[ADVERTISEMENT: don't forget to consider the Zhonglish / Chinglish conference on Nov 17 -- still haven't heard from some of you three regular readers]
—–
Life is like a karaoke club — you always think you sound a bit better than you really do.
A karaoke club is like life — you can get away with a lot more foolishness than you think.
Extra Beijing Sounds credits — BJS Bucks — to the first reader who identifies a KTV where you and your favorite èrnǎi* (二奶 = mistress) can sing along to Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend. According to Shanghaiist (h/t to Danwei), Lavigne is poised to make a lot more than mere BJS Bucks by localizing her product with some nips and tucks of Zhonglish, “as well as Japanese and five other European languages: Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese.”
Well, nothing wrong with serving the needs of the market, says the marketer in syz.
Zhonglish Sampling
But how about that Zhonglish? Unfortunately you can’t hear the youtube version that Shanghaiist posted cuz, well…
Where’s good old-fashioned pirated content when you need it?! (Oh yeah, Baidu, probably.) The Danwei recording is still available, but doesn’t have as much quality Zhonglish, so what options are left but to ACTUALLY PURCHASE THE MUSIC LEGALLY.
Yes, that’s right. The BJS Studios have sent an entire American dollar, which is actually worth something at present, to Steve Jobs in exchange for the honor of being the second iTunes purchaser, behind Avril’s mom, of the Mandarin version of Girlfriend.
Thank the overflowing studio coffers.
Not only that, but in the interest of
a) not being shanghaid by Sony BMG
b) avoiding the “but is it music?” debate
… I’m posting not the entire piece but just a clip of the precious Zhonglish that concerns us here today. Let’s have a listen:
Hey hey you you… [ok, I'm skipping the echo girls from now on]wǒ bùxǐhuān nǐ nǚpéngyou
我不喜欢你女朋友
I don’t like your girlfriendnǐ xūyào yīge xīnde
你需要一个新的
You need a new onewǒ zěnme huì shì nǐde nǚpéngyou?
我怎么会是你的女朋友?
How can I be your girlfriend?riff
wǒ zhīdao nǐ xǐhuān wǒ
我知道你喜欢我
I know you like meshì yīge mìmi
是一个秘密
It’s a secret**wǒ yào dāng nǐde nǚpéngyou
我要当你的女朋友
I want to be your girlfriendriff
wǒ bùxǐhuān nǐ nǚpéngyou
我不喜欢你女朋友
I don’t like your girlfriendnǐ xūyào yīge xīnde
你需要一个新的
You need a new onewǒ zěnme huì shì nǐde nǚpéngyou?
我怎么会是你的女朋友?
How can I be your girlfriend?riff
wǒ zhīdao nǐ xǐhuān wǒ
我知道你喜欢我
I know you like meshì yīge mìmi
是一个秘密
It’s a secretwǒ yào dāng nǐde nǚpéngyou
我要当你的女朋友
I want to be your girlfriendfeedback
“Mortifying”?
The iTunes reviews follow the predictable anonymous-poster pattern of love/hate, with perhaps an unusually heavy emphasis on the latter. A quick sampling:
“I might buy this version just for laughs”
“umm… wow… that sucked”
“How bad does a song have to be that you need to make 5 different versions in hopes SOMEONE will buy it.”
but then there’s her PR firm (visualize a frantic 38-yr-old marketing manager and her associate: “We’ve gotta do something to fight these negatives — hey! yeah, we can make up positive comments! but — well, it’s gotta sound real. We don’t want to come off like a bunch of stiffs in the industry. What’s that? Yeah, great idea! Kids are always using the abbreviations! OMG! so cool…”) –
“OMG, can’t believe she has a Mandarin version! I can really understand what she’s saying! I think this is really creative…definitely catchy and worth buying. Avril’s talent is amazing!”
BJS takes no editorial position on the quality of the music or the moral value of localization. We do, however, take issue with blanket statements about anyone’s Zhonglish — and there are plenty of those:
“you can’t even understand the words”
“a disgrace of chinese/mandarin speakers”
“a complete insult to the language”
Is it as bad as all that? Could Lavigne’s manager, as quoted from Shanghaiist, be making it all up?
In order to get the intonation and meter just right, she spent hours studying recordings by foreign language singers. Once Lavigne felt comfortable, she headed into the studio with a tutor and spent “a couple of hours nailing it”
The advantage of doing Zhonglish in music, of course, is that you get a freebie: no tone worries. That’s the “instant Zhonglish improvement” guaranteed in the title of this post. You, too, could have some of the Zhonglish privileges afforded to the likes of Avril Lavigne, just by stepping foot into your local KTV.
Now clearly her pronunciation is lacking a Beijing lilt. But why? For analysis, we start once again with Chao’s Grammar of Spoken Chinese (also referenced here, here and here).
Most English-speaking learners of Chinese favor the retroflexes (they usually pronounce them too palatally, anyway, thus making them sound like palatals to start with).
If you’ve heard much Zhonglish, you’re familiar with what he’s saying: the Zhonglish-speaker tends to meld the sh of shì and the x of xī into a single, palatalized, English-imitating sh-sound. So how does Avril do? [first name basis is OK now, right? we're all Zhonglish speakers today] Listen to her first three Xs, repeated for your listening pleasure:
wǒ bùxǐhuān nǐ nǚpéngyou, nǐ xūyào yīge xīnde
In this sample, the Zhonglish analysts actually give her a solid B for the discipline not to “favor the retroflexes”. Arguably there’s a bit of tongue movement in that direction, but it’s not, I think, what gives her the distinctive Zhonglish flavor. It’s more her vowels that give her away. For example the “ao” of xūyào uses the American/Canadian diphthong rather than the Mandarin, so [aʊ̯] instead of [ɑʊ̯] if I got the IPA right. It also sounds like there’s a bit of native language influence in the “huan” of “bùxǐhuān”. As we all know, /hw/ seems a bit endangered in English, with lots of people (but not this eastern Washingtonian) thinking that which & witch sound the same. And even holdouts like me generally don’t have a problem with considering the /h/ optional. But it’s not optional in Mandarin, and its omission seems salient in this case.
Overall, if I had to point to one feature that sounds most -glish and least Zhong, it’s the “zhīdao” of “wǒ zhīdao nǐ xǐhuān wǒ”. Here’s your clip:
The “ao” has the same [aʊ̯] problem mentioned above. More importantly, the rhoticization of “zhī” is very much from the rhotic-English tradition; it’s not the Beijing-R. I wish I could describe it in more detailed phonetic terms, but I lack the knowledge. Can anyone do it justice? For the time being, suffice it to say that, as much as there’s similarity between the Beijing and American R, they are definitely not the same and it becomes quite apparent in situations like this.
In fairness to Avril, though, I’m not sure any of this analysis would help someone in her position, who presumably has zero Mandarin background and wants to spend enough time to get it roughly right in a song. Would you tell her to use “no R”? To say something like “Juh - dow”? That might actually come out worse.
One more twist: Out of curiosity, I emailed the sound file above (all Mandarin, no English, no context) to a friend who hails from around Xi’an and who, like me, has no knowledge of pop culture in any form. I asked him what he thought of the accent:
F: standard chinese
Syz: listen again carefully and see if you think it’s possible she’s a foreigner
F: can’t hear an accent
Syz: she actually doesn’t know any mandarin
F: she’s good
Syz: i’m pretty sure i hear an accent. listen to how she says 知道
F: yeah, that i could hear. but it’s a song
Beijing dialect it may not be, but this is a pretty strong refutation of any blustering about how her Mandarin is “incomprehensible.” So as with every Zhonglish analysis, we’ll end with a toast to anyone, including a blatantly self-promoting pop singer, who’s willing to put some Zhonglish on the line for public analysis.
————–
*Why with the èrnǎi? It just feels more appropriate. Maybe something to do with the lyrics? To pare it down: “I don’t like your girlfriend! I think you need a new one. I could be your girlfriend. I know that you like me. Don’t you know what I could do to make you feel alright? Don’t pretend — I think you know I’m damn precious. And hell yeah, I’m the mother fuckin’ princess. I can tell you like me too and you know I’m right. She’s like, so, whatever. You could do so much better. I think we should get together now.”
**I’m guessing this should have been “bùshì yīge mìmi” [it's NOT a secret] to be consistent with the English, but I can’t hear any “bu” there at all.
Comments 6
If it’s true that she had no prior knowledge of Mandarin and spent only a few hours practising this, then I’d say her performance is pretty darn good. Certainly many people would need much longer exposure to the language to reach this level of accuracy.
True, singing obviates the need for observing tones, but since she is a professional singer and therefore has a keen sense of pitch, I’ve got to think she could pick up the tones of Mandarin easily if she tried.
Posted 02 Nov 2008 at 11:09 am ¶“pretty darn good” — I agree and I shoulda said that explicitly at some point.
Human psychology is funny in the way that it loves to snipe, in this case about her Mandarin. Sheesh, there’s a lot to complain about in the song if you want to do that. But (my guess is) people complain about the pronunciation because they’re pretty sure most other English-speakers reading their comments won’t be able to call them on it. Others have no idea if it’s good or bad. But just a few minutes ago I got re-confirmation from none other than Mrs. BJS herself. After listening to the clip, she said she had no idea it was not a native Chinese speaker. That’s two for two now.
Posted 02 Nov 2008 at 6:57 pm ¶I agree that the overall quality of the Chinese here is good, and certainly comprehensible. One reason that some native speakers may not recognize that the singer is non-native is that pop songs are so highly produced these days, with all kinds of digitized effects made to the vocal as well as the instrumental tracks, that slight features of a non-native accent might not stand out amid all the other distortions. For example, in this song, there seems to be some kind of digital editing or compression going on in the phrase “nǐde nǚpéngyou”; the “de” is shortened and sort of overlapped with the surrounding syllables.
To my ear, the most salient marker of an English accent is one that syz didn’t mention: the first vowel of “xūyào”. This is a high front rounded vowel in Mandarin (pinyin ü, IPA [y]), but Lavigne pronounces it more like a back English “oo” (IPA [u]).
Posted 10 Nov 2008 at 12:46 am ¶Maybe I shooyao a new set of ears, Zev — it is a pretty sorry ü and I didn’t give it much thought before. To my ear the zhī is still worse, but that might be just because my own ü is pretty weak.
Good point about the overproduction too. When you chop up something enough, eventually no one’s going to have any idea if you’re a native speaker. Right, Barack?
Posted 11 Nov 2008 at 6:47 am ¶I do hear what you hear with the zhī, and indeed the same thing with the shì. Both are pronounced to rhyme with the English word “shirr” (a favorite of egg-lovers). The vowel of the English is lower, more of a rhotacized schwa, while the vowel of the Chinese is higher, the jaw not changing position from the articulation of the consonant to the vowel.
I’ve often wondered if Southern Californians might have an easier time with the Chinese ü vowel, since in that dialect /u/ is fronted pretty far when between two alveolar consonants (think “duuuude”). But it probably doesn’t transfer.
Posted 11 Nov 2008 at 7:14 am ¶Düüüüüd that is, like, a totally cool analogy. I almost think it might work as a teaching aid.
Great explanation about the R too. Playing around with the vowel makes all the difference.
Posted 11 Nov 2008 at 7:41 am ¶Post a Comment