The Great Wall of Chinese and the Internet Resources to Help You Over it Jenna Orkin Somewhere in his autobiography, Malcolm X says he studied Arabic to escape feeling stupid when among people who were speaking it. That explanation resonated with me; for similar reasons, I had paid particular attention in French class in high school. There's something deeply unsettling about being surrounded by people talking rapidly to everyone else while you look on in clueless dorkhood. You feel like the new kid in school and realize you'd better get up to speed "vite." There's no language - except maybe the click tongues of South Africa - that so readily play into this sense of alienation as Chinese; no language that offers so much, well, foreignness, from the pictographs which the Chinese scribble with the same speed they apply to their construction projects (a bridge in Beijing was recently replaced in 43 hour