Chapter 544: Difficult Chinese
Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
In the morning, Zhang Zian opened his eyes and glanced around the bedroom as usual. The elfins were sleeping. He turned over and had planned to get more sleep. It was early, and dark and cold outside. A strong wind was blowing.
But after lying for a while, he fully woke up. Something was wrong. After careful thinking, it seemed that Pi was missing.
He sat up in bed, and searched carefully with the night lamp of Famous. The chair given to Pi as a temporary bed was empty. Pi was gone.
Did it go to the bathroom?
Zhang Zian turned his head, but didn’t see any light beneath the bathroom door. So it was not in the bathroom. He hit his head. Pi was an imaginative elfin, why would it need a bathroom? He must have been confused after sleeping.
Tap, Tap, Tap!
A slight keyboard tapping sound came from the living room. Zhang Zian put on a jacket, passed by the sleeping and kicking Famous, walked over quietly, and saw the back of Pi.
It sat on the floor in front of the coffee table. The light from the laptop screen drew out its fuzzy shape. The nameless book was next to the laptop.
Pi was short. It was not comfortable after using the computer on the couch for a long time, so it crossed its legs and sat on the floor. Luckily, there was a carpet near the coffee table and the floor was not too cold.
A new Word document was created on the computer, with lines and lines of numbers. Needless to say, it was good old Pi. Mixed in with the numbers were some meaningless English letters. Maybe it was practicing how to type.
The pince-nez was clipped on its nose, and the light from the screen was reflected on the thin lenses. Looking from one side, the lenses seemed to be without power, as there were no circles of the prescription lenses.
Pi was a slow typist. Sometimes it couldn’t remember the location of a certain key, and its finger stayed above the keyboard for a long time. Even so, it didn’t use two fingers to make the typing easier. In order not to disturb the elfins’ sleep, Pi was gentle in every movement on purpose.
After hearing Zhang Zian’s footsteps, it turned its head and grinned at him silently.
Zhang Zian pointed at the desk, then picked up the laptop and put it on the desk. He then adjusted the chair to the maximum height, and added a cushion. He asked Pi to sit in the swivel chair, then took another chair next to it for himself.
The height was perfect. Pi was sitting in it comfortably. It pointed at the screen to show something to Zhang Zian. It typed in English: “I want to learn Chinese.”
This line of English words were typed among a string of numbers. Yet compared to the time at the library, the numbers were much fewer. Although it was still awkward to read, it was less tiresome for the eyes.
Learning Chinese?
Zhang Zian stopped for a moment, extended his arms, and replied by typing in English: “Why?”
Pi clearly wanted to learn to type in Chinese. It was much harder than speaking and reading Chinese. For a westerner, switching from an alphabetical Indo-European language to a pictograph Sino-Tibetan language was extremely difficult to do.
Pi typed on the screen: “Because Chinese is everywhere.”
It pointed to the functional buttons in Word, then at the variety of books on the desk. Both the words on the buttons and on the book ridges were Chinese, with very few in English.
If Pi wanted to live a long time in the pet shop, or in China, it would be very difficult and inconvenient if it didn’t know Chinese at all.
Zhang Zian nodded and typed: “I get it. How do you plan to learn? Can you learn from your book?”
Pi shook its head and typed: “There is no Chinese in the book.”
Zhang Zian thought the book contained everything in the world. He was surprised to find out about this.
Pi noticed Zhang Zian’s confusion, then typed: “The book is full of knowledge.”
All right. He finally knew something about this book. It was a book about life, universe and everything. But maybe it was written in English without any Chinese. So Pi couldn’t use it as a textbook for Chinese.
Zhang Zian thought about it and typed: “You don’t know Chinese, but you can understand me talking?”
Pi responded: “I know Pinyin. I can hear.”
What the heck? The book had Pinyin but no Chinese characters?
Zhang Zian encouraged it: “If you know Pinyin, it will be fast to learn Chinese. I can help you.”
Pi cheered up and typed: “Thank you. The book taught about how to learn Chinese fast.”
Next, Zhang Zian found a lot of free Chinese lessons online, and asked Pi to study with the videos.
Pi was very focused when studying. It could stare at the screen and sit in front of the computer for hours, while referring to the nameless book with the videos. Zhang Zian had to remind it to get up and move around. Only then it would stand up.
After the pet shop business, Zhang Zian played hide-and-seek with Galaxy, finished the daily training with Zhan Tian and Famous in the green field, and spent most of the remaining time with Pi, offering help. For instance, choosing an easy-to-use Chinese input software for it was how he helped.
Maybe because it knew Pinyin already, or the learning methods in the nameless book were very effective, or the Chinese input software was intelligent, that a sentence could be accurately entered by typing the first letter of each word. Or maybe it was because Pi was an elfin born of Strength of Faith. It was impossible to predict it with common sense. Anyway, Pi was learning Chinese extremely fast and progressing at a miraculous speed. It was able to type some simple Chinese sentences within a day. By the second day, it was able to express itself in Chinese, although there were numbers and wrong characters mixed in the sentences, and some grammatical errors that would make people laugh. But it was making solid progress.
The grammatical issues were hard to solve, as the Chinese grammar was too complicated. When the same word was placed in different places within a sentence, the meaning of the entire sentence could be completely different. Also, identical sentences could have completely different meanings depending on the context.
Zhang Zian found some old newspapers for Pi and asked it to type out the news from them. The newspaper wording was very formal, clear and coherent. After mastering the written language, it would not be too hard to study the spoken language then.
Pi was tireless once it started studying. It could not leave the pet shop, and Zhang Zian was the only person it had contact with. Unfortunately, Zhang Zian often needed to tend to the customers during the day, and could not stay around it all the time.
When learning a language, the most important thing was to immerse oneself in the language through the daily conversations and interactions. Unlike the other elfins, Pi could not speak, and nobody else was able to communicate with it except Zhang Zian. Pi’s progress in learning Chinese soon hit a bottleneck. For the same reason, Pi felt lonely, and often appeared low-spirited.
Zhang Zian noticed the same. But he couldn’t duplicate himself. He had to handle the customers as well the elfins, which didn’t leave him much time with Pi.
He wanted to find a way to make Pi less lonely.
