The photo on the right is one of three seen in the subway in Shanghai. They’re advertisements for Phillips appliances. The image shows a young child chillaxin’ as a breeze goes by. The caption, in childlike handwriting, says 我家的房子会呼吸 wǒ jiā de fángzi huì hūxī, “my family’s house can breathe”.

Another in the series has a kid freaking the heck out at the shadow of a dinosaur and the caption, which I’m sure I don’t remember perfectly, says something like 哇！恐龙来啦 wa! kǒnglóng lái la, which translates as “holy crap! there’s an effing dinosaur!”

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I was trying to watch a movie this evening. By watch I mean use as background noise while I wrote papers. Ideally then it would be in English. Looking for “Shanghai” with Gong Li and John Cusack, I was stuck with the Mandarin dubbed version. That’s 谍海风云 dié hǎi fēngyún for anyone interested.

There are a few things you’ll find when browsing the videos available on Youku, Tudou, 56 or whathaveyou. First, when dealing with the spoken language, Mandarin is called 国语 over 中文 or 汉语 by a large margin. A quick few searches on Tudou returns these numbers (Thits?):

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I spend lots of time confusing Chinese characters I half-know for others I’m vaguely familiar with. But I’ve never had trouble identifying where a character started and finished. At least that part is straightforward, right? Everything in a box, one size fits all.

Until, that is, I did a bleary double-take as I came to this…

I’m still not sure what three characters I was trying to make out of it: 相那鬲, maybe? Continue…

Even if you don’t drive yourself, in Beijing pretty soon you learn to spot the xīnshǒu (新手), literally the “new hands”, the greenhorns, the folks that made it through cryptic questions and an irrelevant “road” test and now possess that coveted, slightly-too-big-for-a-credit-card-slot, laminated green card that entitles them, for the next six years…

1. to drive around the 47 cars waiting in the left turn lane and position themselves in front of the first car, even if that means placing themselves in the middle of an intersection during a red light
2. to reverse for 500m in the right lane of the freeway after passing the exit ramp they decided was appropriate after stopping and deliberating (in lane) for several minutes
3. to maneuver their car through a 10-minute long, 17-point U-turn on a street hardly wide enough for bicycle traffic Continue…

Whilst on an informative jolly around Shaoxing’s lántíng 兰亭 (orchid pavilion) in the sweltering heat, I came across the following  stele:

It reads 鵞池 é chí, ‘goose pond’ (it probably loses something in translation). The guide told me that the é is a painstaking reconstruction of a character written by Wang Xizhi 王羲之 (303–361), whilst the chí was written by one of his descendants. And aparently Wang loved geese because he felt that, in profile,  they resembled the shape of the character 之 in his name. Continue…

The Chinese writing system is incredibly efficient, isn’t it? I mean, it’s a pain to learn and we all forget how to write the odd character from time to time, but you can cram so much into such a small space. It’s not just things like the Analects which, in translation, require lines of English to represent the briefest of the sage’s utterances; even making simple arrangements by SMS/text message seems so much more convenient in Chinese.

Then, as Bryan pointed out, there are signs in your local hospital which protrude unreasonably far, simply so that they can helpfully accommodate the English translation.

Watch out. That thing could take your eye out! Continue…

In the schadenfreude category, here’s an example of a college-aged native Mandarin speaker mis-parsing a sentence that would have been clear if it had been spoken or if writing with Chinese characters indicated word boundaries.

I wrote:

我下星期一直跟小孩在家

I meant:

（我下星期）（一直跟小孩在家）
(I next week) (continually with kid at home)
Gloss: “I’m home with my kid all next week”

But she read:

（我下星期一）（直跟小孩在家）
(I next Monday) (continually with kid at home)
Gloss: “I’m home next Monday with my kid”

The central ambiguity is in how to parse these four characters: 星期一直. Is it (i) or (ii)?

1. 星期一 (Monday) plus 直 (continually)
2. 星期 (week) plus 一直 (continually)

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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:

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I was schadenfreudically surprised the other day when a friend of mine, native Mandarin speaker, stopped short while reading through a list of teachers and asked her daughter: “Uh, what’s that teacher’s name?”

鄢老师！Yān Lǎoshī: Teacher Yān, of course!

One of the pleasant surprises in Chinese characters is how few surnames you have to learn, at least in the beginning. The common man isn’t called 老百姓 (lǎobǎixìng, roughly “old one hundred surnames”) for nothing. Heck, you can probably get away with a dozen, speedreading through business cards like, well, like nobody’s business: “Mr. Liu! Ms. Wang! Lawyer Zhang…”

But then the long tail hits. Continue…

A year or so ago someone left a watch in one of my classrooms. It has hanzi for the numbers, but they are a little strange:

See if you can figure out what is going on here, and then click on “Continue Reading” to see if you are right.

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