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 title of this post is one of my favorite ungrammatical constructions. That (un)grammatical construction doesn’t really have much to do with the post other than the fact that in college, when I first started thinking about that construction, I didn’t know what to call it (or even how to “fix” it).
There are some things that expats use or deal with every day in China, but in a Chinese language environment. When asked how to say them in English, we spin our wheels because either there really are no suitable translations, or the suitable translations are something that we’re not familiar with. Continue reading
Those words were on a sign hung around the necks of students who spoke their native Austronesian dialects at school in Taiwan 50 years ago, according to this BBC article (h/t Eye on East Asia). Something like this:
Compare the ability of native speakers, educated in their common scripts, to remember how to write words. Is it harder to remember Chinese characters, or English spelling?
Exhibit A:
If you’re one of those phonetic savants who thinks that the four(ish) tones of standard Mandarin are starting to feel a little dull — mā, má, mǎ, mà, mamahuhu, whatever — maybe you can venture into this part of China, if the PKUCN* rumor is true.
汉语方言中可有双曲调型
Are there any Chinese dialects with a type of “double tone”**?我好像在哪本书上看到过某些方言中有双曲调型(即先降后升再降,或先升后降再升)。不知是否真有这种调型？具体是哪种方言。最好能有native speaker的录音
A friend of mine just returned from a retreat at a monastery, and I greeted him on Google Chat by typing 阿弥陀佛. But a strange thing happened.
A tweet by Taiwan-based NZ expat Nick (@riceagain) today (or yesterday, technically, given the time zone gap) brought me back to a problem I had in my own spoken Mandarin a while back. It reads as follows:
Guys, If you learn Chinese from girlfriends, listen to yourself from time [to time], there’s a chance ppl are laughing at you.
Amen. For those of us who’d really like to have native-level Mandarin some day, it’s no small problem. It basically amounts to this: You, a respectable business-oriented expat, who has been known on occasion to wear a tie, sound to them what in English is best described as “valley girl”. Like, oh my god, right?