     | september 8, 2010
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| september 8, 2010
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Found in Translation Catherine Price -- 11/15/2004  “I’d like to ask you a couple of Chinese place names, all right?” said my classmate, struggling to correctly pronounce the question in Mandarin. “I know a bit about Chinese geography,” I told her enthusiastically. “Ask away!” The truth was, I didn’t know anything about Chinese place names. Nor did I really understand how to make Peking Roast Duck or correctly boil water for tea, but teacher Zhou didn’t care. As long as we could spit out perfectly memorized monologues correctly using the past-tense-indicating speech particle “le,” we would succeed—or at least earn a good grade in his intensive, two-hour a day Chinese class. I tried to spice things up in our end-of-year skits by staging a drama between a husband, wife, and flirtatious waitress at a roast duck restaurant, but memorizing eight new characters a day overwhelmed me and my grade on our final test was a D. Five years later, when I decided to go to Beijing for the summer to study Chinese again, I had forgotten all my characters, my vocabulary had been reduced to the words for “sea cucumber” and I was justifiably scared that I wouldn’t make it on the mainland. In Beijing, I avenged my previous Chinese experience by staying up late the night before my first oral exam memorizing sentence patterns such as, “That sweater expensive is expensive but I still buy!” and “Wang has gotten a little fatter.” My work paid off the next morning when, after telling my teacher that I loved “all kinds, all types of air conditioners,” she asked if I wanted to move up a level. “Thank you,” I told her, aware that the other class was learning vocabulary like “imperial concubine” while I still couldn’t say “toilet paper.” “But I think their vocabulary not very useful.” She asked for an example of a not useful word. “Eunuch” seemed an excellent choice, but I couldn’t remember how to say it, so I wrote “eunuch” on the board in English instead, pointed to my crotch while saying “meiyou, meiyou” (“don’t have, don’t have”), and tried to explain in Chinese that in the Forbidden City there were “very, very many.” My teacher, whose grasp of English only slightly exceeded my control of Chinese, pointed to her watch. The oral exam thus ended with me trying to demonstrate, via charades, that I had no testicles. When I looked up the words later, I realized that instead of “eunuch” and “Forbidden City” I had been saying “comforter” and “public bus.” But vocabulary and idioms can lead to mistakes in any language, like when I tried to tell my French friend that I wanted to shower but instead announced my intention to douche. The additional trick of Chinese is the tones. Every syllable in Mandarin can be said four different ways, each of which has a different meaning. “Ma” in a steady, flat voice means “mother.” Scoop your voice down and then back up again on the same sound and it’s “horse.” “Kou yin” said one way means “pronunciation” but, in a cruel joke on tone-deaf students, one small change in pitch turns it into “blow job.” end of page 1 [ 1 ] read more ... [ 2 ][ 3 ] |
