Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

[ADVERTISEMENT: don't forget to consider the Zhonglish / Chinglish conference on Nov 17 -- still haven't heard from some of you three regular readers]

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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.” Read the rest of this entry »

Eterrrnally grrrateful to pinyin.info for bringing Talk Like a Pirate Day to the attention of the ever-unvigilant writing staff here at the Beijing Sounds studios, who apparently missed this well-known international holiday entirely. Having once been credited with (accused of?) promoting R-fulness in the speaking of Mandarin, the editor is happy to adopt the holiday as his own by giving the staff the afternoon off beyond 4:30, handing them leftover moon cakes and bottles of milk (with smiley stickers over the well-known local brand name) as they walk out the door. Read the rest of this entry »

On the ineffable act of naming, the Beijing-R dissected by the white coats, and the ultimate Beijinger

Sometimes convergence happens.

Not the dream where you’re listening to God Save the Queen belted out by a punk cover band in your company’s cafeteria, talking to Grandma Gertrude about Suzie (who you liked in high school) who’s supposed to show up later in the evening, when suddenly Grandma confides in you that she’s been studying Mandarin (she began tutoring after her 92nd birthday). Excited, the two of you begin a Zhonglish conversation about the finer points of Beijing smog control during the Olympics. You discover that, yes, Grandma did read Imagethief’s smog recipe and laughed until her defibrillator went off. Then your wife comes in and you realize she was actually Suzie only somehow her name and ethnicity changed… But then: you’re awakening; the convergence begins to shimmer and fade away; the puzzle that was coming together turns out to be a box full of corner pieces.

No, this time it’s real convergence. Truly. The evidence is laid out, irrefutable, in three books that happen to be on my desk connecting me back to an e-mail discussion on -ngr from several months ago. The converging ideas from
- Osho on Buddha
- Bohm on meaning
- Pinker on naming
… all line up to illuminate and preserve the mysteries of the er-ized /ng/, i.e. the -ngr, the sound that differentiates tāng and tāngr, like this:


(which comes from this post)

It’s not the kind of convergence that gives you mourning clothes and doom buttons, but it’s convergence all the same, and no one can take that away from you. Unless, that is, you start to doubt yourself… Read the rest of this entry »

Zhōu Yǒuguāng on a Beijing talk show; 4=2 in Beijing; Pinyin and topolects; schadenfreude

Everyone knows that literacy in Mandarin means hour after brutal hour of memorizing and practicing a script whose design clearly shows the influence of sadistic genius. Here are a couple of favorites from the torture rack: two pairs of characters that have absolutely no connection except that they just might possibly, to the benighted, appear to be vaguely similar in form to one another.

衣农， 日曰

Well, at least we think we know what Mandarin literacy means. But do we really? Could you possibly get away with achieving literacy through something less than masochism? Read the rest of this entry »

More on the “sounds” front: a Beijing dialect vocalization.

Learning what animals say in languages other than your native one is always jolting. Consider, if you will, the utter silliness of Mandarin-speakers thinking dogs should say “wàng wàng” when everyone knows they say “woof woof”.

After a few illogical discussions of that sort, you eventually acknowledge that animal sounds are just convention and try to shrug off your prejudices. But it’s disconcerting to realize there’s a whole class of sounds that you think of as natural, almost innate, that are actually quite conventionalized and culturally specific.

Here’s one from a category I hadn’t thought of: car movement. In the US, the police car of the average seven-year-old almost certainly says “woooo, wooo” while it goes “zoom zoom” or something of the sort. But check out this Beijing police car, zooming in the vernacular: Read the rest of this entry »

Regarding neighborhood enmity, L=N, and other hútòng realities.

Reality is never quite what you think it is, let alone the way you relate it to others. To tell a story you have to simplify, abstract, highlight and gloss over, of course. That’s the nature of storytelling. Trouble is, a lot of times what you end up with is wishful thinking, platitudes & nostalgia — an idealized reality that isn’t real at all. Read the rest of this entry »

A sound you almost certainly will get to hear in Beijing someday, if you’re so fortunate, is the sound of Lǐ Chuányùn 李传韵 fiddling. The Qingdao native is a world phenomenon and the recipient of a loan instrument from the Stradivari society. What you won’t hear from Beijingers, though, is his particular flavor of Mandarin. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks, all, for the feedback this week. Between huffing virus-laden recirculated toxic fumes (aka flying) and battling a drooling-in-meetings case of jet lag, I’ve only had time for a few responses up until now.

It’s kind of shocking what happens to email/comment volume when well-trafficked blogs give you a plug. Special thanks to recently unmasked Jeremiah of the inimitable Granite Studio for mentioning Beijing Sounds. That mention was picked up by Jeremy of blogosphere stalwart Danwei, whose “Beijing-obsessed” line was spot on. So the feedback floodgates were opened, at least by Beijing Sounds standards.

I’m particularly smitten with two categories of comment that go to prove some people are even more obsessed with běijīnghuà than I am.

1. Deeper Thinking

To R or not to R? Apparently, some people have thought pretty hard about érhuàyīn 儿化音:

Sima wrote a treatise to get you started on the semantics of it all, with an especially good observation about fànguǎnr 饭馆儿 versus túshūguǎn 图书馆 — this is how linguistic meaning gets created. Elisa responded with another example, which my closest Beijinger informant tells me is not just běijīnghuà, but old-timer běijīnghuà at that. Then Brendan (of bokane.org fame) topped it off with a link to the best “bèir 倍儿” ever uttered in the history of cinema.

What do you call Mandarin butchered by non-native speakers?

I’d nominated then pleonastically defended “mandarish” but now I’m kicking myself for not thinking of Shaan’s approach of coining a Mandarin word for the task — it’s certainly a better parallel to “Chinglish”, which is fundamentally a combination of English syllables.

2. Corrections

I appreciate everyone who’s sent in a correction, by email or by comment. Apparently Beijing Sounds is a target-rich environment. My typesetter’s on notice that any more slacking will result in suspension without pay.

For the most part, I just make a note and correct the entry, but William had the observation that the mistake in this entry

一减一加五等于无

gives “the result of the calculation as 无 wu2 nothing instead of 五 wu3 five”. Amusing.

I happened to have lunch the other day with some university students, a couple of Guangdongers and a Shanghainese, in one of those Rolex-Louis Vuitton malls that clutter central Beijing, the kind where shopgirls outnumber customers 23 to 1 on gleaming floor after floor of luxury goods, until you get to the food court and find yourself breathing into your tablemate’s ear, close enough to eat the shrimp out of his chopsticks and surrounded by wàidìrén [外地人, outsiders, i.e. people from outside Beijing] shouting order numbers and bussing tables. Astoundingly, we found seats for the whole group, and as the conversation turned to language, (inevitable if you lunch with syz), I asked if they’d been trying to learn any běijīnghuà [北京话, Beijing dialect] while going to school here.

I was rewarded with looks of confusion. Yeah, of course they felt like their pǔtōnghuà [普通话, standard Mandarin] was improving. But were they actually learning běijīnghuà?! Of course not. All běijīnghuà really means anyway, they said, is that you have to juǎn shétou [卷舌头, curl your tongue] when you’re speaking pǔtōnghuà.

This is typical. Non-Beijingers describe the pronunciation of the natives as tongue-twisting, and it’s pretty literally right. The Beijing retroflex is somewhat like the American Midwest R as in “car”; it gets tacked onto and into words and certainly isn’t suited to everyone’s second language tongue. (Listen to this post for some good examples)

The general perception among outsiders is that it’s just a way of speaking. It doesn’t really mean anything. HOWEVER, my two experts for today’s post, one six and one sixty-ish, say it ain’t so. There are words you can say with or without the Beijing-R (commonly called érhuàyīn 儿化音 or érhuàyùn 儿化韵), but often the different pronunciations really mean something different.

As a bonus, in one of the examples today, tāngr 汤儿, the Beijing-R fuses with an /ng/, turning it into a truly sublime consonant. Even the spelling /ngr/ doesn’t quite do it justice, because the /r/ is so thoroughly mixed in with the /ng/ that it really becomes it’s own special sound. When Dr. Seuss talked about the letters after Z, I’m sure this is what he had in mind. In fact: I’ll isolate it just so you can hear the two right next to each other, first tāng then tāngr:

But back to our story. The érhuàyīn 儿化音 really does change things. In the first example it’s an actual difference in meaning: tāng 汤 and tāngr 汤儿 simply refer to two different liquids. The former means broth/soup, while the latter is the liquid that comes with your non-soup dishes, something cooked out of the meat or vegetables that you might spoon onto your rice. Sauce / gravy, perhaps, but incidental — not consciously made for the purpose of being sauce by itself.

In the second example Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

My daughter adores her art class. What’s not to love? Crayons, paints, bits of colored paper, bows and ribbons, stickers, playdough, glue – everything a five-year-old could love as long as you’re not a five-year-old like I was, who thought art class was like a bow tie for your birthday: not just a phenomenal waste of time but a lost opportunity.Playdough, for example

It’s not just the materials — her instructor is an inspiring character too. Teacher Jing 竟老师 [Jǐng lǎoshī] is strict but forgiving, granting freedom with boundaries and direction. There’s no whole language-like let’s-learn-art-naturally philosophy here. 竟老师 teaches technique and you’re here to learn technique, not to run amok.

Here she is, giving some end-of-class instructions. Beijing-R (儿化音 érhuàyīn) fans can hear a full R on display in her speech: wénr and huàr and ménr instead of wén and huà and mén.

Read the rest of this entry »