Modern chinese students at russian universities: Compiling summary portrait of cultural and linguistic personality

Elistratov Vladimir Stanislavovich Doctor of Cultural Studies PhD in Philology, Dr. Habil. in Culturology, Professor at the Department of Area Studies, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University. 1 Leninskie Gory str., Moscow, 119991, Russia vse.slova@mail.ru

Khe Yan'li ORCID: 0009-0004-6792-4352 Postgraduate; Faculty of Foreign Languages and Regional Studies; Lomonosov Moscow State University 1 Mendeleevskaya St., Moscow, 119991, Russia linda.he@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Chinese students in modern Russian universities (bachelors, masters, postgraduates, interns) are, of course, completely different people. They have different levels of Russian language proficiency, professional skills, different psychotypes, they represent a wide range of regions of China with their "flourishing complexity" of regional features, etc. Because China is, as many geopoliticians say, a civilization that pretends to be just a country "out of modesty." It is difficult to reduce all this to a single methodological denominator.

Of course, the stated topic could easily be "turned off" into a conversation about the Chinese national character and the need to take into account its peculiarities in the teaching process. In principle, this is the common place of the theory and practice of intercultural communication, the basis, the dominant topic of it, something like class theory in Marxism.

The "national character" is like a creative black hole with a very wide "event horizon", a giant testing ground for scientific (and sometimes near-scientific) experiments. Nevertheless, many developments in this area can and should be adopted.

There is a rather detailed concept of linguistic personality ^[6]. There is also criticism of this concept, in particular, criticism of the redundancy of the term itself: after all, there seems to be no non-linguistic personality, any personality is linguistic ^[7]. One can object to this criticism that personality can be not only linguistic. After all, we are not familiar with Andrei Rublev's linguistic personality, but his works bear the imprint of the brightest personality.

Anyway, the concept of linguistic personality, as they say, works successfully, for example, in the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language (RCT). Most often in this area we are talking about the formation of a linguistic personality in the educational process.

Our task is somewhat different. We have stated the working term "summary portrait of a cultural and linguistic personality".

First, by a total portrait, we will mean a generalized portrait. But not in the everyday sense, but in the most scientific sense possible. The total portrait of a Chinese student is, strictly speaking, his invariant, that is, the sum of those qualities, properties of his "Chinese personality", which continue to be a constant for all fluctuations in individual properties and qualities.

When researchers talk about national character, they mostly point to properties that are quantified by a quantitative method, for example: "Russians are hospitable," which is generally an unprovable postulate. Russians may be hospitable "for the most part," but it is ultimately impossible to isolate the "percentage of hospitality." Or researchers seem to be going in the opposite direction, counter-quantitative, that is, they refute quantitative generalizations, usually of a tendentious ideological nature, called stereotypes.

The hospitality of Russians is not an invariant, but a particular empirical conclusion, which is inductively generalizing in nature. Any stereotype is based on a system of two syllogisms: first with induction, then with deduction. Relatively speaking, the average Chinese man saw Vasily at the hotel. Vasily was drunk. Russian Russian thinks: Vasily is drunk, Vasily is Russian, therefore, all Russians drink. Then the Chinese saw Fedor. Russian Russian, all Russians drink, therefore, Fedor drinks too. Even if Fyodor is a staunch teetotaler. This seemingly primitive scheme is nevertheless extremely tenacious, it lives in that very notorious Freudian unconscious, although consciousness denies it.

We are not interested in the whimsical neuro-linguistic "vagaries" of the subconscious mind, but in the invariant, i.e., what in linguistics and cultural studies are called emotional or emic units (phoneme, morpheme, mythologeme, culturema, etc.) ^[2], or, if you like, those psychological matrices that Jung called them archetypes, although in this case we mean national archetypes, not universal ones.

Sinology appeals to many such emic invariants of the Chinese cultural and linguistic personality, but, according to our observations, the most fundamental of them are two. We will briefly discuss them.

At the same time, having quite a lot of experience in the practice of RCT and, more broadly, the practice of working in a Chinese audience, we were able to make sure that these invariants of the Chinese worldview really, as they say, "work", and very successfully.

Firstly, it is what is often formulated by Sinologists as vitalism, that is, a view of life as such as the main value in general. There is nothing more valuable than life.

This is a Taoist tradition that has survived to the present day. There is nothing "higher" than life in all its forms. What happens after death is deeply secondary. Hence the cult of immortality, and then longevity in classical Taoism, and then in modern China. The modern Chinese audience is very vitalistic at its core. One of the dominant psychological atmosphere in it is fun and laughter.

Many Russian teachers who do not know this invariant of the Chinese mentality are involuntarily too serious in the classroom, one might say, dull and boring.

In principle, to put it "radically figuratively," the atmosphere in a class with Chinese people should optimally resemble the atmosphere in the Chinese market, where you will not achieve anything if you bargain (cf. teach) with a serious look or, God forbid, get angry.

In Chinese culture, especially in everyday life, the culture of laughter plays a huge role. In a somewhat narrowed form, the science of laughter, which affects human health, is called gelotology ^[11].

If we understand it more broadly as the science of laughter in all its manifestations, then we can confidently say that a teacher in a Chinese classroom should be a professional gelatologist. All Chinese students greatly appreciate the wit, irony, and especially the self–irony of the teacher. The Chinese themselves are very self-mocking. Self–irony is one of the central qualities of a Taoist, for example, Chuang Tzu, as well as the Greek Socrates, Greek cynics, and Russian buffoons and fools. Relatively speaking, the teacher should become to some extent a "buffoonish Chuang Tzu." In this case, students readily accept the ridiculous "rules of the didactic game" offered by the teacher and begin to gamely compete with each other in wit. Moreover, "laughing didactics" is possible at all stages of learning, including at the beginning, for example, in teaching phonetics.

One of the phrases that can become a key didactic principle here is "fun game". The Chinese student is primarily Homo Ludens, that is, a man who plays (the title of the famous book by J. Huizinga). In this sense, the teacher should have the entire arsenal of "didactic aesthetics", that is, a kind of "pedagogical gameology" ^[9].

Of course, the "vitalistic imperative", "vitacentrism" determines the subject of classes. Speculative and metaphysical themes typical of Western philosophy are unlikely to be relevant here.

First of all, Chinese culture can be characterized as phagocentric ("phago" in Greek means I eat) ^[5], that is, food is one of the main topics for the Chinese. There are great prospects for discussions here. Many key points of Chinese culture are related to "phagology" in one way or another.

Let's give an example. In the ancient Chinese myth of the Flood, people were destroyed by a flood, and only a brother and sister escaped death by hiding in a completely "edible" pumpkin. Later, brother and sister became husband and wife, recreated people and became the ancestors of mankind. Pumpkin is closely related to human reproduction. Pumpkin, round and multi-seeded, that is, fertile, is strongly associated with a pregnant woman. When a woman gives birth, she reproduces the world, that is, she saves it, just as a pumpkin saved humanity during the Flood. In this regard, eating pumpkins is deeply ritualistic.

Many Chinese thinkers (Confucius, Mencius, and others) spoke of food as a basic human need, not only (and not so much) in the physical sense, but also in the metaphysical. Food is the most important way for the Chinese to explore the world. There is a well-known paradoxically ironic maxim: if Europeans use their thinking (brain) to explore the world, then the Chinese use their mouths to do the same.

There is an expression in Chinese that says, "The first person to eat a crab." It belongs to the Chinese writer Lu Xin, who "praised" the first person on earth who dared to eat a crab ^[3]. Of course, according to the inhabitants of China, this man was Chinese... Mao Zedong said, "If you want to know the taste of pears, you should try them yourself."^[14] Tasting is done by mouth. Mouth – "tries", which means "explores", "tests" and as a result - "understands". Europeans would call this approach scientifically positivist.

Another example. Lin Yutang, analyzing the reason why the Chinese have not made a significant contribution to world biology (which, of course, is not entirely true), humorously noted that the reason is as follows: the Chinese have never been able to calmly observe fish, but only thought about the taste of fish if, again, "put it in your mouth" ^[4]. This is probably because the Chinese people's scientific curiosity about the objective world has never exceeded their curiosity about delicious food.

Of course, everyone has to eat to survive, but Chinese and Westerners, especially North Westerners, have completely different attitudes to food. For Westerners, in most cases, food is just a source of energy that allows the body to continue working and, therefore, to do something for self-development and self-realization. In their opinion, which largely follows from Christian doctrine, eating too much not only does not save the soul, but even kills it (gluttony). For the Chinese, food is perhaps the main and main priority in life, the most important "thing among all things." To put it as generally as possible, Westerners "eat to live," while Chinese people "live to eat."

It should be noted that the topic of food is very relevant in the modern world. It is the most resistant to the effects of so-called globalization, because it is a kind of constant of traditional material culture. After all, it is inevitably based on basic products, the composition of which, as a rule, is quite stable and constant over the centuries ^[8]. This stability causes equally stable images, associations, etc.

Mo Yan, a Nobel Prize winner in literature, for example, has repeatedly recalled that as a child he dreamed of eating dumplings three times a day. The reason? Dumplings look like ears, and they are eaten during the winter solstice, "so that the ears do not freeze" (a traditional Chinese belief, and the Chinese still eat dumplings on this day).

In addition: the Chinese believe that dumplings are similar to traditional Chinese gold bars, symbolizing wealth and family cohesion. Eating dumplings during the Spring festival is a demonstration by a person of his identity, belonging to a certain socio-cultural group, and as a result, the desire for well–being, to which this identity largely leads.

All this "traditional metaphor", as experts write, is based on "national and cultural associative complexes" that have been forming over centuries and millennia ^[13]. Food is not just "filling the stomach", but a kind of possession of higher knowledge, the basis of mentality, "orientation in the space of Being."

"Nutrition," one of the most material aspects of existence, may be the most important aspect in understanding the "spiritual temperament" of a nation.

Russian Russian Chinese students' local food is not only a replenishment of vital energy, but also a kind of spiritual, "synergetic introduction" to Russian culture (or maybe, on the contrary, it is a "minefield", that is, a collision with Russian food that is unpleasant for Chinese). This is an integral element of the "in-depth learning process", which is never limited to working in the classroom.

Food, among other things, combines two functions for Chinese students in Russia. On the one hand, it is overcoming the feeling of loneliness during a collective meal, on the other hand, it is "saturating" the feeling of homesickness. This is a complex feeling of "joyfully sacred" synthesis, in our opinion (although not based on "Chinese material") It is very well conveyed in the film "Eat, Pray, Love" (2010).

Simply put, food for Chinese in Russia is one of the most effective ways to solve adaptation problems, relieve psychological stress and establish social contacts with other people in the context of intercultural communication. The problem of the relationship between food and the so-called cultural shock has already been discussed in the scientific literature ^[12]. There is also a fairly extensive literature on the adaptation of foreigners in Russia and, in particular, on food as an integral part of it ^[1].

Thus, phage therapy (food) and gelotherapy (laughter) in international education are the most important modes of human existence. This is the most important section of the philosophy of education.

Further: when working with Chinese students, anything "life-affirming" is welcome. For example, comedies, humorous prose, discussion of various everyday problems, including physiological ones, etc.

In short, vitalism as an invariant, as an "ema" of the Chinese total portrait of a cultural and linguistic personality, generates many of its vitalistic variants. And all of them are necessarily present in the Chinese audience, acting as a kind of "didactic gestalt."

The second invariant of Chinese mentality is often referred to as sympathetic thinking or holism.

Its essence lies in the fact that in the primordial consciousness of the Chinese, everything in the world is connected to everything, and ultimately the world does not succumb to the causal determinism that is characteristic of Western thinking. This principle can be described by the formula: all in one, one in all, all in all, one in one. Or the Chinese maxim: you can't pick a flower without offending a star. Or a quote from F.I. Tyutchev: "We cannot predict how our word will respond..." Or the term of the Russian philosophy of the Silver Age "unity". Or the popular term of Western postmodernism "rhizome", which means mycelium ^[10].

We are dealing with a variety of formulations here, but their essence is the same: the whole is not amenable to a rational solution of the parts. The parts do not succumb to the dictates of the whole. There is something higher and unknowable (Tao) that is the arbiter of everything's relationship with everything.

How does this Taoist sympathetic magic affect the didactics of teaching Chinese in a Russian audience?

Very simple. When analyzing any educational material, the emphasis should not be on pure logic, but on random, most unexpected associations, comparisons, and conjugations. The more unpredictable the association, the more effective the didactic effect.

In this sense, the Chinese cultural and linguistic personality is very consonant with the cultural and linguistic personality of the Russian.

Note that both invariants mentioned in this article are closely related to each other. Associative-sympathetic thinking is directly related to the vitalistic perception of the world. Vitalism, in turn, presupposes "holism" as an integral exploration of reality.