Chinglish Roundup

It may seem a tad unfair to make fun of foreigner’s attempts in good faith to helpfully add English to signs and products, but many of the attempts are rather poor – and weird language tickles the humour centres of the brain so nicely. I collected quite a few examples of Chinglish in the last few months, but here are a couple of highlights.

The Gold Articles is Monoplied

Another store has been spotted with “is monoplied” in the name – it’s probably a dodgy entry in a popular dictionary like Powerword.

Compare to insurance expert

Are insurance experts dissocial? I don’t know, but there’s nothing less fearsome than a dragon that can be compared to one.

Adding ethereal oil

This is the menu from a massage parlour nearby. What I like is that I can pretty much guess what adding the ethereal oil foot cave means, and it doesn’t sound too bad.

No psychotic ragamuffins

This classic is from the gate of Shanghai’s most visible tourist attraction, the Oriental Pearl Tower. Although this will presumably be fixed soon in advance of the Expo, in the meantime its ban on ragamuffins, effluvium and baleful biology is a classic.

Finally, this isn’t Chinglish but I like how they omitted the fate of this “flight pioneer”. Surviving acocunts vary on whether he actually acheived lift-off before dying, or was simply immolated on the ground.

Tone and Colour

Another interesting post over at Sinosplice today on the subject of using colour to learn tones in Mandarin. It seems plausible, but not proven, that colour might be a better way to encode tone information visually than he traditional tone marks – plausible, but not proven.

I’m planning to put it to the test – I’m assembling two vocabular lists which I will study as flashcards only, one list will be colour coded and the other with tone marks as usual. After a week, I’ll see if my retention rates have differed. In general, if I can remember a Chinese word’s spelling but get the tones wrong, I don’t mark it as “known”, so if this method increases retention of tone information, my scores should reflect that. I’ll only test English-Chinese, so I can’t see the colours until I look at the answer. We’ll see if I can glean any useful data. Unfortunately iFlash doesn’t support colour, so it will take a couple of days to make the cards as images.

Interesting to see how the brain works.

English Corner

People’s Park, in the centre of Shanghai is pretty busy on weekends. Some people (including me) go to see the lotus blossoms when they’re in bloom; most people there seem to be parents looking for a match for their children, as I’ve previously mentioned. There’s a section of the park, though, informally known as “English Corner”. Locals go there to practice English, so if you show up as a foreigner you’ll quickly gather a flock of Chinese conversationalists ranging in age from small primary school kids to octogenarian professors.

English Corner at People’s Park

Many people ask where I’m from (“guess!” is my reply), what I do, how do I like Shanghai, and other such banal but useful topics. I quickly get bored with discussion of my job, and at least half of the people practicing seem to be computer programmers or engineers, which makes the problem worse. We had a discussion about porting the Linux kernel to embedded systems, which is interesting but probably not good vocabulary for a general audience. It’s easy to change the topic, as the speakers aren’t shy – “How much do you earn?”, “Are you married?” and the ubiquitous “Do you want to marry a Chinese girl?” have to be parried (“I’m not rich”, “No”, and some good-natured wisecrack).”Do you like Mao”, “what don’t you like about China”, these questions require more delicate handling and I generally deflect those too.

Some learners have a (literally) encyclopedic knowledge of Australia which borders on the bizarre. A few people have been there, but some have only studied the country’s geography, so will ask me where I’m from, then list the states and territories of Australia and name landmarks near my house. “I’m from Melbourne, MEL-BUN,” I might say, to which the reply might come, “Oh, I like Londsdale Street,” or “Bendigo! Ballarat! Geelong!” Last year in Germany I ran into a woman who lived in Clayton while working for Bosch, and this year met one or two students who studied there at Monash University, so it’s funny to think of that rather unexciting suburb as a world city, but there you go.

There are a few characters – short bandanna-guy (pictured) seems a self-appointed organiser and facilitator, often shepherding reluctant learners and shy children towards expats. A garrulous English teacher claims to have swum the Yangtze for four and a half hours as a child, started English Corner, and can act, sing and dance like a pro. Dissident guy likes to talk only about the poor human rights record of the Chinese Government, causing – perhaps in my imagination – the other learners to glare and shift impatiently.

The kids are especially cute. They are often pushed up by eager parents, dreadfully shy, and then, after overcoming the stage fright, launch into their routine: “Hello-my-name-is-Alice *pant* I-am-in-the-5th-class-where-are-you-from-do-you-like-Shanghai?” Last time, a boy from Harbin who must have been seven or eight years old spoke conversational English with perplexing ease – “Are you married?” “No.” “Oh, so you’re available?”

Perhaps I should be practicing my Chinese, but where else can I simply stand around and have people flock up eager to talk to me, be my friend, and pry about my life? It’s like being a minor actor in an episode of Star Trek show and going to a Trekkie convention, only without the figure-hugging Lycra uniform.

God and pronouns

(Update: See note below, it’s even more interesting than what I wrote initially, which is a bit wrong.)

It’s interesting to me that English now lacks a common feature of many languages – a polite version of the pronoun “you”. As you may be aware, we used to have one – “you”. We were so polite that the familiar form, “thou”, and its verb conjugations, has fallen into disuse. (For some reason, English speakers imagine that “thou art” is more polite. I suppose because it sounds old-timey, harking back to an imaginary era when people had some god-damned respect.)

It can be tricky when learning a foreign language to remember to use the polite form or to know when to use it. We’ve all made a few mistakes with Usted, vous or Sie. And there can be a few surprises. It’s pretty clear what to use when you greet a customer, headmaster or prime minister. What about your parents or grandparents? In European languages, and in Chinese, the parents seem to get the familar treatment. (After all, we would think a kid who called his dad “Sir” had an unusually strict upbringing.) In Chinese, though, grandparents get the more respectful term. Not surprising in a culture where age is respected – even revered.

What about God? The traditional Lord’s prayer tells us that in English we historically use the familiar form (“who art in heaven… thy name”). This hadn’t occurred to me when I discovered that Germans use the familiar form, “du” for God. It seemed to me that if you are talking to God you probably believe in him, and if anyone deserved respect, it’d be someone who could decide the outcome of your latest war or give you an aneurysm without working up a sweat. But we Westerners seem to have a more casual relationship with the almighty – “Dear God: Hey buddy, please make sure my pizza gets delivered soon, ‘k, thanks.” The same is true in Spanish, for instance – although you probably wouldn’t say “tu” to God, the conjugation of the verbs indicates familiarity. The Chinese on the other hand are a bit more cautious – God gets the 您 (nín) polite treatment here. What does this say about the respective cultures?

I’m especially curious how this all works in Japanese, which is famous for many levels of formality and a plethora of pronouns. Can anyone enlighten me?

Update: Actually, asking some more Chinese, I’ve been contradicted on both the grandparents and God situations- it apparently varies, and seems to be a generational thing. For instance, someone told me you would never address a grandparent with 您 (nín, polite) or 你 (nǐ, familiar) at all – only by “title”, such as grandmother, which I admit makes little sense to me. What’s even more interesting, though, is there is a separate pronoun just for God that I wasn’t aware of – pronounced the same, but with its own character. Thanks to leyan for pointing me at John Pasden’s excellent write-up at Sinosplice.