Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

An earlier post mentioned no tense in Mandarin as a bonus for the second language learner. It compared Romance languages and English. Now you can be happy you’re not learning Fyem, which I just came across here:

More verb forms, more second language-learning pain. (Although I’m guessing Fyem doesn’t use characters for a script, so maybe we should call it a tie).

[update Dec 29 2007 -- fixed spelling consistently to "Fyem" even though "Fyam" also appears to be legit]

[Sound files are all at the bottom of the post]

Wallowing is a vile, unworthy habit. You inevitably get sucked into it from time to time. But too often and you become, as GB Shaw put it,

a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy

It’s a choice you make every day. Whatcha gonna do: wallow, or create something? Your social environment strongly influences the decision. Conversations about life tend to go in one direction or the other, but not stay in the middle, whether you’re talking with your coworker, or your brother, or your barber, classmate, spouse, childhood friend… You end up on one side or the other of the continental divide, either wallowing in self-pity and loathing, or fired up to create something, do something, fight entropy.

But what pushes you one way or the other when you’re on the ridge? Read the rest of this entry »

OK, so the BJ office party makes free use of merry-making accouterments. Makes sense; they’re all made here.

This was my first Beijing holiday party, and my expectation was that, like everything else in the world, this cultural phenomenon would be heavily internationalized and sterilized, taking many cues from US culture.

And I was partly right. Aside from the noisemakers, it was like… A FULL-BLOODED WALL STREET OFFICE PARTY FROM THE 1970s, with a more equal mix of the sexes and Chinese characteristics.

As the glasses of Australian Shiraz washed down the běijīng kǎoyā (北京烤鸭), it became clear that the American-style sexual harassment lawsuit has yet to make its influence felt in cháoyángmén (朝阳门). No puritanical HR police here. The personnel department was more likely to be leading the frathouse “go-go-go-go-go!” as another full glass went down the hatch in traditional Chinese table-to-table style peer-pressured drinking.

But then again, maybe there was a little teetotalling influence from across the Pacific, because when we got to KTV, the harder stuff was gone and we ended the night on merely an endless stream of beer bottles.

Is this just my company?

[update just minutes after posting: had 潮 instead of 朝 in 朝阳门. oops]

From the recent deluge of email*

Dear SYZ: Is it unfathomably hard to learn Chinese, or is it actually laughably easy?
- Tone-deaf in Dōngzhímén

Dear TD in DZM

I feel your confusion. Daily. The short answer is, Yes. Another common answer is “Go to hell” (if you happen to ask someone who has just misread 农 for 衣 for the 29th time). Or maybe it should be “Idunno,” because I’m only a Stage 3 learner anyway.

But the following True/False quiz should clear a few things up, especially if we consciously skip all the frothing about what “Chinese” means and just focus on Mandarin as it’s spoken and written in Beijing.

[Note to Beijing-R fans: there's not much, but you can scroll straight down to the answer to #2 for the best érhuàyīn (儿化音) in the post.] Read the rest of this entry »

In your hometown, you pretty much know what everyone’s going to say before they say it. There’s really no new thing under the sun. In Eden Prairie, MN, the grocery bagger’s going to ask me about paper or plastic, the restaurant greeter’s going to apologize for my wait, and so on. It’s the flip side of knowing what to say in a given social situation — knowing what to listen for reduces the complexity of the task faced by your overtaxed linguistic processor.

But the farther you get from home, the more you have to adjust your expectations. Here are a couple I missed recently. Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago I tried to nominate Manglish as a term for Mandarin butchered by excessive influence of foreign sociolinguistic patterns, prosodic habits and so on.

Through an idle Google search I discover that “Manglish”, though, is a very well-established term for a dialect of English spoken in Malaysia, with 62,700 Google hits and its own Wikipedia entry. So what’s our word for Mandarin garbled by a non-native speaker? My vote is for Mandarish. Not quite as catchy as Manglish, but, with only 21 google hits, not too promiscuous in its semantic habits.

[Correction 12/9/07 - "Malay" to "Malaysia"]

Ah, language learning. It’s one thing to try to get the accent right. You can work on that every day in Beijing. But it’s another thing to know what to say in particular social situations.Like when you’re introduced to your brother-in-law’s coworker.

In the US: Nice to meet you
Beijing: Nǐ hǎo... [and what else???]

Is there something else to say? Well, maybe, but it’s pretty sure not to be a direct translation of “nice to meet you”. Read the rest of this entry »