Hover a line for its pinyin and translation; hover a word for its meaning. Tap 🔊 to hear it.
Generate a brand-new dialog on any topic, using this lesson's 0 vocab words — plus any words you add below.
Sign in to generate dialogues. It needs a pass — the first ten lessons of every course are free either way.
Leaving, and what actually comes back with you
This lesson is the one the course has been building towards, and 阿明's correction is the whole of it. Asked what he is taking, Alex lists objects. 我说的不是东西. What a year somewhere actually returns is harder to inventory, and three things are worth naming because learners rarely see them in themselves. The first is that you have been illegible. For a year you have been someone whose accent, grammar and manners marked you out in every interaction, who could not quite follow the joke, who needed things repeated. That is an experience most people from large wealthy countries never have, and having had it changes how you treat the next person who cannot follow you. Alex's 看人的眼光变了 is not a sentimental remark. The second is the particular humility of having been wrong about a place in detail. Not wrong in the sense of having held a bad opinion, but wrong in the sense of having arrived with a picture made of headlines and found a country of a billion and a half people getting on with things that the picture had no room for: 春运, 内卷, 阿婆's fruit, 粤语 as somebody's mother tongue, the arguments people have with each other about their own country. Lesson 76 and lesson 87 were written carefully for that reason — the honest position on a contested question is usually that it is contested, and knowing which questions those are is itself knowledge. The third is the people, and it is the one that needs the least explanation and the most maintenance. 常联络 is easy to say at an airport and hard to do from eight time zones away, and the friendships that survive are the ones where somebody sends a message about nothing in particular every few weeks. WeChat makes this trivially easy and the obstacle is never technical. Be the one who messages first. A practical note, since this is still a language course. Your Chinese will go backwards when you leave, quickly at first, and this frightens people into thinking the year was wasted. It was not: what decays is fluency and what stays is the system. A learner who has had a year and then two years away comes back to near their old level in weeks, not months — the recovery is nothing like the original climb. Lesson 104 is about keeping the decay slow, which is a more realistic goal than keeping it at zero. And 阿明's 别说这些 is worth copying. Chinese friends often head off the farewell speech, not because the feeling is unwelcome but because saying it formally makes the parting final. 常联络 就行 does the same work and leaves the door open, which is the point.