[Magdalen] Like I Was Puzzled.

[Jay Weigel]

I know that Chinese is the world's only mostly right-brained language, and
I recently learned from my brother's lady, who is a first-generation
American of Taiwanese descent, that apparently people on the autistic
spectrum pick up Chinese much easier than other people, even as adults.
This reinforced my theory that autistic spectrum folks are much more
right-brained than left-brained and that possibly their brain wiring is
routed in that direction rather than the more conventional one. (I
developed that theory after many years of living with an ASD son.)

My oldest nephew has been living and working in China for about 10 years
now, and for the last 5 has been married to a lovely Chinese woman. When
they met, he spoke almost no Chinese and she spoke very little English.
After a year, her English was amazing; his Chinese remained limited pretty
much to profanity and what Darci (his wife) refers to as "pillow Chinese".
I think it's improved now. Matt is a computer whiz and most of his clients
speak pretty good English. Darci, whose Chinese name I have forgotten, is
an event planner who trained as a ballet dancer but left that field when
she learned that she was to be relegated to a company in her backwater-ish
home province. As a sideline, she has also become a very good surfer
(taught by Matt) and is China's first female competitive surfer.

On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 9:51 AM, Roger Stokes <roger.stokes65 at btinternet.com
> wrote:
>
> On 23/12/2014 14:38, ME Michaud wrote:
>
>> I know that international pilots speak their communications in English,
>> even in the Far East, sometimes (but not always) repeating in the local
>> language.
>>
>> Did you read the article about the large number of people with perfect
>> pitch
>> in China and Vietnam? Scientific American IIRC. Learned young as part of
>> language acquisition.
>>
>
> No, I didn't but it does show the problems there would be for someone of
> another nationality trying to learn it in later life.  In the Summer a
> young man who has been living in Hong Kong for a year or more talked about
> the same difficulty. It is not really a feasible alternative for spoken
> language and, I would expect, present as many problems as Japanese does if
> trying to communicate by computer.  It is slow and/or difficult to learn.
>
> Roger
>