Easy, Tiger: Lonely Planet redemption
Up until very recently, I hated Lonely Planet phrasebooks. I own Brasilian Portuguese, Hindi & Urdu (since updated to include Bengali) and Turkish, and have spent considerable time looking at Egyptian Arabic and Mandarin Chinese. They’re characterised by three things in my mind:
1. Poor choices of transliteration systems
2. A chapter on weirdness, e.g. UFOlogy in the Egyptian one and recreational drug use in Brasil
3. The inclusion of the phrase “Easy tiger!” in the chapter about sex. 살살 해요!
The Mandarin one has since been updated to have pinyin and skip the wretched transliteration system I remember it having before, and the Hindi/Urdu one I have is from 1998 so I can only hope that’s improved significantly as well.
Anyway, this all came up because I was planning a trip to Korea. That night I asked a Korean speaking friend to come with me. The selection of language books on Korean was a bit dismal, but we sat there for 20 minutes nonetheless going through each one. Each one, except the Lonely Planet phrasebook. Finally just out of curiosity I picked it up and flipped through the pages. Turns out it’s pretty good. I won’t get into all the details but in the end my friend thought it was the best choice by a significant margin. Surprise.
The thing that really got me was when I went wandering around to see what other language learning books they had. I came across a fat (for Lonely Planet) phrasebook entitled “China”, not Chinese, not Mandarin.
It’s great. It covers survival-level language for fourteen Chinese ‘lects. Specifically, it covers
Mandarin
Cantonese
Chaozhou
Dongbei hua
Hakka
Hunanese
Shanghainese
Sinchuanese
Xi’an hua
Yunnan hua
Zhuang
Mongolian
Tibetan
Uyghur
I’m loving the fact that it has Wu (Shanghainese) and Uyghur, both of which you’re not otherwise likely to find a phrasebook for. There are of course plenty of transliteration issues, though for Mongolian, Tibetan and Uyghur the original scripts are included, so you could point if you’re not understood. Or course I’d be happy if the Shanghainese had IPA, and their handling of tones is far from idea, but so be it. Not bad at all for first edition.
Unfortunately, since each chapter is significantly shorter than their usual phrasebooks, I’m left without knowing how to say “easy, tiger!” in Zhuang.
Maybe it’s just that Zhuang like it rough? 😉
I know people that swear by phrase books as a portal into a new language. I’ve never found one I was particularly interested in, but I’ll have to check the China phrasebook out.
Very interesting… how is the Uyghur? I wonder who wrote those sections up for them.
Porfiriy: Not sure about the quality. You tell me.
The Uyghur (or Uighur in this case) was done by Tughluk Abdurazak.
John B: I guess I need to meet more Zhuang…
Nice. Luckily I live next to a Barnes & Noble and was able to have my curiosity satisfied as they also had this phrasebook. The Uyghur, obviously, is correct as the writer for the Uyghur section is indeed a Uyghur (or some who by a freak coincidence has an entirely Uyghur sounding name). There are some issues that were beyond the Uyghur writers’ purview, some spelling errors probably due to typos and an issue where the ل character followed by the ئا character didn’t render properly; in Uyghur it does this little loopy thingy, لا, you can see this on page 343 that you scanned, the third phrase from the bottom, should be بولامدۇ. Again, that’s most likely because some computer during the editing process choked on the Uyghur font. But other than that, nice job, it’ll amply serve the purposes of anyone who wants to go to Xinjiang and try out the local language, and, failing that, provide said tourists with text that Uyghurs can read.
Damn. My comments keep getting Eaten.
Short recap of what I wrote the first time: Not surprised by that particular error. Modern publishers still suck when it comes to inclusion of Arabic script in Western texts.
I have more to say on the لا ligature and the use of written ء in Uyghur, but that’s for another time.