Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons In Life, Love and language was a book by Deborah Fallows that was done by walker & company. It is about 208 pages long. When Deborah Fallows travelled with her Husband to live in China, she armed herself with few Mandarin lessons. However, when she landed to Shanghai, it was not as simple as she expected. She found it very difficult to utter any word or phrase that she studied previously. In this book, Fallow demonstrates through writing about her journey into the Chinese language along with her many missteps on her way in this culture. Deborah who has a Ph. D in the field of Linguistics and comfortably speaks six languages knew that learning and speaking Chinese will be just an easy mission. The one thing that she overshadowed was the fact that Chinese is considered as one of the difficult languages in the whole world.
Deborah Fallows has spent the great part of her life not only travelling around the globe but also learning varied languages. However, not one of her encounters has prepared her for the surprises that she encountered in learning Mandarin which is the China’s most used language or the intensity that was involved in living in Beijing and Shanghai cities. Over the time that she was in this new home, she realized the her triumphs and struggles in learning the culture and the language of the newly adopted home was just providing a very minimal clues to their deciphering behaviors and the habits of the dominant people along with their culture’s conundrums. With every increase in her skill in the Mandarin, some of the language bits like grammar oddity, a word or phrases became the guiding principle in learning and understanding the relationships, the romance, and the protocols along the overflowing humanity in the current China.
For instance, Deborah fallows was able to notice that the blunt and abrupt way of speaking that accompanied...