Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

Olympic sloganeering & ingenuousness, Mandarin acquisition & n-closing, the Catch-22 of tones

If you’re a return reader to this blog of questionable taste, obscure subject matter and infrequent update, you probably have an appetite for a good cynical rant. Not that you’d be able to feed the habit on this url, mind you: as a recovering cynic, the editor-in-chief takes pride in methodically expurgating sarcastic ledes that might degenerate into farting about the ignorance or folly or Pollyannish behavior of some group or another. But old habits have a way of sneaking in through the side remark, the choice bit of lexicon, the polysemous blog title — the territorial pissings of a cynical alter ego that subvert the editor’s best intentions and signal to the ranks that Optimism shall not yet overcome.

Pity the editor, for a moment. As any recovering cynic will tell you, it’s one thing to suppress knee-jerk cynicism, snarky comments, sigh-heaving…. It’s quite another to move from “absence of negative” territory and into the realm of the Affirmative, i.e. to write something ingenuously positive or even (dare you say it) optimistic. Every time the valiant and reformed editor tries to assert his rightful dominance and blog about how such-and-such might make the world a better place, or at least how this-and-that would make the day easier to get through, the subversive cynic starts muttering about Lei Feng or the like — insinuating that you’re on the path to a world of naive optimism, in which the calculating use just-so stories to manipulate the gullible.

All this is a long-winded explanation for the notable lack of Beijing Sounds Olympic material in the run-up to 8/8/8. Let’s be honest, it’s even hard to utter the word without conjuring up a stream of cynical imagery: the questionable judging, the thuggery (and subsequent celebrity female boxing), the East Germans. And that’s all pre-Beijing.

But today, thanks to Chris Pereira and his “Work in Progress” blog, this editor has made an Olympic effort to break through the naivety of cynicism and come up with a genuinely positive theme for what’s likely to be the one and only Beijing Sounds Olympic post. Living vicariously through Chris’s optimism, it includes…

♦ an uncynical twist on the ubiquitous Olympic theme
♦ some positive thinking on Mandarin vocabulary acquisition, with Zhonglish-N and some érhuàyīn
♦ an amusing take on self-conscious Zhonglish

One world, two memes

Well, here they are. 8/8 is…

1. The greatest thing since Siddhartha’s realization under a fig tree

2. A celestial alignment of everything evil in modern society

With the dialog bifurcated at this level, it’s no wonder “one world, one dream” generates the eye-roll. Everyone who’s spent more than a layover in PEK Terminal 3 knows the meaning of the Olympics is more subtle than all that, but too many commentators don’t fit the category. In reaction to the widespread literary thuggishness, the cynic takes out his peevishness on the slogan , aligning it with everything that’s tone-deaf about either the China-bashing from the outside or the jingoism from within.

同一个世界，同一个梦想
Tóng yī ge shìjiè, tóng yī ge mèngxiǎng
One world, one dream

It doesn’t really have to be that way, whether for the event or the slogan itself. When Victor Mair, China scholar and language commentator and hardly an unquestioning friend of the Beijing government, dissects the slogan for Pinyin.info, he offers a couple of insightful comments that a naive cynic might have a heyday with:

1. It appears to have been translated from English

2. The word used for dream, mèngxiǎng “more often than not implies ‘vain hope’.”

But in a fit of what one might interpret as optimism, he doesn’t stop there. Despite the slogan’s ungainliness, he notes, he is “happy that the powers-that-be decided to write the Olympic slogan in vernacular Mandarin rather than in Literary Sinitic (Classical Chinese)… [which] would mark a definite step backward in the attempt to democratize the written language.”

If Victor Mair says it’s not all evil and nonsense, I’m ready to listen.

Then there’s Chris Pereira, a Chinese lit student posting ingenuous videos on youtube and personally responding to the inevitable trolls. Sheesh. Asking the recovering cynic to suspend old habits for such a character is like asking Bill Clinton to maintain decorum on his wife’s campaign trail, right?

Not really. Chris is one of those rare breeds who, by blending in humor, can get away with some optimism that would seem pretty hokey otherwise. Take a watch or click here if the video isn’t working:

Absorb, don’t perfect

Chris has also got an optimistic approach, and some realistic thoughts, regarding vocabulary acquisition — probably a pleasant change from the whining about characters one usually has to slog through on Beijing Sounds. His is a message about the 80% rule. “Never demand a 100% understanding… You’ve got to get a feeling for how language is used.”

Now that’s my kind of learning. It’s cousin to the anything-above-a-B-means-you’ve-wasted-your-time principle that allowed me to hold down a half time job during the “full-time” MBA.

You can give his whole vocab-acquisition method a listen here, and there are some good ideas. But Beijing Sounds is Zhonglish Central (see here, here, here, here and here for the evolution), so digression is in order, although I do so with the usual disclaimer that the point is to learn with, not to poke fun at, the Zhonglish-speakers of the world who are almost universally far better than I at speaking Mandarin.

1. What’s going on with the N?

The most important Zhonglish question is why the foreigner sounds non-native. In this case, one of the giveaways is the closed N in the middle of certain words. A closed N is what most English speakers would say defines an N. But Mandarin has another flavor, at least in Beijing (and I’m pretty sure it’s widespread — anyone know how far this can be generalized?) This is the open N, in which the air can still flow through the mouth while making an N, so your tongue is not really sealing off the airflow but just getting close enough so it sounds kinda like an N. How would you know if your N is open or closed? If you can plug your nose and still get out some N-sound, then it’s open. The auditory effect is subtle, but distinct. To a native English speaker it often sounds like the open N is just not being pronounced at all, or that it’s sort of a “lazy” pronunciation. A good parallel is the L in English, which seems a lot like other languages’ Ls when it’s at the beginning of a syllable (Lazy Loafer) but does dark things at the end (tall tale). That the average English speaker isn’t even aware of the difference makes it all the more frustrating for learners of the language.

RULE? I think the open N always occurs at the end of syllables, and the closed N at the beginning. Let me know if you think there are exceptions to this.

In certain words the effect of an open N becomes quite obvious. “Pīnyīn” is one of the best examples. In the mouth of a fast-talking Beijinger a few posts back, it turns into a single syllable with a weird vowel. For the Zhonglish speaker, on the other hand, it turns ordinary words into markers of foreignness. Here are a few from the vocab-building video, with the double N marking the closed N where it should be open (yeah, not IPA, but if someone wants to comment and help out here, much appreciated):

词都能翻译差不多后再去看课文。
Cí dōu néng fāNNyì chàbuduō hòu zài qù kàn kèwén.
After you can translate all the words, go look at the text again.

会翻译之后我再盖住汉语那边。
Huì fāNNyì zhīhòu wǒ zài gàizhù hànyǔ hàNNyǔ nàbian [thanks Randy for correction]
After I can translate, I cover up the Mandarin on that side.

然后雪上加霜
ráNNhòu xuě shàng jiā shuāng…
and then putting frost on top of snow…

然后，把不懂得词查出来
ráNNhòu bǎ bùdǒngde cí cháchūlái
Then, look for the words you don’t know

2. The non-Beijing R

One other thing that struck a chord with these R-sensitive ears: the use of érhuàyīn (儿化音 = R-ization / adding in an R sound) with xué (学 = study). Not something I recall hearing in Beijing.

我们今天要讨论的问题就是如何学好语言。
wǒmen jīntiān yào tǎolùnde wèntí jiùshì rúhé xué(r) hǎo yǔyán
The question we want to discuss today is how to study languages well

但你如果真的想学好那个语言的话
Dàn nǐ rúguǒ zhēnde xiǎng xué(r) hǎo yǔyánde huà
But if you really want to learn that language well…

Now Chris’s website says he’s studying in Zhengzhou, Henan, so is it possible he’s picking up some érhuàyīn that’s just different? Or maybe the ears are just crusting over like usual.

Tones: the less you know’em, the more you need’em

Now the encore: here’s Chris with a self-conscious parody of Zhonglish in which he’s trying to speak without tones. The video asks, perhaps tongue in cheek, how tones could be so important if you can still understand what he’s saying. Ah, precisely the Catch-22 in the tone-learning debate: the more you can speak, the less important they are.

Now don’t quote that out of context. Beijing Sounds is widely on the record for believing in the importance of trying to learn the tones of each word as you acquire it, and trying to put the tones together in context. But that doesn’t mean I think the toneless speech is incomprehensible. The biggest problems with tones happen to beginning Mandarin students. It’s the one-word communication that really screws you, e.g. “shui”. Given the wrong context (and especially a lack of visual cues) the native speaker doesn’t know if you want a cup of water or want to go to sleep. But if you’re handy enough to put together “wo yao shui jiao,” no one’s going to make that mistake.

The other problem with the video’s question, if you want to take it literally, is that this hardly qualifies as “toneless” speech. He really does use more tones than he wants to, and it’d be interesting to analyze which words he actually puts the right tone on and why. But fortunately for those of you not yet comatose, the editor has deemed this post too long and six weeks past deadline, so it’ll have to wait for another day (/month).