Chinglish

“Wet floor, slip carefully!!!” This is what you see at restaurants when they are wiping the floor instead of “Wet floor, be careful not to slip!” This is just one of the hundreds of mistranslations from Chinese to English that you would see anywhere around China. It is referred to as ‘Chinglish’, a language between Chinese and English! Sometimes you really cannot understand any tiny bit of what the signs are trying to say. Sometimes it is really funny and we crack laughing in public. It is really fun! As if they are just using Google Translator randomly.

'Passengers no entry'. And where are the flowers!

Get out through the tunnel!

Understand anything?

Bear is a famous drink in China!

This actually shows how the Chinese try their best to reach foreigners and welcome them in their country. Although China tries its best to protect its language, the globalization of English has been able to penetrate. Tourists coming to China need some guidance and China does not want to lose its tourists just because of protecting the Chinese language. Also, without creating Pinyin (Latinization of the Chinese language) China wouldn’t have been able to cope with technology and science. Actually China is coping with internationalism by opening up to foreigners. We as ‘rare’ foreign trainees are one example.

These are just a few that I remembered to take pictures of, you can go to 'Google Images' search and type Chinglish and you won’t stop laughing for hours!!

Mandarin Chinese - Part 3 - Numbers

Aside Pinyin and Tone, Numbers are easy and are the 1^st to be studied when learning a new language, especially that there are no alphabets in the Chinese language to start with. 
                                                                

Chinese Numbers

The 7 looks like an up-side-down English 7, the 8 looks like an Arabic 8. Also you can spot an English 4 and 5 in the corresponding Chinese 4 and 5. This is how I managed to learn them! 

Chinese numerals are similar to Roman numerals when it comes to expressing tens and hundreds.

• Roman:       37 is XXXVII (3 tens, and a 7)    
• Chinese:  三十七 (3 tens, and a 7 said as sān shí qī)

After learning this logic in numbers I realized that English numbers might be an evolved form of the same root – thirty seven might actually be like ‘three tens and a seven’, where ‘three tens’ evolved to be ‘thirty’ and so).

The hand gestures shown in the picture are used commonly in China to express prices and numbers – so handy to know. 

Saying a decimal number like 4.5 is similar to English. ‘diǎn’ or ‘点’replaces ‘point’.

Hundred is "bai" (百） and thousand is "qian" （千）

1.2    one point two                 一点二          yī diǎn èr

13      ten and three                 十三              shí sān

31   three tens and one            三十一        sān shí yī

800   eight hundreds                八百               jǐ bǎi

So the most complex that sums it all would be:
    

                 1345.8                one thousand three hundred four tens and five point eight    

      一千三百四十五点八     yī     qian      sān      bǎi       sì    shí         wǔ   diǎn   jǐ

This is a basic demonstration of Chinese numbers which helps in understanding and saying numbers. It needs good practice to get used to pronunciation as it is the trickiest part. Actually, when we learned the numbers, we were able to understand what the cashiers are saying by filtering out the numbers we hear. 

The good news is that people in China use English numbers when writing or on tickets. They do not use the Chinese characters. If communicating numbers is not working, you can easily escape the misunderstanding by writing the numbers in English on a piece of paper – everybody understands.

Mandarin Chinese - Part 2 - Pinyin & Tone

As mentioned earlier, the following 3 are the basic elements of the Chinese language:

• Characters (Described in the previous post, not needed for speaking and listening, only needed for reading and writing)
• Pinyin
• Tones

Pinyin: It is a form of “Latinizing” the Chinese language by writing the language in Latin letters. This is what I have been using to give examples of how to pronounce Chinese words. We do the same in Arabic by writing "keefak” and so. The difference is that Pinyin is an official part of the Chinese language. It was developed in the 1950’s to make the Chinese language compatible with the modern “English-based” technology and globalized media and industry.

When I came to China I thought that keyboards will be all in Chinese but no, it is all in English – there are no Chinese keyboards. To write Chinese you type in pinyin and the computer will give you options of corresponding Chinese characters to input. When you enable the Chinese language on your computer, you can add the Mandarin Chinese (PRC) keyboard and you will be able to type Chinese. Google’s pinyin program is better for typing Chinese.

Tone: There are 4 main tones in Chinese. The same word with different tones has different meanings. It looks like the Arabic diacritics (harakat/حركات) but it is a totally different concept. In Chinese tone is literally a musical tone.

tā        Flat tone     (as the sound the doctor asks you to do when inspecting your throat)

ní       Ascending    (same as tone of asking a question…as saying WHAT?)

nì       Descending  (same as tone of saying an answer….as saying YES in an affirmative tone)

nǐ       Descending then Ascending like a parabola

There are also words with ‘no tone’ that will sound as if you are just saying it neutrally in English, and there is a tone that is represented by ‘double dots’ which is not widely considered a major tone (it sounds like saying ‘eww’ when you are discusted from something).

A complication in relating Pinyin to Characters is that in Chinese, the same Pinyin word can have different Characters with different meanings. The first word ‘tā’ can mean he/she/it. Although the pinyin word and tone are the same, the characters representing each of he/she/it are different.

tā       he     他

tā    she    她

tā     it        它

Fortunately when speaking and listening to other, you need to only know “tā” which will be understood due to the context of the speech.

To listen and speak Chinese, Pinyin and tone are enough – no need for Characters. If you know Pinyin and Tone you can start learning Chinese. That is what we are doing; we started with Pinyin and Tone then with forming basic sentences. By knowing Pinyin you can still type on the computer with any Pinyin input program.

Saeed found the following YouTube lessons which are extremely helpful. The lady is teaching what is supposed to be taught to who do not know any Chinese at all. This was our starting point of learning Chinese.

YouTube Video Links (click on the Lessons #’s below to view, or search for ‘7 Days Mandarin Lesson’ in YouTube):

7 Days Mandarin Chinese – Lesson 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Mandarin Chinese - Part 1 - Intro & Characters

(If your computer does not view the Chinese characters written between these brackets [你好嗎] you can enable Chinese from Control Panel > Language Options > Languages > Tick the “east asian languages” box > Click OK…I will be using some Chinese characters as demonstrations in this and later posts)

The Chinese language has many dialects. These dialects are sometimes considered different languages because of the great difference among them. The main two Chinese languages spoken are:

• Mandarin Chinese: spoken by more than 90% of Chinese, spoken in Taiwan and Singapore
• Cantonese Chinese: spoken mainly in Hong Kong and Macau

Mandarin Chinese is spoken by more than a billion people. This makes around 1/6 of the world population.  It is the most-spoken language by population. Yet English is still the most spread and is the language of globalization and technology. Hindi, Arabic and Spanish often join Mandarin Chinese and English on the lists of top 5 spoken languages. Mandarin Chinese is what we are learning and is what I will be posting about.

Along with Japanese and similar languages, Chinese is so different than other common languages because it is not alphabetical based. There is no fixed 26 or 27 letters that can form different words. It is based on pictorial characters which have corresponding sounds associated with them. For example, a cross sign “十” means “ten” and is pronounced as “shí”. The cross sign is the evolved form of what the Chinese thousands of years back used as sign to mark the number 10. The following picture shows the evolution of some Chinese characters with time. This part of the language is the toughest yet the most interesting since it relates things to pictorial characters. It is the toughest because there are thousands of different characters, and the meaning of a combination of characters does not necessarily have to do with either of the characters standing alone.

Evolution of Chinese Characters. Notice how pictorial they were initially

Characters are based on number of “strokes.” Some characters are a mix between more than one simpler character.Chinese dictionaries are arranged either according to number of strokes in the characters or according to the ‘alphabetical’ pronunciation of the word (referred to as Pinyin).

The core of Chinese language is composed of 3 basic elements that form its infrastructure:

• Pinyin
• Tone
• Characters (described above)

The bad news is that in Chinese, ‘listening and speaking’ is totally different from ‘writing and reading’. It is as if you have to learn 2 languages to speak Chinese. This is because of its non-alphabetical base.

The good news is that you do not need to know the ‘characters’ to listen and speak Chinese.

Characters are only needed to read and write.

Characters are described above, and I will post about Pinyin and Tone separately which are the base of listening and speaking Chinese.

Chinese Lessons

We started Chinese lessons last week. We are taking classes at Ms. Bonnie’s place which is 10 minutes away by bus. We got to know her from online forums and she is really good. She actually teaches English to kindergarten students also at her home which makes her method of teaching so basic and appropriate for us.

We are taking classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Starting from 6:30pm (after work), we are taking 1.5 or 2 hours each of these days.

We are paying 30 Yuan per hour per person which is a really low amount. Foreigners usually pay 100-150.

It is really interesting and fun when we start testing what we learn with people in the supermarkets or in public. When they understand, they show a verrryyy wide smile..they love it! They don’t mock when they hear our weird Chinese. And it feels amazing for us when we make them understand. This is because the difference between English and Chinese is so extreme, and because the Chinese in public do not know ANY English, except for the word "Hallllloooo" when they see us, especially that in the area we live we are the only foreigners.

So imagine that initially when we first came to China we were unable to communicate in any way. We used to always ask for the help of our Chinese friends from the company. In the beginning, we used only hand gestures and acting. One time I wanted a detergent to clean the floor. I only found dishwashing soap because it had pictures of dishes. So what I did to make them understand is that I took that dishwashing soap to the man at the counter and started acting to him that I am pouring some detergent to the floor and wiping it. And he understood directly! But there was no floor detergent.

But now we can:

• Order food
• Ask for prices
• Communicate about where we are from and where we work
• Understand numbers
• Salute
• Say that “we don’t understand Chinese” if communication gets complicated!

I wish we will be able to add to this list as much as possible.

I will write soon about basics in the Chinese language. It is really interesting and if you have time, you can actually at least know what is the Chinese language based upon.