Chinese is a funny Language
Disclaimer : This article is not meant to be racist, or criticize or hurt anyone’s sentiments.
I’ve been closely associated with China for most of my adult life. Through the years I’ve mastered my spoken Chinese skills and travelled widely through China. In India we say the dialect changes every fifty kilometers – this stands true for China as well. While they have many dialects (each a language in its own right), they have a common script.
They have a National Language as well, its called Mandarin. Mandarin by itself is also a dialect, one that is spoken in Beijing and surrounding areas. Is there a pure form of Chinese? There is… but most Chinese cannot speak it. They tend to mix it up with their own local tongue. There are other two major Dialects, Cantonese (spoken in Hong Kong) and Mingnan dialect (spoken in Taiwan). Complicated right?
Here is where it starts getting really weird. Chinese (mandarin) has four tones. Which means that you can speak the same syllable in four tones, which would make four different meanings (eg: is, eez, iz and ees). As if that would not complicate matters, Chinese (mandarin, Cantonese and everything else) is a Character based language as opposed to English (or Hindi, Marathi, French and most others). There are more than five thousand characters, three thousand of which are frequently used. Each character has a unique design (what looks like a picture or a squiggle) and each of them have a unique meaning. Then by either using them alone or combining characters together, they would make words and words into sentences. Even highly educated Chinese don’t know all the Characters. It wouldn’t be infrequent for a Chinese to give a perplexed look and say, “I don’t know how to read this!” (Extremely hilarious for foreigners)
What’s funny: Now that they are stuck with using a predefined set of characters that have their predefined sounds (many of which are the same) – they have to assign the same sounding characters to multiple words. In my humble opinion – Are you Insane??
Here are a few examples
1) The City I live in sounds same as the word for ‘careful’. I get into a cab and like India would go “Bandra” and the cabbie will go “I’m always careful!” (???)
2) Since they have predefined sounds that they can use, every new word has to fit into those sounds. So my friend Tushar becomes “TUSA” which also sounds like ‘Kill All’! Mehul becomes “MIHU” which also sounds like ‘confused’. Tushar changed his name to Tony.
3) ‘Please’ sounds like ‘white head’ (Old man)
4) Every time I check into a hotel and need an extra blanket, they would send me cup.
You guessed it!
5) The word for Train and Truck sound the same.
6) The word for Fish and Rain sound same!
7) The number 4 and 10 have the same sound ditto 14 and 40 (how did they miss that?) So now every time I say ‘four’ I show four fingers to make sure they get it. In return, if I don’t do that they show me four fingers or cross index fingers of both hands to look like an ‘X’ (the visual representation for ten, they have one for 6,7,8 and 9 as well!) to make sure they understand what I’m saying. (After ten years I still cant get it right!!)
8) Not only is the sound of 4 and 10 similar; city, die, yes, is, stone, color, time, work and many more share the same sound!
So I ask “What City?” They hear “What Work?”
“Do I take bus no. 4?” “Yes” … or is it no. 10?
“Is your father in the hospital?” “He is.” - Or did he say he’s dead!
It gets funnier when they speak English! Since some of the sounds in English do not exist in Chinese they cant pronounce it.
Thank you becomes zanku
That becomes zat
Sorry becomes solly
Really becomes leally
It gets even funnier when they have to dictate something to someone. They have to explain each character with reference and context of each character! I have no way of reproducing the exact effect, but it would go something like this. M – for Mat, U for Under, M for mole, B the one that follows A, A the one that precedes B, I as in Me, That’s right. That’s the City, now the street address… wait what was the city again?
Every language has its own peculiarities. Chinese is a tough language to learn to speak and tougher to learn to write. One you get past the basic “Ching chong chong chong ching” things begin to make sense. Anyway what’s the point of learning a new language if you cant get a few laughs out of it!!
