Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

In this Beijing Sounds exclusive, we build on the story that Obama campaign computers had been compromised by “Russian or Chinese” hackers back in August.

We need to ask ourselves: might they have been invited in?

Fast forward to late October, one week before election time, when the Obama infomercial carried, according to our sources who have provided the recording, a communication from the Manchurian candidate himself to those who are likely his controllers. Before reading on, listen for yourself and see if you can understand the not-so-subtle message:

Asked for comment on this shocking statement — a revelation that would have been the ultimate October surprise had the Beijing Sounds production staff not displayed their usual incompetence and misplaced the tape in the cold storage room — Obama’s transition staff made the usual protestations that the president-elect’s statement was “taken out of context.”*

Careful readers of this blog may be clear-thinking enough to offer other explanations. We know that the recorder doesn’t lie. Even the most tone-unconscious and stuttering Zhonglish is a legitimate attempt at communication and I, for one, am horrified at the implications.

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*How far out of context? Well, I’d always wanted to see if you could do this kind of thing. It was actually pretty easy, although a little tedious and I can’t see myself doing it again anytime soon.
1. “wǒ” from “Juanita” [Update: forgot to mention -- I did take also slice off the initial /h/ in Obama's /hwanita/ to get this wǒ. Thanks to that /h/ I was able to re-use the word for huān (see #3 below). It's actually getting harder and harder to find /hw/ in American speech, it seems to me, and even when it's there it's not usually as breathy as the Mandarin /hw/.]
2. “xǐ” from “address the economics” by taking the “th” out of “the” — seems to give you something closer to the “x” sound than just a standard English /sh/ or /s/
3. “huān” is also from “Juanita”, the same utterance in fact
4. “Zhōng” is from “jobs that don‘t work” using the /j/ of “jobs” and the “on” of “don’t”
5. “guó” is the most tortuous, coming out of two sentences “…gets as many on the road as possible. And to reduce our dependence on foreign oil…” by snipping out all the stuff in the middle and that final dark /l/ (which was the trickiest part). There must have been a better way.

Voila: wǒ xǐhuān Zhōngguó (我喜欢中国 = I like China) — straight from the candidate’s lips.

[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 »

On YU Alternatives — anyone have recommendations?

Here’s a bit of the guest lecture today at YU:

[No sound? Click here]

sān jiā èr děngyú wǔ, yī jiā sān děngyú sì, sì jiā èr déngyú liù, wǔ jiā èr děngyú qī, sì jiā èr déngyú liù, yī jiā wǔ děngyú liù.
三加二等于五，一加三等于四， 四加二等于六，五加二等于七，四加二等于六，一加五等于六
3+2=5, 1+3=4, 4+2=6, 5+2=7, 4+2=6, 1+5=6

Rather elementary (first grade, in fact), but still a decent lecture, with extremely clear tones and a textbook example of 3rd-3rd tone sandhi (where the first of two consecutive third tones automatically becomes a second tone) on the last sum. Thereby

wǔ děngyú

becomes something that sounds like

wú děngyú

No doubt: I’m a YUniphile. But when reader Ellen writes in to ask for Mandarin study opportunities outside of YU…

I’ve been studying Mandarin for about 2 years as an adult learner in the States and am looking for an intensive summer program in China to focus on my speaking skills (my nightly prayer: dear any-power-that-is-listening, please, please help me with my tones). Do you have any to recommend to a middle-aged person determined to become marginally fluent? For business reasons, I’m inclined to look in Beijing but welcome suggestions in other places where there might be fewer English speakers.

… I have to admit I’m kind of at a loss, so she said I could pose the question to a wider audience. Does anyone out there have a recommendation?

Personally, my ideal program:

1. Forces communication. It should make the Zhonglish speaker get things done and get them done in Mandarin.

2. Involves Mandarin speakers who aren’t secretly trying to learn English. Common problem for native English speakers trying to learn any language — that their interlocutor is actually trying to use the opportunity to learn more English.

3. Emphasizes acquiring a reasonable level of competence in the spoken language before attempting to teach characters. Any curriculum teaching characters to beginners gets sent straight back to the dugout for some long, hard introspection.

Meeting these criteria is what makes YU so great — it certainly beats some of the alternatives cited earlier. However, some potential students may think the tuition is a bit steep.

Looking for ideas here, folks. Can anyone help?

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 »

On Beizzhing v. Bay-Jing oddsmaking and how English speakers are finally going to pronounce the name of this city anyway

By this time you’ve heard from their mothers and their aunts. You might as well admit it: you’re addicted. You’ve been watching the human interest pieces, lapping up the sappy music, the soft lighting, the black-and-white photos… You feel like you know both competitors intimately. Maybe you’ve even put aside your initial biases and followed the example of Beijing Sounds, which months ago declared a likely winner but in the same breath declared editorial disinterest. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Language correction as decoy

Those who think the sole purpose of language is communication are destined for disappointment and confusion. It’s not that language can’t serve that purpose, it’s just that it’s equally well suited to obfuscating, mollifying, incensing, distracting, humiliating… well, all those human activities so near to our hearts.

You’d hope this universal law of human behavior gets suspended when you’re speaking a second language. It’s hard enough to get your point across without worrying about ulterior motives of the person you’re speaking to.

You’d also hope that your affairs will prosper and your friends will be true. Read the rest of this entry »

A different way of thinking about how to put tones together

Let’s say you’re living in China’s Minnesota, the frigid dōngběi (东北 = northeast). You’ve come to Beijing for a bit of R&R and have met up with syz and his audio recorder. The idea is to talk linguistics and maybe record a random conversation or two along the way — fodder for the blog.

Suddenly after taxiing around Beijing for a bit, innocently explaining to the sījī (司机 = driver) where you’re from, syz interrupts your Mandarin train of thought with, “Hey, could I use some of this for the next episode of Zhonglish?”

What do you say? Was “Zhonglish” part of the bargain? Do you let the insult slide so as to achieve ever-lasting notoriety on the world’s most widely read (N=8) blog about the minutia of běijīnghuà?

Of course you do! Because syz has the most sympathetic ear you’ll ever find. His own thick tongue and disturbing (to him) inability to memorize hànzì make him eminently sympathetic to the difficulties of Mandarin. Anyway, calling your speech “Zhonglish” is no insult — it says so right here in the definition. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to S.H.E. we Zhonglish-speakers now apparently have our own hit song, complete with rap lite and formulaic key change in the last refrain. Hat tip to Granite Studio for the reference to the song as it was performed for the new year.

Key phrase:

全世界都在学中国话
quán shìjiè dōu zài xué zhōngguóhuà
The whole world is learning Chinese

Read the rest of this entry »

The first in a series. Part 1 — Tones

There’s really nothing fair about growing up as a native English speaker. The world wants to learn your language, no credit to you. But you, personally, get to reap all the benefits. You are invited to go to exotic places like oh, say, Latvia after you graduate from college. In the village of Vandzene, amidst the rolling hills and plentiful lakes of the Talsi region of Kurzeme, you get to “teach” English, although you have no teaching skills in anything, least of all English. You’re treated like a visiting dignitary, with clandestinely expedited access to everything. They’ve also pulled strings to pay you at the highest end of local wages, ironic in that, despite being grossly unfair to long-suffering, hard-working local teachers, it’s not enough to pay off an hour’s worth of interest on your student loans.

And BEST OF ALL, when your Latvian language skills reach the level of a butane-huffing 13-year-old who just got his teeth knocked out in a fight, you are paraded before the local media and adulated in the manner of a minor deity.

Not to single out Vandzene, really. The same story gets played out in Beijing, albeit with Chinese characteristics.

Thus today we present: Zhonglish! Revenge for every native Mandarin speaker and, by extension, for every non-native speaker of English around the world who has been blankly stared at, mocked, ignored, ostracized, discounted, looked down upon, trifled with, or made a fool of as they attempted legitimate communication in English.

(For the record, “hellooooooo” thrown in the direction of aforeign face does not fall under the category of “legitimate communication”)

Oh yeah, the post also includes some reasonably constructive analysis of the “All right, I know I sound like a foreigner speaking Mandarin, but why?” problem.

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"]