Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

The following is a guest post by Randy Alexander, who more frequently (but not with any great frequency) posts at Echoes of Manchu. This is part 1 of 2 (go to part 2).

We’ve been seeing the word “Chinglish” all over the place lately, especially in reference to Beijing cleaning up English signs to prepare for the Olympics. But there’s another kind of Chinglish that is unseen: that which is uttered daily by the estimated over 300,000,000 English speakers (well, learners mostly) in China. Here we’re talking about spoken Chinglish, which has almost nothing to do with translation, little to do with incorrect word choice, but everything to do with pronunciation.

The mistranslated signs that we’ve been seeing are funny, sure, but they don’t pack the world-changing doom that Chinglish pronunciation does. Consider the fact that the number of English speakers/students in China is greater than the whole population of the US (and not everyone speaks English in the US). Add to that the US’s slow economic growth rate (63% from 1990-2006) versus China’s fast rate (327% in the same period). Can you see what’s coming? Don’t try to turn away! Denying it will get you nowhere. It’s happening whether you like it or not:

CHINGLISH IS GOING TO BE THE WORLD’S NEXT GLOBAL “LANGUAGE”!

OK, now let’s fast-forward and just say we’ve already passed through Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief about this and have finally accepted our fate. What does it really mean?

Scenario: you’re on your first vacation to China, and you’ve been walking all over the place, sampling the local food and drinking lots of nice Chinese tea. All the new experiences are so wonderful that you thought you’d just hold it a little while longer, but now that bladder-pressure alarm is screaming for attention. You approach a friendly-looking Chinese man on the sidewalk and, with as much patience as your bladder will allow you, you smile and slowly and carefully ask”Excuse me, do you speak English?”

The man smiles and nods enthusiastically, looking like he understands you perfectly, and says:

You’re not completely clear about what he just said, but encouraged by his friendliness, you carefully add “Could you please tell me where the nearest washroom is?”

“Ah” he nods with an understanding smile, then looks off somewhere and says:

Your smile fades and you begin to look desperate. He gives you a reassuring look and speaks a little more slowly this time:

Your knees buckle. It’s over. Forget about the bathroom. Where’s the nearest underwear shop?

Wetting your pants is downright embarrassing. But not being able to understand your native language is inconceivable. “What?”, you protest. “He wasn’t speaking English!”

Oh, but he was, he was! He learned it from this book:

In April, 2007, Victor Mair mentioned this book in a post on Language Log, describing it as one of his most prized possessions: “a little handbook of some 240 pages that was published in Xi’an, Shaanxi in 1993.”

Prof. Mair also posted a scan of what it looks like on the inside.

On the scanned example page in Prof. Mair’s book, there are six sentences transcribed into Chinglish. They are given in English and then in Chinese characters. That’s right! They’re using Chinese characters to write English! How can they do that?! Well, basically for each English syllable, they find the Chinese syllable that they think most closely matches it, and then they choose a Chinese character that uses that syllable. To a Chinese who doesn’t know any English, it looks like a godsend. There’s only one big problem: using only Chinese sounds to make English sentences will pretty much ensure that no English speaker will have any idea what you’re trying to say.

I’ve reproduced the English sentences, and their Chinese character transcriptions below. I have also added pinyin, which Prof. Mair’s book lacks, and recordings of a Chinese television announcer (who incidentally had no idea that what he was reading was supposed to be English) saying the Sino-fied sentences, so you can hear how ridiculous this is:

1. Let’s keep in touch.

莱茨 凯普因 踏气

(láicí kǎipǔyīn tàqì)

2. Yes, of course.

业丝 厄弗 靠斯

(yèsī èfú kàosī)

3. Would you please speak slowlier (faster)?

乌得油 普利斯 斯批克 斯楼累儿(发斯特儿)

(wūdéyóu pǔlìsī sīpīkè sīlóulèir (fāsītèr))

4. Where is the toilet, please?

外厄儿 衣斯 热 涛雷特 普利斯

(wài’èr yīsī rè tāoléitè pǔlìsī)

5. The washroom is over there, across the road.

热 乌我细入娒 衣斯 欧吾儿 热爱尔 厄克若斯 热 若欧得

(rè wūwǒxìrùmǔ yīsī ōuwú’ér rè’ài’ěr èkèruòsī rè ruò’ōudé)

6. What are you doing now?

沃特 阿油 度英 闹

(wòtè ā yóu dùyīng nào)

Note that in #2, sī is represented by two different characters: 丝 and 斯. In #3 累(lèi) is used while #4 uses雷(léi).

Now you’re no doubt thinking that Prof. Mair’s little book was published 15 years ago and certainly English education in China has progressed since then. There can’t be books like that around anymore, can there be?

In April 2006 while waiting in a bus station, I saw this:

I promptly bought the book so I could show the graduate students I was currently teaching how not to study English pronunciation. This book has the same title, and most of the same phrases on the front as Prof. Mair’s book. But this book is 314 pages, and was published in Harbin, Heilongjiang, in 2005. It has color-coded writing and little decorations on the pages. It seems to be an updated version of the one Prof. Mair has, including pinyin and even IPA, but it is stripped of any mention of its original author or publisher. The fact that Xi’an and Harbin are quite far apart in space, and 1993 and 2005 are quite far apart in time, and the fact that I bought my little book in a bus station and not a bookstore, point to the notion that these little books, using Chinese sounds to approximate English, are all over the country, and have been for quite a long time. Worse than that, I remember seeing a xeroxed textbook in New York City about eight years ago that used this same method. My mother-in-law (yuèmǔ) was taking English classes with it. And on a trip to the bookstore a few weeks ago, I saw similar books (different publishers) for teaching Spanish, French, Italian, and even Cantonese and other Chinese “dialects”. So this method of using Chinese characters to learn English and other languages is a lot more widespread than one might think.

This is part 1 of 2 (if you’d like to comment, please go to part 2).