As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m planning a trip to Korea this year. After failing to find truly cheap airfare, I ended up buying from one of those online sellers where the price looks great and then you’re suddenly hit with a thousand kuai in “fees”. I’m still working through the bitterness.
It turns out there were still some issues once the ticket had been purchased. The flight I had signed up for didn’t actually exist. They were kind enough to email me and let me know though, offering an alternative flight at close to the original time.
The original flight I had was to land in Gimpo 김포, and the only other one I knew of was landing in Incheon 인천. Gimpo is in a better location but either would work. The problem was that the new flight was to land in Rengchuang.
I’ve just had a week on the road with a bunch of guys, a sports team, to be a little more precise. I’ve been coaching them for about eighteen months and we’re all on pretty familiar terms, but this is the first time we’ve all been away together.
We travelled from home in NE China, down to the South – 30 hours plus on the train. Plenty of time for everyone to get into the tour spirit.
Having played various sports for most of my life and having been on a number of tours, I ought to be pretty familiar with how these things pan out. And sure enough, this tour was like most others; plenty of laddish humour, lots of card playing, a certain amount of drinking. People take up various roles in the group; the worrier, the flirt, the joker, the quiet one, the leader, the guy who can never find his stuff, the one who’s always last to breakfast.
Then there’s always tour language. Maybe someone says something really dumb on the first day and it becomes a catchphrase for the tour…
…or maybe one of the group has an unusual accent and this becomes much imitated.
And so it was. They all did their impersonations of me. Some just occasionally, some near incessantly. It was kind of amusing; sometimes flattering, sometimes pretty uncomfortable, but mainly just intriguing to hear how I sound to them. I only managed to capture a few phrases on the final day and here they are:
你好吗？
就到这里吧
放松点吧
[Descriptions of above recordings added, 11 Aug 2010. Sima]
I’d love to pretend that I never say any of these things and that it certainly sounds nothing like me, but I guess the big question is…
But beyond that, does anyone have any experience of being mimicked? Is there a general comic accent which most people would recognise as the foreigner speaking Chinese? Would anyone care to describe what they hear in the above recordings that sounds foreign?
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)?
In a post written by Syz in June, the topic of language discounts was discussed. By all means, if you haven’t read it, go take a look at the post and the 30+ comments it brought about. I want to review this idea for a moment, but this time on non-Sinitic languages. Specifically, I want to look at Korean.
As I mentioned in my last post, I’m giving myself a crash course in Korean. I’ll be in Seoul in a couple months and as nice as my friends there are, I don’t want to have to rely on them for conversations on topics like hotels, taxis, restaurants. In fact as added incentive, my friend has given me a list of things I must master by the time I get there. This includes the above few tourism-related areas, but then also I’m expected to learn at least one pop song for karaoke (Kr: 노래방 noraebang, lit. “song room”). I’ve only just begun, and I’m doing what I can to make sure my pronunciation is passable from the start. But I can’t help thinking I’m about to hit a stage in my vocabulary acquisition where it just explodes into awesome. It has a lot to do with discussions had over at Annals of Wu on what I call the “sound matrix” theory.
In one of the most important Polish newspapers, Gazeta Wyborcza, I encountered an article about the introduction of disco-polo to the Chinese music market. In case you don’t know what disco-polo is (and I’m pretty sure you don’t, unless you are from Poland), check out this Wikipedia entry. Basically, it’s a music genre that had its golden age in the ’90s and that some Poles adore, but for others it’s a synonym for bad taste, kitsch and “redneckedness” (most of the bands originated from small villages where they played at weddings etc.).
I have absolutely no idea why someone would try to sell this kind of music in China. And while in Poland it is (or, hopefully, used to be) popular mostly in rural areas and among less-educated people, the Chinese target is “between 25 and 40 years old, higher education, big city resident, high professional and social position, incomes much higher than average”. At least that’s what the producer says.
In autumn a disco-polo band BayerFull (in Polish bajer is a slang word meaninggimmick or sweet talk) is going on a tour in China. Its leader says “We’re entering the Chinese market professionally. Everything is arranged legally. We’ve had our Chinese costumes tailored, our dragons are ready. Our image is going to get people interested. But we’re not deceiving ourselves, we know we’re going to be treated as an oddity.”
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…
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?
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”**?
