The other day I was listening in on a class of Chinese students who were taking an evening course in my native language, Swedish. Their task for the day was to change nouns written in singular form to plural, (that is: “cat” to “cats”). This can be complicated enough in English: How do you now that a bunch of small rodents are called “mice” and not “mouses”? In Swedish matters get even worse, since there are five
different ways to mark plural forms.
“So why is this form used for “apple”?”, a student asked.
“Uuhhm.. I don’t know. It just is…”, said I, feeling ignorant
The …
I was watching this video (see below) of some dude reading a Chinese passage. I don’t know about you, but when I hear Chinese spoken in this way it gives me that nails-on-a-chalkboard feeling. Sorry no, it gives me that I-want-to-kick-you-in-the-nads feeling.
Recently a friend of mine from Australia recently confided that while he likes learning Chinese, he still fails to see the utility of characters. “I still don’t see why they just don’t use pinyin,” he said with a shrug.
I began to explain why characters are, in fact, useful, beginning with the sheer number of cognates in the Chinese language. The relative paucity of different pinyin combinations would make reading a Chinese text in the system maddening and difficult.
Hell, I could go on all day with this; better you refer to bloggers with better command of Chinese than yours truly.
But here’s an aspect of characters that I would miss would they been discarded; their aesthetic beauty. I was thinking …
I was just leaving a comment on the always refreshingly drinkable Beijing Boyce blog when I saw one of my biggest Chinese Pinyin pet peeves - chuanr.
串儿, for those who’ve been in China for less than an hour, generally means tasty bits on a stick. Chuàn/串 (meaning to string together) + ér/儿 (a suffix that makes some verbs into nice little nouns) technically comes out as “chuanr/chuan’er/chuan’r”… but when pronounced it is “chuar”.
Never, not ever, have I ever, never, heard anyone, ever, say Chuan-er.
And good thing, because it sounds like something you call someone you don’t like. “Yeah, he talks big, but what a feckin’ chuan’er.” “Ohmygod, did …
Whenever I become too cocky about my Chinese skills I seem to have a humbling experience: The latest took place the other week at my university. After a class where I actually understood all the major points of the newspaper articles we were reading, I headed for the book store to buy myself a ruler.
Just ten minutes before, I had managed to figure out what the word for beta carotene is in Chinese, but now I realize I don’t know how to say “ruler”. Well, here’s a chance to add another word to my vocabulary. I look “ruler” up …
My second year of Chinese studies in China is about to start, this time at a Shanghai university. The first day of the semester consists of a placement test. All of us new exchange student wait outside the classroom, clutching our newly sharpened pencils and feeling like we did on our very first school day.
I get called in.
“Can. You. Speak. Chinese?” asks a teacher in an extremely clear standard Mandarin.
“Some”, I say, modestly.
The rest of this short interview is carried out talking about where and how I studied Chinese (For. How. Long. Have. You. Been. Studying. …
Nothing boosts one’s ego in the early days of learning Chinese as conversations with taxi drivers. I’m sure we all have had this experience; you step into a cab and spit out your address (carefully memorized, of course), the cabbie subsequently nods and tells you how good your Chinese is.
A bit later, once you have more Mandarin under your belt, you begin to master what I call “taxi Chinese”. You learn the four or five questions the driver will ask and practice your responses. Before long, these conversations become so automatic that to an untrained listener, you’re speaking perfect Chinese.
Even if you’re aware that your Chinese is painfully limited, these short taxi rides give an unbridled boost of confidence. Often, …
I recently spent four days in Hong Kong as the final stop of a brief Southeast Asian trip, and as usual I found the language situation there somewhat mystifying. Hong Kong, as we know, has three official languages: Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. Because I don’t speak the former, I was reliant on the latter two to guide me through interactions with locals.
I was well aware that in the past ten years the prevalence of 普通话 has spread in Hong Kong, yet people tell me that the average native still feels more comfortable conversing in English. Feeling lazy, I used English exclusively during the first two days and communicated without undue difficulty.
I found the Hong Kongers to be neither polite nor …
With that title, it sort of sounds like they were holding one of those eager English-language students hostage.
Terrorist activities aside, Chinesepod.com has produced a fantastic guide to the Beijing Olympics for visitors, athletes, journalists - or just whelps like myself who can’t be bothered to deal with the crowds, but wouldn’t mind brushing up on how to say things like fly ball and handspring.
The guide includes vocabulary sections for all the sporting events, as well as a large collection of related newbie and elementary level lessons - topics cover pretty much everything, including: cheering, the Olympics on TV, …
I first became aware of the enormous language gap in China three weeks into my first year, when I taught English at a public high school in northern Jiangsu. One afternoon, feeling slightly homesick, I hopped into a taxi with a simple mission: to go to McDonalds. Being completely unable to speak Chinese at that point, I was fairly confident that the word “McDonalds” would be international enough for my driver to understand.
Alas, when I said the magic word, he gave me a blank stare and shook his head. I then proceeded to draw the golden arches on a piece of paper, hoping my driver would at least recognize an international symbol. No luck. We drove around in circles for …
different ways to mark plural forms. 
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