the playground being the judge telling them what to do, what not to do.
They'd like to have a unanimous consensus among themselves and they feel like they're all peers, they're all equal and they decide.
Who wins and who loses for one round.
And they're totally OK with it.
They are.
I don't think that would work in every professional sport, but it certainly works in this one.
And, judging by the kind of frisbee lovers that I know, they're also enjoying the after-match event a lot.
They become friends, they talk to each other, they would have dinner together.
So the social element, 社交属性, this is very important.
社交 is social, 属性 is like trait or status.
So the social element in a lot of these hobbies can be demonstrated in different ways.
And for Frisbee, it's the most common, easy and accessible way.
That is, you like the people you play Frisbee with and you hang out with them afterwards.
I think that's called Ultimate Frisbee.
Yeah, because you can play Frisbee just with your friends, like just tossing it around, right?
But the actual game, I think they call it Ultimate Frisbee.
Yes, yes.
And it is.
It is true.
It's one of the sports that has a very social aspect to it.
And it's a sport, too, where men and women can play together and everybody gets along.
And it's great, great exercise at the same time.
So feipan is one of the hobbies that are young, that are new among the younger generation.
And another one.
I think this one is getting its popularity among not only the younger generation but in general the Chinese society.
That is, bike riding or cycling.
I didn't know that that was relatively new, because even when I first moved here I saw tons of cyclists everywhere.
And yeah, we're not just talking about well, I mean, we could be talking about renting the city bikes, the ones that anybody can take.
I'm not.
Yeah.
Some people use it to get to work.
Yeah, we're talking about like hardcore cyclists.
Yes, because I think the changing of mentality happened when bicycles started.
Stop being the major transportation means here in China.
We used to call the country a country on a bicycle.
自行车上的国家。 自行车 is a bicycle, which ironically is translated directly as automobile or auto.
自行 is bicycle.
Self moving, and the 车 is a mobile, so automobile, but it's bicycle.
自行车上, on top of a bicycle, 德国家, a country on a bicycle.
So that was referring to China, but definitely not anymore.
So at that time, because bicycles were viewed as the main mode of transportation, because they were people, didn't view them as something that you do for fun or something that you use for fun.
Precisely.
But nowadays, to start with, we see people stop riding bicycle all the time when they're in a hurry, when they're going to work.
Well, some people still do.
The feeling that when I'm on a bicycle, I definitely have a certain destination and the destination is much more important than the journey, started to fade away, which leads to the possibility of viewing cycling as a hobby instead of a way to work, a way of commute.
Yeah.
And people get into it and they take it really seriously.
I think it almost becomes a lifestyle.
You can start out, and this is true for many hobbies, you start out with the basics.
And then, once you get into it a little bit, then you might want to upgrade your gear, upgrade your bike.
Which can be very expensive.
Bicycles can be insanely expensive and so can the gear that comes along with it.
But the cool thing is, and there is a club just not far from us.
There are these bicycle clubs where members meet.
It's offline and online.
You know where I'm talking about?
It's just down the street here.
And it's like a whole little community of different shops in there.
I know that because I'm a cyclist.
No, that's where my favorite hamburger place is.
If you've not tried that, try it out.
It's very good.
Really?
Yeah.
So this is my.
From what I see, you don't see those cyclists out in the daytime on the streets in Beijing.
Not really.
You see them at night and you'll see them travel in packs of, you know four five six seven eight nine 10 11 12 13, 14.
They travel in packs often and when they come to the stoplights or whatever, they're all having a chat with each other.
It's very social.
They're super in shape.
You can tell that they do it a lot.
They spend a lot of time doing that at nights and, of course, on the weekends.
And there are different types of cyclers out there.
There are those who concentrate more on upgrading the gears, the bicycle and having fun with friends during, for example, weekend days or nighttime, like Steve had just said.
And they go to relatively nearby places, suburban area adjacent to the city centers.
But there are those who wanted to exercise, on one hand, and cycling to really far away places, on the other hand.
Cycling is a way of traveling for them.
They would cycle to Xizang, for example, for really long days.
Yeah, and that can be, again, talking about a lifestyle.
Then you're getting into a different level of cycling, I think.
And with more people enjoying this hobby.
City planners in different places, different provinces, would even create, design the kind of cycling routes for those who are, on one hand, want the condition of the road suitable enough for them to cycle.
But on the other hand.
Enjoy the view on the road as well.
So different sections for different purposes, having a lot of fun.
My wife and I, we go out on the weekends often.
Yeah.
So we just go until we get tired and then we stop.
And it's really a great way to exercise and a great way to see the city too.
Yes.
And besides that we also have other types of activities that are semi sports, semi social activities.
Have you ever heard of hide and seek or modern version of hide and seek?
I know the traditional version of hide and seek.
I played that.
I think that's kind of an international children's game.
Yeah, but that's for children.
Yeah, that's for you're talking for adults.
I'm talking for adults.
And in Chinese, we call it 躲貓貓.
躲貓貓?
躲, here's the meaning of hide.
And 貓 is cat.
I have no idea why, but we call it hide like a cat.
Hide like a cat.
What are the rules of this 躲貓貓?
So we know about the traditional ones.
That is, you count from one to 100 and other people would hide and you go find them.
And whoever's found become the next one who's looking for people.
So that's the easy version.
But for the younger generation, I think, Duomo Mo.
To be honest, I'm not really sure if it's still as popular today as its prime time, because there was a certain period.
Even here in parks in Beijing, I can see young people playing Duo Mao Mao.
Have you heard of the game?
Do you know how it's played?
Yeah, so the modern version of this, which is really kind of wild, is different from the game that we played when we were kids.
When we played as kids hide and seek, it would be within the confines of maybe your backyard or the park where you were playing or some small space, right.
But these days it can be even bigger than that.
It can be in a shopping mall, for example.
It can be in a huge park.
It can be in a giant park.
It can be in a district or a neighborhood.
So what that means is it's a grander scale.
But it's not just that, because how the heck are you supposed to find somebody in a whole neighborhood?
So we need the help of technology.
So in the beginning of the game through your phone and, by the way, you register for the game through a mini program, as far as I understand, through WeChat or something.
Before the game starts, you are assigned a position.
You are either a cat, which means you are the hunter, or you are the mouse, which means you have.
You have to run and hide.
And it is the job of the cats to physically find and touch the mice.
This is where the element of the game tag comes into play.
Now, what else does tech do?
Well, because you're playing in such a grand, large area.
From what I understand, the phone is used to help both evade and find different characters.
If you're a mouse, your phone will show you where some safe spots in the shopping mall are or in the neighborhood are.
So that's why you'll have people hiding in convenience stores like actually hiding in a store because there is a cat nearby.
But the cats can use the same system. to help to track down the mouse.
So it's a game of hiding and avoiding and eventually finding.
And then when you find the mouse, then you tap the mouse, you physically touch them, then they are either out or they join your side.
And also because sometimes they up-level the game.
There are different teams and when you see on the map there's a mouse and a cat together hiding somewhere, you do not really know which one is the mouse, which one is the cat.
And you have to you know.
Yeah, right.
Negotiate a little bit, pretend a little bit, acting.
A lot of element is in the game.
I think that's the fun, isn't it?
If you're a cat and you see a mouse nearby, but you've been spotted you can pretend to be a mouse too and get close enough to them and then grab them.
Yeah, it's really fun.
It's a much expanded version of the original game.
And I have seen people in parks wearing the ribbons and playing the game.
And also afterwards, I think I've seen the before and after of it.
Because before...
The way to join these games, because you can imagine the more the merrier for this kind of game.
So a lot of young people would find their peers on social media, on different types of social media posts, and they know there is a game in this park at this period of time.
They'll just show up and join the game.
Yeah. and start a WeChat group and knowing people.
So the before part is people still not talking to a lot of the players very aggressively because they do not know each other a lot just yet.
But after playing the game, You have a shared experience.
You have something to talk about.
And then you sometimes become friends.
And young people like that way of becoming friends, apparently.
How do you say, so when we're talking about games and a game that maybe I'm not familiar with.
So you said Duo Mao Mao.
How do I say, how do you play?
How do you play Duomaomao?
You say, the game, how, play.
So, Duomaomao, 怎么玩?
Duomaomao, 怎么?
怎么 carries the meaning of how, in what way.
玩 is play.
Var.
And then var has two different possible pronunciations, right?
Yes, var.
But I'm giving you the Northern Uruguayan version of it.
The character itself is pronounced wan.
Wan.
Wan shuai is to play.
Okay, so Dumau Mau Zumuvar.
How to play the game.
If we're in the southern regions, Dumau Mau Zumuvar.
Yes.
Thank you.
And for today's Takeaway Chinese, we've only covered the sporty part of the hobbies.
Actually, here in China, we have a lot of other areas.
For instance, some people enjoy the kind of artifact creating kind of hobbies.
They can weave.
They use different beads to put the beads into a certain form or into a certain character that they like.
Yeah, they'll put them into the shape that they like, with the colors that they like, and it's creating some kind of art for them.
Yes, and there's also art performing kind of hobbies.
We have people enjoying being someone who's trying out open mic or stand-up committee for the very first time, learning the kind of impromptu acting in theaters.
And we also have people who collect things like earlier generations, but the things that they collect are different.
And we are going to cover all that in the next episode of Takeaway Chinese.
Part two.
Yeah, so make sure you stay tuned to that as well.
I'm Yoho Lin.
Thank you so much for listening.
We'll see you next time.
Bye-bye.
