americantakeout
tasty bytes from China
Categories:

Archives:
Meta:
April 2024
M T W T F S S
« Nov    
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930  
01/23/11
Chenglish
Filed under: General
Posted by: @ 4:31 pm

P1180003

I can’t laugh at Chenglish because I know my Chinese sounds just as ridiculous. I can say a few key phrases such as “thank you” and “how do you flush this thing”? but that’s about it. The rest is Greek to me.

For starters, the language spoken in Kunming isn’t Mandarin or Cantonese, but an ethnic dialect all its own, a Chinese Creole so to speak.  It uses loads of fringe letters of the English alphabet, the ones that help you rack up the points in Scrabble, such as X, Z, Q and J.

But Chinese pronunciation is a whole different game.

Q isn’t the way we pronounce Q, but more like if you put “Ch”, “T” and “R” in a blender on the “phonetic puree” setting.  

Plus, there’s the whole tonal thing in the Chinese language. Giving a simple word the wrong tone can be disastrous. For instance, the number “4″ when mispronounced can easily turn into death.  This is why cell phone numbers that contain a lot of “4s” are less expensive than those containing easy to pronounce and lucky numbers such as “8″ (pronounced “bah”, yeah, like a sheep.

Yes, I admit, my midwestern mouth trips over sounds such as Woos (Woo is me, literally!) and Wuus (Street): Zo Gwuys (turn left) , Yo Gwuys (hang a right), and other impossible tongue twisters, “ Duō luó xi, wǒmen zài yě huí bù qù kānsàsī le”  (Dorothy, we’re not in Kansas anymore). Yet, I know enough survival Chinese to buy something at the market.

Jeff, on the other hand, got a T-shirt printed up that says “Ting Bu Don” meaning: I don’t understand Chinese.

This Chenglish sign is at Carrefour, the Chinese version of the Kroger Supermarket. It makes “this oldie ever smile big”. The Carrefour website is a cyber field of Chenglish land mines.  http://e-shop.carrefour.com.cn//product.do?action=listpro&catalogid=84

3 Responses to “Chenglish”

  1. fran Says:
    January 25th, 2011 at 6:27 am ha you oldies, you. lovin’ the blog.
  2. Jan Says:
    February 2nd, 2011 at 5:24 pm Jeff, love your TShirt Design :>)!
  3. Michael Irvine Says:
    February 15th, 2011 at 11:21 am I want to see the shirt! Love you both.

Leave a Reply