A strange thing happend when I was reading a book and counting how many columns in a table. To my suprise, the number I counted in English didn’t equal to the number counted in Chinese. In English the number is nine, but in Chinese it is eight columns. Finallly I found I missed the number five when I was couting in English. What a big discovery!
I don’t know why I tend to ignore the number five subconsciously. But there was a real story about the number five. At that time, I was still a college student. Jelle and Ineke, friends of my advisor visited Beijing. It was their first time to be in the city, so I showed them around to visit temples, parks and other spots. We mainly took bus to travel cause it was cheap and we would have chances to experience the Chinese daily lives. One day, we were waiting for No 5 bus. My spoken English was not proficient and often make mistakes expecially in pronunciation. I said to Jelle we were going to take No 5 bus(but I pronunced like “No file bus”). But he didn’t understand. I repeated but still didn’t make sense. Then after a while, he understood and said No five. He even taught me how to pronunce it correctly. But I was very ashame of that, and still found it difficult for me to pronunce FIVE.
According to Freud’s Unconscious theory, people tend to ignore or hide the unpleseant experience, this would help to explain my error in English counting.
