I’m sure most folks have either noticed or heard the jokes about Chinese, maybe Asians in general, are frequently mispronouncing letters in the English alphabet. The most common, of course, are: L and R. Oh yeah, that reminds me of a Seinfeld episode on this very subject. Well, it turns out that there are good reasons for these mispronunciations. Just take a look at this picture.

I recently moved to a new apartment. A little background: I was lazy about moving from my old place even though I didn’t feel completely comfortable there.  When I found out that I had to re-register there for another visa, I figured that if I had to register, I might as well register in a new location. So, I moved to a new apartment complex where the quality of the components was much higher. I’ve got a view of the bay and the hills in Hong Kong. It’s much more pleasant. Anyway, the water heater is a “Rinnai”, which was translated as ?? in Chinese, which is “Lin” (tone 2) and “Nei” (tone 4). So, right away, the pronunciation is wrong. I woulda translated it as something like ??, which is “Ri” (tone 4) and “Nei”. But, then again, I’m not Chinese. I asked a few folks and the best answer I got was that this was the best choice of words. A word that starts with an “L” instead of an “R”.  I never got a good answer to “why”.

Often, the translations for English names choose words that have nice meanings. Of course, we foreigners don’t know these inner meanings unless we take the time to study the characters. For example, there’s a French supermarket that I go to called “Carrefour”. The Chinese translation is “Jia” (tone 1), “Le” (tone 4), and “Fu” (tone 2). The characters mean “Home”, “Happy”, and “Lucky”. So, I like to joke to folks that, “Hey, I need to go to ‘The House is Happy and Lukcy’ to buy some stuff.”

I’ve talked about how important numbers, and playing upon the sound of numbers, is in Chinese.  For example, 8 is a lucky number because it sounds like the word for “to get rich, and 4 is an unlucky number because it sounds like the word for “death”.  Well, that’s basically Chinese for you:  everything sounds like everything!  Here are some more extreme examples of taking advantage of numbers in Chinese:

1. The number to order home delivery for McDonald’s (yes, McDonald’s) ends in “517517″, which is pronounced “wu yao qi, wu yao qi”.  This pronunciation is very close to “wo yao chi, wo yao chi”, which means “I wanna eat, I wanna eat!”  Clever, huh?
2. I just learned about this one.  This Friday, May 20th, is another “new” Chinese Valentines Day.  I think I was told that this one has been around for two or three years at most.  The only reason this day was selection was because of the similarity to the date’s numeric pronunciation:  520 or “wu er ling”, which is very close to “wo ai ni”, or “I love you”.  They even add on other numbers:  1314, “yi san yi si” or “from birth to death”.  All together:  5201314.  ”I love you for my whole life”.  See how challenging Chinese is?  Everything sounds like everything else!

Of course, there are many more examples.  Apparently, people spend really really big money to have vanity license plates with lots of 8′s on them.  Nobody has silly text on their license plates; it’s all about the numbers.

By the way, a belated Star Wars day to everyone (Wednesday two weeks ago):  May the 4th be with you!  Revenge of the Fifth!  Aw yeah.

I told myself that I’d never be an English teacher in China.  It just seems that most every foreigner in China is an English teacher.  So, not wanting to be like the average foreigner in China, I simply said that I wouldn’t teach English, even though I enjoy teaching.  When Davide‘s wife first asked me to teach at her fledgling English school, I declined saying that I was too busy (true!).

But, when she sent me a desperate text message saying that a teacher had canceled at the last minute (a common problem among those bums), what could I say?  So, I showed up and winged a class.  Turns out it was a lot of fun and quite easy.  There wasn’t much more to do than just talk, ask them to repeat, and correct pronunciation.  OK, a little more than that, but still easy if you’re willing to be a bit of an actor and have a good time with the kids, there’s really nothing to it.

The kids can be totally rambunctious, much wilder than western kids.  And the parents, who enjoy watching too, will usually not do anything.  When they do scowl at the kids, the rebuke only has effect for maybe one minute.  However, the last class that I taught (a duo of the better English speakers), one of the girls just would not behave at all.  Her mom happened to be inside the office.  After telling the girl to sit down and behave for the 25th time, I stood up and knocked on the door.  The kids immediately got quiet.  I told the mom to have a talk with her daughter and tell her to behave.  Well, the end result was a fit of crying and I had to teach the remainder of the class as a 1:1.  Oh yeah, and because that disruption was so big, I felt like I needed to improvise a game.  So, I came up with sort of a charades game:  We took turns drawing on the whiteboard.  The other person would think of an animal or object and describe it.  The other would draw it.  The result was often funny.  I’m only able to do this game with this one student, who lived in Toronto for a while.  Impossible for the other students.

Most of their English ability is deceptively bad.  They have a decent amount of vocabulary, but when I got bold in one class and suggested that we started working on basic sentences, I was shocked at how hard this was for them.  Sentences like, “Are you awake?” and “I’m going to school.” took a lot of effort!  I wonder how they’re teaching English in the native schools?  Guess I’ll learn more about all this as I go along.

Oh, here’s another interesting thing, our classroom is in an apartment that’s been converted into a school.  This is quite common in China.  There’s some sort of after-school school being conducted in an apartment on the first floor of my building.  Not sure the legality of this (I suspect there’s no issue with it), but this is quite common.  There’s an old lady in an apartment under the school that I teach at who periodically complains about the shouting kids.  Can’t say I blame her.  They do love to shout.

Here’s a shot right before class.  Normally, there are five students in this class:

We just finished up our “Call Me in China” January retreat.  My business partner, Peter, who is also a former MS employee was in town for around two weeks.  After leaving Microsoft, Peter moved to Shanghai for the more stimulating social environment and cosmopolitan feel.  Me, I still like Shenzhen.  Peter’s brother, Chris, accompanied him.  Chris, a computer engineering student at Carnegie Mellon, accompanied him and will be spending a semester in Shanghai learning Chinese.  Chris’s capacity with “Call Me in China” was officially intern and his contributions were greatly appreciated.  To learn a little more about the retreat, read more here.

We ate many meals together.  Peter and Chris leaning more towards the Northeastern style cuisine featuring dumplings and me preferring the spicier offerings of the Sichuan and Hunan regions.  Our final meal together was at a fairly small Sichuan restauarant.  Peter heard a suggestion from the waitress of what he though was “sweet chicken”.  The conversation was too fast for me to catch, unfortunately, for I knew what this “sweet chicken” really was.  Actually, it was “field chicken”.  Both “sweet” and “field” have the exact same sounds:  “tian” tone 2.  But, the characters are completely different and thus the meaning is completely different.

“Sweet Chicken”, aka “Qin1 Wa1″,  is another word for “Frog”!  I’ve grown to like frog actually and this was a tasty dish, but it was a bit to realistic for Chris’s liking.  The bodies of the poor frogs were almost intact.  The heads were missing thankfully, but the cute little hands and feet were still intact.  The underside looked otherwordly too; “Alien” was the term that Peter used.  Chris didn’t eat too much of this dish, but at least it made for some good pictures.

My first flight ultimately bound for Hotlanta was scheduled to depart Hong Kong at 8am sharp.  This was the best ticket I could find when searching for a flight to return to the US for Christmas, both by route, layover, and price.  I assumed it would be pretty easy to get to Hong Kong by 8am.  Turns out it’s not.  Well, I should correct that; it is easy, but it took me a long time to figure it out.  I asked lots of people and none of them could confirm anything.  I’d pretty much decided that I’d just go into Hong Kong late the night before, nap some, and then check in around 6am.  Going without good sleep for more than 24 hours is not my strong suit.

But, thankfully, the day before my flight, I happened to ask my Philippino friend who pointed me to “Sky Limo”, claiming that they left at 5am, maybe even earlier, for the Hong Kong airport.  Turned out that I also had a business card of theirs too (I can’t remember when I last used them).  I called the Hong Kong number and asked in Mandarin if they had any English speakers (I don’t understand any Cantonese).  I got someone who was OK and between Mandarin and English, got it all worked out.  However, there was still some doubt when she first told me that the earliest departure was 6am.  When, I said I needed 5am, she just responded, “5am, no problem!”  Well, I trusted my friend.

I’m not writing this little airport journey story because it eventually turns funny or horrible.  Everything worked out fine.  I just enjoyed the ride from the taxi to the Huang Gang border in central Shenzhen, the only 24-hour border, and thought I’d write about that (and now I’ve got it documented should I need to take an early flight again).

I left my apartment complex around 4:20AM and interrupted a taxi driver’s sleep.  He sprung to life when he saw me leaning over him and we were off.  On the way in, I was amazed at the number of “Ming2 Gong1″ folks I saw on the streets.  These are the people in the aqua and yellow outfits, with those traditional Chinese hats, who are cleaning up the messes that everyone else makes during the day.  I got the distinct impression that, much like how money, goofy gifts and card, and wrapping paper is the lifeblood of the Christmas economy, trash is the economy of the night for these folks.  Maybe it’s halfway a good thing that a lot of Chinese people will think nothing in tossing trash carelessly on to the street; the ming gongs will spring to life after hours and get the city sparkling, despite the stains, again for the morning.

In my basic Chinese, I sort of joked that “ming gong” (tone 2, tone 1) probably translated as “tomorrow industry”, meaning that the sweat from the common laborer was the one who’d provide the muscle to bring the country into a better world, day by day.  Well, no, it doesn’t have anything to do with this.  In fact, this is not the “ming” which means “tomorrow” or the “gong” which means “industry”.  I’m not really sure what it means, dang.  I’ll have to research this some more and add comments later!  Man, speaking of with, there are so many “gong” words which are tone 1.  It’s really hard to keep up:  “industry”, “public”, “company”, and “palace” are the ones that I’m aware of.

Well, might as well finish the story.  I arrived at the Huang Gang border.  Some guy, of course, saw me and said, “Airport?” and tried to take my suitcase.  Obviously, this wasn’t right; I had to cross over the footbridge just in front of me.  A quick, “Bu yong” and I was off.  The stairs leading up the bridge were lined with old beggars; I hadn’t seen such a pitiful scene in a while.  Arriving on the other side, I asked where the Sky Limo window was.  It was just a few booths down though, being 4:45am, they hadn’t arrived at the office yet.  The “limo” ride, actually a mini-van,  was quite comfortable, though we were held up at the Hong Kong border for about 45 minutes because one of the women in the van was pregnant.  I wasn’t sure exactly what she needed to do to pass through, but fortunately the journey from Huang Gang is only 25 minutes.  So I still arrived with enough time.  Thankfully, the security lines were short.

Right around 7:30 am, as I was working on some shredding exercises, I looked up at the video map and noticed that we were flying right over the North Cascades.  I opened my window hoping that I’d see a little sunrise.  There was enough sunrise at just the right time.  I spotted Mount Baker just as there was enough light.  After that, all the other peaks fell into place:  Glacier Peak, Johannesburg, Forbidden Peak, Columbia Peak and so on.  It was great looking down on my old stomping grounds and I had a sensation of the smallness of the world.

Since moving to the “Coastal City” neighborhood, I’ve become much more adept at riding the bus. I was a little skeptical about moving to Coastal City, having been so dependent on the subways before.  But, I’ve adapted well.  The busses, despite having a few with English announcements, are generally a tougher form of transportation than the subways.  The main reason is that all of the routes “maps” are not really maps; they’re just ordered names of locations.  And, those location names are only in Chinese characters.  So, if you only know how your destination sounds, you’re out of luck.

However, since I committed to sending text messages in Chinese to Chinese people, my character recognition has gotten good enough to where I can go to a bus stop, read a route map and generally know if a bus can take me roughly where I want to go.  I haven’t made a mistake yet and taken a bus to some bizarre location (that happened to Daryl on his most recent trip out here.  Took a couple of hours in hard rain to get back.  Daryl’s one of the few people I know who doesn’t speak Chinese brave enough to try the busses).  It’ll probably happen to me eventually.

Since returning, three new subway stations have opened along the main line, extending westward into the High Tech Park where the MS office is located.  There are many other stations still under construction and are set to open in a year or so (dang!).  The new stations are very nice.  Shenzhen is still rapidly transforming and it’s going to be a great city once all those subways are opened.  Fix the air and this will be a world class place.

Many people have been telling how good of a show that HBO’s Deadwood is.  Since I had no new DVD material that I was regularly watching, I decided to pick it up.  Not to mention, it would be a good diversion from working into the evening.  I scouted around the DVD places and learned that the name of the show is a direct translation:  “Dead” and “Wood”.  In Chinese, it’s “Si”, tone 3 (we don’t have this “i” sound in English; it’s not the same as the Spanish word for “yes”!), and “Mu”, tone 4 (Basically like a cow:  “Moo!” with a strong downward inflection (that’s what “tone 4″ means)).  So, this is pretty easy to pronounce correctly.

I didn’t buy anything right away.  But, I came back a week later to the place that had all three seasons with good quality and a good price.  I couldn’t find it, so I asked for “Si3 Mu4″.  Confused looks.  I explained a little more, “It’s an American TV show.  It’s called ‘DeadWood’.”  Instead, I was directed to someone else.  More confused looks.  I know I was pronouncing it correctly.  Eventually, someone handed me a piece of paper and a pen asked me to write it down in English.  Then we translated it.  “A!!!  Si Mu!”  Yeah, that’s what I was saying!

Anyway, I bought it, but as a continued experiment, I asked a few English-speaking Chinese if they could understand what I was saying.  Most of them weren’t sure.  One good response was “Dead Deer?”

See, it’s not that I was mispronouncing anything.  It’s just that Chinese is such a damn weird language that without the context, you can’t tell what I’m trying to say!  The sound “si”3 and “mu”3 are represented by multiple characters, so with so few words, how do you know for sure what I’m saying.  If I were better at Chinese, I would have said something like, “‘Si’ as when you die and ‘mu’ as what trees are made of.”

Some seventy or eighty years ago, as I understand it, there was a movement to do away with the Chinese characters and adopt some sort of alphabet, like the Western alphabet.  To demonstrate how necessary the characters were, a professor in Beijing wrote a nonsensical story that told about someone named Mr. Shi who lived in a stone hut and was addicted to eating lions.  Sounds weird, but the point was that although he used numerous characters to tell the story, there was only one phonetic sound (excluding the tones):  “Shi”.

See how messed up that is?  People who read the story can understand it fine, but if they hear it, they have no idea what’s being said.  Pretty crazy, huh?  Outside of maybe a short sentence, this isn’t conceivable in English.

The Chinese language is optimized for subterfuge, double meanings, and confusion.  No wonder Westerners here often get frustrated or just plain perplexed.  Maybe this is why Chinese have such a great reputation in negotiation and business; they are accustomed to wearing down opponents just by using frustrating language.