10. Mandarin is a tonal language.
If you say “hua hua” with a rising tone, it means “slippery”. If you say it with a flat high tone, it means “licentious” or “womanizing”. If you saying with a descending tone, it means “drawing”.
If you are tone deaf, congratulations! You are going to make a lot of Chinese people laugh.
Situation: A street vendor has asked you if you wish to buy a tiger claw (for medicinal purposes).
You meant to say: “不要. Bu yao (descending tone). I don’t want it.”
You have actually said: “不咬. Bu yao (dipping tone). Please don’t bite me!”
9. It is very hard for foreigners to memorize proper nouns.
If I tell you my name is Max, all kinds of neurons fire. Maybe you think of a dog named Max. Maybe you call me Maximus and you picture me in the gladiator arena. Maybe you just fixate on that sexy “x” in my name. Or maybe you picture me in M.C. Hammer pants “taking it to the max”. Which, of course, I do on a daily basis.
If I tell you my name is Li Feng, no such images are elicited. Not a damn one. To you it’s just a random string of letters. Without those silly, fleeting associations to serve as subconscious cement, no memory is formed.
Situation: You run into me on the street after just having met me.
You meant to say: “立丰,你好. Li Feng, ni hao. Hello Li Feng.”
You have actually said: “Um….. 凤梨,你好. Feng Li, ni hao. Hello Pineapple.”
8. You will be tempted to translate directly from English and it won’t work.
高 means “high”.
潮 means “tide”.
So 高潮 means “high tide”, doesn’t it?
Nope, it means “orgasm”. I found this out the hard way when I asked someone about surfing during high tide.
7. Hangman becomes a *lot* more difficult.
6. The bad dictionaries are worthless.
My electronic dictionary translates 发紫 as “empurple”, 更改 as “rejigger”, 品尝 as “degustation”, and 荡漾 as “popple”. Which are really fancy ways of saying “to turn purple”, “to update”, “to try (food)”, and “to ripple”, respectively.
Who in Sam Hill wrote this? Clearly someone who is more intimate with the Oxford Dictionary of Pompous Twaddle than he is with actual English-speaking human beings.
Thanks a lot pal. I’ll rejigger you til your degustation popples.
5. The good dictionaries are worthless too.
Look up 蛋 and you’ll see that it means “egg”. Simple enough.
But it’s wrong, wrong, wrong. 蛋 actually means “a sizable, oblong egg with a hard shell”. Try asking where you can buy fish蛋. Chinese people will imagine that a sizable, oblong egg with a hard shell has come tumbling out of the fish’s cloaca. Then they’ll laugh at your ignorance of basic aquatic reproduction.
Certainly don’t use 蛋 to describe human eggs.
4. Chinese typos totally alter the meaning of the sentence.
Chocolate. Chocolat. Chocklit. Chokomut. Whatever. They all mean the same thing.
Chinese is typed by punching in the romanization of the character. Then you get a little menu to pick from a few dozen homonyms, prioritized by an autosuggest program that looks at context.
I was IMing a friend once, inattentively letting the autosuggest do its thing.
I meant to send: “你有没有申请圣地亚哥的大学? Did you apply to any universities in San Diego?”
Two mistyped tonal numbers resulted in: “你有没有深情圣地压歌的大学? Do you have deep feelings for the Holy Land’s university of squashed music?”
3. Idioms Gone Wild
Chinese is full of idioms that don’t make sense when read literally. Think of the English idiom “shooting fish in a barrel”. You know what “shoot”, “fish”, and “barrel” mean, but you still don’t see how making fun of Eggbert the Class Nerd is like shooting fish in a barrel.
马屁精means “brown-noser”, but character for character it could mean “essence of horse butt”. Wow! Is that by Calvin Klein?
So don’t get discouraged. The Eastern Mountain will rise again.
2. The Chinese language reflects a difference in thought, not just a difference in expression.
I spent forever trying to translate “the scientific method” into Chinese before it hit me that maybe China doesn’t teach it. We don’t have a word in English for the acupunctural practice of putting suction cups on people’s backs to draw out the bad energy. Why should Chinese have special vocabulary to describe the 17th century works of Francis Bacon?
Kleenex is also hard to translate because the same word is used for both facial tissue and toilet paper. The word for “toast” refers to sliced bread whether it is toasted or not.
It works the other way too. For example, 看破红尘 is a simple four-word phrase that can’t be translated succinctly. Roughly, it means “to see through the vanity of life and become disillusioned with the mortal world”.
1. You guessed it: it’s the writing system! The number 1 reason why Mandarin will kick your ass is that it has 6500 pissed-off, knuckle-dusting characters in common use.