You realize just how related the Chinese and English languages aren’t when you come across transliterated words. Using Chinese syllables to pronounce English words often results in something completely unrecognizable and counterintuitive to native English speakers; we could never guess what the original English word was, and, if we’ve studied any Chinese ourselves, we often feel we could come up with alternative transliterations that make much more sense.

“Qiáo ěr” (乔尔) is “Joel”, for example, but “zhōu ōu” is one of a couple alternatives that sound closer to me. “Obama” is “ào bā mǎ” (奥巴马, like “ow! bama”) even though in Chinese you could easily transliterate the vowels almost exactly (“ōu bā mǎ” / 欧巴马). The other day one of my students did this in reverse as a joke. He held up a sign for me to read that said: “Pieces war found.” To a Chinese ear it sounds like “pì shì wǒ fàngde” (屁是我放的), which basically means, “I’m the one who farted.” They thought it was funny and so did I, but only because it requires a really bad Chinese accent to make the connection between those English words and that Chinese sentence. I doubt that a native English who’s never studied Chinese would be able to connect those dots.

Last night a Chinese friend showed me Chinese blog post of unintentionally funny English translations on Chinese signage that included this worksheet of a naughty elementary student. Apparently someone’s harbouring some negative feelings toward his or her English homework:

Not only are they trying to pronounce English with Chinese syllables, but rather than just use meaningless rough phonetic equivalents they deliberately chose certain characters to turn the English words into a Chinese joke (or at least vent some homework frustrations?):

1. bus (bà sǐ / 爸死 / “dad is dead”)
2. yes (yé sǐ / 爷死 / “grandpa is dead”)
3. girls (gē sǐ / 哥死 / “older brother is dead”)
4. miss (mèi sǐ / 妹死 / “little sister is dead”)
5. school (sǐ guāng / 死光 / “dead completely / die off”)
6. pea (pì / 屁 / “fart”)
7. yesterday (yē sǐ tā diē / 噎死他爹 / “Choke to death, his dad”)
8. guess (gāi sǐ / 该死 / “should die” [This is how they usually translate swear words like "darn!" (but stronger) in movie subtitles.])
9. dangerous (dān jiǎo lā shǐ / 单脚拉屎 / “stand on one foot, poop”)
10. five (fèi wù / 废物 / “rubbish / useless (person)”)

1. Hands,hands,two hands. I have two hands (hàn zǐ hàn zǐ, tōu hàn zǐ, ǎn hái lái tōu hàn zǐ / 汉子汉子偷汉子俺还来偷汉子 / “guy guy steal a guy [cheat on your husband], I’m still stealing a guy”)
2. How are you. What is you name (hào ā yóu. wǒ sǐ yòu nèn / 耗啊油，我死又嫩)

The Chinese isn’t all correct and some is totally meaningless; he’s just cramming the characters into the English sounds. But you can see what he’s going for. Someone needs to give these kids a break, or a spanking…

Other Chinese education system stuff:

• The future looks… dysfunctional?
• “Water Brain” — high quality animation depicts the Chinese student experience
• Spinning the grades

One of my friends in particular loves to practice his Chinglish on me. I in turn refuse to reply in English, opting instead to inflict him with my own Chinglish. For example, he just sent me this text:

Great! man I will going to the shan xi road on this Sunday. I’ll waiting for you at entrance. Time is 10:20am. Don’t be late,man! By the way! Don’t forget one thing. I needs give your lilian add hers cloths. Winter already was coming! I’m a superman. I can’t feel cold. Haha! How interesting! I said. All right then! Good night! Man Wish your baby has a sweet dream! See you soon!

I have no doubt that my Chinese sounds like this sometimes often. It always helps to keep a little perspective!

(P.S. – Friends don’t let friends use Grand Theft Auto to study English.)

Related Posts:

• Meet Liú Wěi – Coming of Age in a Changing China

I like that Chinese people sometimes choose unusual English names or transliterate their names into English (when they can), not because we get to laugh at the occasionally odd results (though that is fun), but because a good Chinglish name often contains some self-expression while still being workable in English (Apple, Moon, Star, Rainbow, etc.); in perhaps an indirect or vague sort of way it expresses part of them and the fact that they’re Chinese and Chinese people do names differently than we do. Why shouldn’t they carve out their own space in the English name landscape? Of course other names, while nice in Chinese, are simply no good in English (Drizzle, Ripple); they’re too strange or silly to actually function as truly usable English names. I’ll let you decide for yourselves which of my current students’ names below have real potential. They’re listed in the order they came to mind:

• AK (yes, like the gun, she picked it on purpose because she likes guns.)
• Falcon (formerly Eagle: he had an annoying coworker named after some other kind of bird in Chinese, Sparrow I think, so for his English name he chose a bird that eats his coworker’s kind of bird.)
• Gaga
• Florra (She wanted to be different, but a bunch of other Chinese women who also wanted to be different already had the idea of using the Spanish word for flower, so she added an r.)
• Enya
• Eack (was supposed to be “Ike”, but somehow he spelled it wrong).
• Kobe
• Bryant
• Carter (we knew a “Spippen” in Taibei).
• Ray (don’t know why she picked this).
• Cherry
• Candy
• Duke
• Evian
• Edword (because he likes words).
• Win (I forget why she said she picked this)
• Queena
• Long (going for “dragon” (龙)? I don’t know.)
• Sharpay
• Coco

(This is exactly why it took me several months before finally settling on a Chinese name.)

Related Posts:

• Choosing a Chinese name – part 5
• Choosing a Chinese name – part 4
• Dragging this out…
• Chinese name suggestions
• Choosing Chinese Names: more dangerous than you think

If you’ve ever wondered what our Chinese sounds like to Chinese people, this movie trailer makes a fine dynamic equivalent:

Man I hope they’re selling $1 copies of this on the street soon!

(P.S. – if you can’t see this video, you can try its original YouTube page: Mad About English! – Official Theatrical Trailer 2008.)

For our interpretive community. Lots of you are educated in literature and things relating to textual criticism. Surely with our powers combined we can find meaning in this.

Friend
-5′C
because you don’t
force yourself go fall,
you just fall.

Like there are many stars up in the sky, my words for you in this paper resemble tiny bits or seeds.

because you don’t
force yourself go fall,
you just fall.

Cherry! Cherry! Cherry!

My friends

Any and all interpretive attempts are welcome!

We are overdue to have Chinese names. But for Westerners, choosing a good Chinese name is harder than you might think. One American that my teacher knows picked her own name, choosing the characters in part based on what looked nice. She didn’t know it, but her named ended up meaning “insecticide.”

People have to call you something, and the average person on the street in China is going to have serious trouble hearing, pronouncing, and remembering most English names (and vice versa in North America).

Chinese given-names also carry relatively more meaning than English names do. Many Chinese are very careful about what name they choose for their children, sometimes even paying professionals to pick the best sounding and most auspicious name. It’s a popular belief that a name can affect a person’s destiny and success.

When Mainland Chinese choose English names, it’s often based entirely on meaning. For example, a friend of ours is teaching several hundred students at a local university. In her classes she has students named: “Star,” “Moon,” “Taste,” “Apple,” “Banana”… and every English teacher here has lists like this. In Taiwan they seemed to do much better with their English names, though we did get a “Grack” and a “Neo.” Often the English teacher gets to give the students their English names. Peter Hessler, author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, used names of his family members and stereotypically African American names like “Shaniqua” to name his students. Other teachers name their students after characters from their favourite TV show (like Jerry, Kramer, Elaine, and George). Sometimes boys accidentally pick girls’ names. In Texas we knew a girl from Macao who changed her English name from Sam to Cinderella when she found out Sam was a boy’s name. “Cinderella” went on to become the first international student (and probably the first non-sorority president) to win Homecoming Queen. We were proud.

So, choosing a Chinese name… How do you avoid getting the Chinese equivalent of Taste, Kramer, or Grack when you are new to the language and it would take decades to learn and feel all the possible meanings associated with potential names?

You could get a Chinese name from your Mandarin teacher. They often give names, sometimes simply assigning the transliteration of the student’s English name on the first day of class. Neither of us want that; transliterated names sound funny to native Mandarin speakers, and the first character of mine is also apparently shared by George Bush. You could also ask (and trust) a really close Chinese friend who knows you well to give you a good one. Jessica I think will go this route. I’m going a third route: pick some ideas/themes that you like, decide if you care more about meaning or phonetic closeness to your English name, and ask a bunch of Chinese friends to suggest some names with explanations. I sent the e-mail out Sunday and suggestions are coming in. I’ll post them when most or everyone has replied.

Two of our student’s parents run a video production company, and they offered for us to do the narrating for a video. I was the man voices; Jessica had the narration and the girl voices. It was fun, and Jessica is like a pro – her parts sound like a real actual voice talent person and she didn’t even blink reading the Chinese names. Mine sound like the people talking are sleepy. We got the script last night but we didn’t know what the video was about. And then, in the first paragraph, we read,

Taiwanese are able to enjoy a complete sense of bliss and satisfaction here, with visual, audio and tentacle pleasures to their bodies and minds.

Blissful and satisfying tentacle pleasures? Just what exactly did we agree to help promote?! Octopus spa therapy, anyone?

I tried to tell Jessica you can’t mess with people’s scripts and she has to say “tentacles,” but she wasn’t buying it.

It ended up being about some kind of design school exhibition where they make everything out of foam. I talked about special foam hangers and design theory. Jessica did the intro and outro and talked about the school and the designers, and foam Christmas trees.

There were a few other edits we made, the next best coming right at the end when Jessica concluded: “They say that the simple life is to have fun – with heart!” It originally said, “…have fun with a heart,” but we told them that’s not quite the same thing.

I hope we get to do more of this – it’s fun and easy, and Jessica is actually really good at it. She sounds like the real deal. They’ll be putting it on a website eventually, so we’ll post the link when we get it.

Got this in an e-mail. A family member’s recent discovery at the T&T Supermarket in Surrey, B.C.

I just saw the best translation I’ve seen yet in T&T tonight while wandering around T&T….I was laughing out loud all by myself in the store…:)

“Instant Rice Noodle Ass Flavour” !!! I looked at the box to see what was
under the sign….It was packages of instant ramen soup –beef spare rib
flavour.

Amazing what one letter and a period can do.

ps – Hmmm… speaking of bad translations, we have a Chinese lesson today!

Here’s some mostly mindless, and only slightly insensitive anecdotal culture fun. If that other culture stuff is too dense, then this video is for you! =) An American Jewish girl in Beijing explores the Chinese-people-getting-English-names phenomenon. What she uncovers here in 5 minutes is just scratching the surface. (My favourite is Smacker.)

I’ve stepped up on my observations of the local scooter literature. Here are my most recent ones from my walk in the park this afternoon.

Duke: The best racer you are from now on.
Easy: best partner for your life.
Jockey: Join us to ride it!
Jog is fascinating to you.
Jockey: Jockeys ride us!
Going: More you look, more you like it.
Duke: The modern scooter citizen.
Freeway: A scooter you can live with.
Freeway: The shape you want to be in.

Taking a Break

The holiday schedule in Taiwan is, of course, a bit different than N.America. Today we celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival (or Moon Festival), which means we’ll be headed to a couple of barbeques, and we’ve also been sampling traditional and non-traditional (ice cream!) mooncakes. As a result, we don’t have to work today. We do have to work on Saturday, but only the morning class, since so many of our students will be out of town. Also, upcoming next Tuesday is Taiwan’s “National Day” which is also a holiday. That wouldn’t make a big difference for us, as Tuesday is our regular day off….except, the government made a last minute decision to declare Monday a holiday as well, so that everyone could enjoy a 5 day weekend. So, except for Saturday morning, we don’t teach again until Wednesday! And, we’ll have an additional day off next Saturday, because all of our students will be going to their regular schools in order to make up for their “holiday” on Monday, so they won’t be available for our classes.

We’re going to make sure to get out and go hiking and see some stuff…but unfortunately, we won’t get to play too much. Our courses have started and we are swamped with homework and reading, so we’re going to take this chance to get caught up (and maybe even ahead by a little bit!).