Culture 1

Learning Chinese: culture of Unit 1

The dialogue of Unit 1 takes Bai Xue and Gao Xiaoyu from Beijing to Shanghai: a night on the train, the morning subway, a walk to a restaurant with a surprising name. It is a chance to see how people really get around in China today, and to correct a few misconceptions along the way.

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1. Chinese train stations and the three families of trains

A station like 上海火车站 Shànghǎi huǒchēzhàn, Shanghai Railway Station, has nothing in common with a Western train station: it is a town in itself. Huge waiting halls, dozens of platforms, restaurants, shops, and a constant crowd at every hour of the day and night. You cannot just walk in: tickets are issued in the passenger's name, you show your ID (your passport, in your case) and luggage goes through an X-ray scanner, as at an airport. You then wait in the hall, and access to the platform opens only shortly before departure. Arrive early.

Bai Xue and Gao Xiaoyu 坐了一晚上火车 zuò le yì wǎnshang huǒchē: they spent a whole night on the train. Distances in China are so great (about 1,500 km between Beijing and Shanghai) that the night train has remained an institution. You fall asleep in one city and wake up in another. The Chinese sum up this art of traveling with a set expression:

The letter in the train number tells you everything

Here is the really useful point, and the one travel guides rarely explain. The Chinese rail network is divided into three main families, and the letter in front of the train number tells you at once which one you are dealing with:

高铁 gāotiě is short for 高速铁路 gāosù tiělù, literally "high-speed railway" ⟶ high-speed rail. You will recognize 铁 tiě, the character in 地铁 dìtiě from this unit: it means iron, and therefore rail. The letter G comes from gāo. Beijing to Shanghai in about four and a half hours.

动车 dòngchē is short for 动车组 dòngchēzǔ, literally "set of powered cars" ⟶ a multiple-unit train. It is also a modern, comfortable train, just a little slower and noticeably cheaper. Many Chinese travelers choose the D when the G only saves an hour.

普快 pǔkuài, literally "ordinary-fast", is the old network, the one from before high-speed rail: the K (快速 kuàisù, fast) and T (特快 tèkuài, express) trains. These are the ones that run at night and have sleeper berths. The name is misleading, since they are the slowest of the three: the 快 dates from a time when these trains really were the fast category, and usage has kept the word.

On these night trains, you book either a 硬卧 yìngwò ("hard sleeper", six to an open compartment) or a 软卧 ruǎnwò ("soft sleeper", four to a closed compartment). The names date from a time when the difference really came down to how hard the mattress was; today both are perfectly decent, and the real difference is the number of neighbors.

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2. Subway or bus?

In the dialogue, Xiaoyu decides without hesitation: 早上公交车人太多。 Zǎoshang gōngjiāochē rén tài duō. "In the morning, there are too many people on the bus." He knows his China: at rush hour, buses get stuck in traffic, while the subway speeds along.

The 地铁 dìtiě in China surprises every traveler: recent, clean, air-conditioned, with signs also written in the Latin alphabet, which makes it usable even if you don't speak Chinese. The Shanghai subway is the longest in the world. A ticket costs only a few 元 yuán, and people usually pay with their phone. Just one habit to get used to: at station entrances, bags go through an X-ray scanner, just like at the train station.

The 公交车 gōngjiāochē should not be ruled out, though. It is even cheaper, and it shows you the city above ground. That is exactly Xiaoyu's reasoning for the return trip: 我们坐公交车去火车站，可以看晚上的上海。 Wǒmen zuò gōngjiāochē qù huǒchēzhàn, kěyǐ kàn wǎnshang de Shànghǎi. Going by bus, we can see Shanghai at night. Remember the two travelers' rule: the subway when you are in a hurry, the bus when you want to look around.

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3. 上海，我来了！: the art of exclamation

As they come out of the subway, Bai Xue exclaims: 上海，我来了！ Shànghǎi, wǒ lái le! "Shanghai, here I come!" You address the place as if it were a person, and the 了 le at the end marks the change of situation: that's it, I've arrived.

This turn of phrase is everywhere: people shout it when they arrive somewhere, or use it as the caption of a travel photo on social media. It says something about spoken Chinese, which loves exclamation, emphasis and a certain theatricality. The image of an Asia that is all restraint is a cliché worth qualifying: in everyday life, Chinese people are expressive, loud and enthusiastic. (The cliché probably comes from a confusion with Japan, and it does nobody any favors.)

Reuse it: the formula works with any place. 北京，我来了！ Běijīng, wǒ lái le! "Beijing, here I come!" Say it out loud as you step off the plane: guaranteed to impress your Chinese friends.

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4. Store signs that talk

Xiao Wang's sister's restaurant is called 回来吧 Huílai ba: "Come back!" In the West, a store sign usually bears a person's name or a place name. In China, businesses readily display a message: a wish for happiness or prosperity, a pun, a promise to the customer. Here, it is a direct invitation.

And this name is a little gem of grammar, the grammar of this very unit, as it happens. It is 回来 huílai, coming back toward the speaker, and not 回去 huíqù, going back away from the speaker: the sign speaks from the restaurant's point of view, as it waits for its customer to return. As for the 吧 ba at the end, it softens the order into a friendly suggestion.

For the traveler, store signs are a life-size Chinese exercise: the street is a never-ending reading lesson. With this unit, you can already spot a 饭店 fàndiàn (restaurant), a 书店 shūdiàn (bookstore), a 超市 chāoshì (supermarket) or a 水果店 shuǐguǒdiàn (fruit store). Look up: the city is helping you review.

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5. The 吧 on store signs: when the particle becomes "bar"

Let's stay with store signs, because 吧 leads a double life there that puzzles many learners.

You know it as a sentence-final particle, pronounced ba with the neutral tone: it softens a sentence into a suggestion or an invitation, as in 我们走吧。 Wǒmen zǒu ba. "Let's go." (you met it in Unit 12 of Level 1), or in our 回来吧.

But the same character is also pronounced bā, with the first tone, and it is then used to transcribe the English word bar. Contrary to a stubborn misconception, Chinese borrows a great deal from foreign languages; it's just that, having no alphabet, it borrows sounds by recycling existing characters. That is how 吧 became a very productive suffix:

The mechanism is always the same: the first element tells you what you consume or do there, and 吧 says that it is a place where you settle in. A 网吧 is therefore not a bar that happens to have Wi-Fi, but a place where people come to play games and surf the web for hours, often open all night.

This phonetic recycling is found in many borrowed words, and you will come across others as the course goes on: 咖啡 kāfēi (coffee, three units from now), then later 沙发 shāfā (sofa, from the English word sofa). These characters are not read, they are heard: looking for meaning in 沙 "sand" and 发 "send" in a sofa gets you nowhere. A good reflex when a word seems absurd: ask yourself whether it might simply be borrowed.