Saturday, January 19, 2008

ChinesePod

Okay, now THIS is a discovery!  Check out ChinesePod, free Chinese language tutorials in simple, plain English which you can download to your iPod or stream online.  I’ve been listening to these today and I think I’ve learned more just from these than I have from three months with a professional Chinese tutor at work.  Seriously, these are amazing.

Check one out, it covers how to say Good Morning.  Actually try and pronounce these words using the tones. 

In a previous post I meantioned the word zǐ.  The accent mark over the word indicates it is to be spoke in a curved tone, down then up again.  You might think it’s “zee” or “zy” but it’s actually closer to “tsuh” or “tcheah” with a slight pause before you begin saying the sound.  There’s really no English sound which directly matches, and it’s damn near impossible to say without practice.

I’m all over ChinesePod, though.  I think this is going to make my language skills take a quantum leap forward.

Musings on Underpants

I just realized something.  As you guys know I’m a 37 year old bachelor, which means that I’m more or less a 17 year old boy with lots of money.  My ayi comes in twice a week to clean, do the washing, restock the fridge, make the bed, clean the bathrooms, and make sure I’m supplied with beer.  Life is good, the house is spotless, and I always have clean clothes.

This is the issue.  When I lived in LA I had to do my own washing.  I didn’t have a washer in my apartment, I had to use the laundry down the end of the hall.  There were only three washers and three dryers, so often they were being used by other people.  In practical terms, between my schedule, the other people using the machines, and the number of quarters I had (75¢ for a wash and 75¢ for a dry, so $1.50 a load) I really only did a wash once every week or two.  Consequently I have about 20 pairs of boxer shorts and socks.

Of course, now, my washing gets done every three days.  So it just dawned on me, I’ve been re-using the same four pairs of shorts and socks since I got here, because they’re always the clean ones on the top of the pile.

Friday, January 18, 2008

I Like American People

I just had a weird encounter in the elevator.  As I walked into the building there was a guy in front of me, probably late 20s, clean cut.  He had a dark complexion, so I figured he would be from somewhere in the Mediterranean area.  We got in the elevator and he asked me in accented English what floor I wanted, and I told him 25.  He then said, “Where are you from?”

“America.  What about you?”

“Iran.  I am with the embassy.”

Uncomfortable silence.  Then he spoke.  “I like American people.”

It was weird, like he expected me to lunge at him and try to kick his ass or something.  I told him that I actually lived in Iran when I was a baby, back before the revolution.  This is a bending of the truth.  My parents lived in Iran in the late 60s, but it was the only thing I could think of to break the tension which followed “I like American people.” He introduced himself as Hossein, I told him my name was Lee, we shook hands, and he got off at his floor. 

Fucking China, it’s one surprise after another.

Inked

A year or two ago I went to see Bob Saget at a Comedy Club in Orange County.  Opening for him was B.J. Novak, who many of you will know from the US version of The Office.  He had one joke which I thought was hilarious.  He remarked on how everyone these days is getting Chinese characters as tattoos.  You know, they’ll get the Chinese character for “luck” or “happiness” or something like that.  His joke was, “You know what I want to get?  The Chinese character for cliché.”

One thing I’ve learned on my journey through this language is how contextual it all is.  The character you have tattooed on your body might mean “luck” in one context, and it might mean something totally different in another.  Its meaning might change based on the character that comes before or after it.  And I bet most of the time people who get Chinese character tattoos don’t independently learn about the characters, they just pick them out of the artist’s book when they go into the studio.  So while they might think they’re getting the character for “luck” they might be getting “dog turd.” See the update to the previous post for the “plum” example.

If you’ve ever considered getting a character tattoo, don’t.

Call Me Bruce

The name “Lee” is one of the most common family names in China.  It’s spelled Li (or lǐ in Pinyin) and means “plum.” Here’s its character.

This character is a compound of two other characters.  The first is mù which means “tree” or “wood.”

The second is zǐ, which means “child.”

In Chinese, horizontal lines at the top of the character usually mean something like “sky” or “heaven” and lines at the bottom mean “ground” or “earth.” Thus the placement of the tree character over the child character implies a child sitting under a tree.  So that’s me, a child under a tree.  And this somehow means “plum.”

While I find this fascinating to learn, the earthy, hippie imagery this conjures up in my head really disturbs me.  Goddamned hippies, they ruin everything.

Update: Just to add one more layer of confusion to this, even though the name Li means “plum,” if you actually want to refer to a plum, like if you were asking to buy one, you would have to put another character at the end.  That character is zǐ, child.  So the characters for plum are as follows.

Now, the use of the character zǐ is not specific to the word “plum.” The word for one type of dumpling is bao zi, for example.  Christ this language is confusing.

Herro, Wercome to Hootah!

So last night I ate at the Beijing Hooters.  (Yes, they have a Hooters in Beijing.) Here’s a shot of the waitresses dancing on stools to YMCA.

It’s pretty much exactly the same as every other Hooters you’ve ever been in before, except all the waitresses are Chinese. 

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Hard As Hell

Here’s another example of how important the tones are in Chinese.  Suppose you’re a tourist here for the Olympics and you want to go to Tiananmen Square to see the sights.  If you get in a taxi and say “Tiananmen” the way that we say it in the west he won’t have a clue what you said.  Consider this page, where I searched for the individual words tian, an, and men.  The translation, if I remember correctly, is something like “Doorway to Heavenly Peace.” However, look at how many different meanings are represented by tian alone.

1.  sky, heaven; god, celestial
2.  field, arable land, cultivated
3.  fill in, fill up; make good
4.  append, add to; increase
5.  quiet, calm, tranquil, peaceful
6.  prosperous; good; protruding
7.  heaven; sky
8.  turbulent
9.  a place in Xinjiang province
10.  to end; to exterminate
11.  till land, cultivate; hunt
12.  to manipulate; a pricker for a lamp-wick
13.  sweet, sweetness
14.  cave; hole
15.  fill in, fill up; make good

You see my point.  These are all possible definitions to the word tian, and they’re all dependent upon two things, context and pronunciation.  This shit ain’t easy.

Translate This

This translated perfectly from English into Chinese.

We’ve been laughing about it for 20 minutes.  And it doesn’t work properly if you try and translate it back, but you’ll probably get the gist.

Snow White

When I first walked outside this morning I thought it was drizzling, but quickly discovered it was actually snowing.  Consequently my taxi ride in to work, which usually takes 15 or 20 minutes, took an hour and ten minutes.  It’s continued to lightly snow all day.  Here’s the view from my office window.

Most days, no matter how cold it is, you see the elderly out in this courtyard exercising, doing knee bends and waving their arms and stuff.  Usually they have young children with them, presumably their grandchildren. The Chinese are really into stuff like that.

Snoop Dogg

Following up on the previous post, I found a free Chinese/English dictionary for MacOS called Dragon Dictionary.  I downloaded it and launched it and the first word I typed in was “dog.” This is what came up.

That’s right, folks, there’s an entry in there for doggy-style.  I asked my employees and they said that this was correct, too.  Now I just need to learn how to say “Mongolian hooker.”

See the number that follows each word?  That indicates which of the four tones it is to be spoken.  Note that two of the words are “gou” but have different tones, and thus are different words with distinct characters.  See what I mean? You can be saying the right word, but if you say it the wrong way it doesn’t make any sense to the person hearing it.

Wo De Fa Xian

I made a great discovery online this morning, a free Chinese/English translator.  We’ve spent the last few minutes typing in various sentences and it’s worked perfectly every time.  Here’s one example.

English:  “My nose is purple because the cow is made of cheese.”
Pinyin:  wǒ de bí zi shì zǐ sè de yīn wèi mǔ niú yóu rǔ lào zhì chéng
Chinese:  我的鼻子是紫色的因为母牛由乳酪制成

This is fucking dope.

看什么我发现了!

(The name of the site, xuezhongwen.net, means “learn Chinese.")

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

It’s A Digital World

So I finally finished watching the first three seasons of Boston Legal which, despite being the “David E. Kelley Left Wing Agitprop Hour,” is a pretty good show with great writing and acting.  Next up was the first season of the show Journeyman on NBC, which I wanted to watch when I was home and didn’t get a chance to.

Basically the DVDs are rips of HDTV streams in the US.  Someone is simply using their TiVo to record the shows, then they’re ripping them onto DVDs.  Some of the shows so far have been ripped from WBAL in Baltimore, others from WILX in Michigan.  Some of you reading this might be in those areas—your local TV is for sale in China.

The Taxifather

Okay, I just had one of the most surreal experiences of my life.  As usual I took a taxi home from work, and I will never forget this cabbie.  Imagine Vito Corleone as a skinny Chinese guy.  I swear, he was The Godfather.  His voice sounded exactly like Brando, except Chinese.  Even his mannerisms had a sort of squinty-eyed Italian mafia flavor to them. 

When we got to my complex I paid him and said thank you, and he responded with a customary bukeqi, meaning “It’s nothing.” This is pronounced boo-ka-chee.  Now, imagine this in Vito Corleone’s accent.

“Eh, boo-ka-chee, eh!”

That’s literally what he said.  Un-fucking-believable.

Son Of A…

One of my employees has one of those little translation computers, where you type in the Chinese word and it tells you the word in English.  (I need to get one of those, come to think of it.) She started looking up dirty words, and noted that the computer didn’t have translations for fuck or shit.  She was delighted, however, to find that it contained a listing for bitch. 

“Yes,” I said.  “A bitch is a female dog.”

“Ah.  So what is a biatch?”

That’s right, folks.  A Chinese asked me to explain the difference between bitch and biatch.  Goddamned rap assholes…

Parlez Vouz Chinois?

So I had Chinese class this morning.  To illustrate again how simple Chinese is in terms of sentence structure, consider this: 

Wo lai Zhongguo gongzuo.

Wo means “me,” lai means “come,” Zhongguo means “China,” and gongzuo means “work.” So if you want to say the sentence “I come to China to work” you literally say “Me come China work.”

Here’s another couple of bits of useless language trivia.  The Chinese word for Christmas is Shengdanjie.  Sheng means “great,” dan means “birth,” and jie means “festival.” So Christmas in Chinese is “Great Birth Festival.” Also, the word for turkey is huoji.  Huo means “fire” and ji means “chicken,” so a turkey is literally called a “fire chicken.”

I love this language.

Update: I was just talking to one of my employees and she told me that the Chinese word for turkey, huoji (fire chicken), is also how you pronounce “cigarette lighter.” It uses different characters but it’s pronounced the same way, like “ant” and “aunt.”