Kuang

Oxford gives you all the tools you need for your work – food, clothes, books, tea – and then it leaves you alone.

But that’s the beauty of learning a new language. It should feel like an enormous undertaking. It ought to intimidate you. It makes you appreciate the complexity of the ones you know already.’

But that’s the beauty of learning a new language. It should feel like an enormous undertaking. It ought to intimidate you. It makes you appreciate the complexity of the ones you know already.’

But I know English.’
‘Not as well as you think you do. Plenty of people speak it, but few of them really know it, its roots and skeletons. But you need to know the history, shape, and depths of a language, particularly if you plan to manipulate it as you will one day learn to do.

was, Robin discovered, startlingly easy to lose a language that had once felt as familiar as his own skin. In London, without another Chinese person in sight, at least not in the circles of London where he lived, his mother tongue sounded like babble. Uttered in that drawing room, the most quintessentially English of spaces, it didn’t feel like it belonged. It felt made-up. And it scared him, sometimes, how often his memory would lapse, how the syllables he’d grown up around could suddenly sound so unfamiliar.

He delighted when common words were, unexpectedly, formed from other words he knew. Hussy was a compound of house and wife. Holiday was a compound of holy and day. Bedlam came, implausibly, from Bethlehem. Goodbye was, incredibly, a shortened version of God be with you

He did not understand these political struggles, not then. He only sensed that London, and England at large, was very divided about what it was and what it wanted to be. And he understood that silver lay behind it all.

English made regular use of only two flavours – salty and not salty – and did not seem to recognize any of the others. For a country that profited so well from trading in spices, its citizens were violently averse to actually using them; in all his time in Hampstead, he never tasted a dish that could be properly described as ‘seasoned’, let alone ‘spicy’.

If they’re going to tell stories about you, use it to your advantage. The English are never going to think I’m posh, but if I fit into their fantasy, then they’ll at least think I’m royalty.’

If they’re going to tell stories about you, use it to your advantage.