Booming Bye
I’ve been here since the end of October last year, and it never dawned on me until today to learn how to say “I don’t understand” in Chinese. This is wǒ bù míng bái, which literally translates out to “Me no understand.”
It’s pronounced similar to the English words “Woe booming bye.” To show you how the tones work, try saying this.
wǒ is a 3rd tone word, meaning it’s spoken in a down-then-up tone. You might think this is “woe” but it’s actually more like “oaaa,” (the w is almost silent) and somewhat rhymes with “squaw.”
bù is 4th tone, meaning it’s spoken in a sharp downward tone. Imagine jumping out in front of someone and yelling “boo!” That’s exactly how you pronounce this, sharp and down.
míng is a second tone word, meaning it’s spoken from down-to-up, sort of like the annoying habit teenage girls have of “uptalking” at the end of sentences. (Like, y’know?) It’s not pronounced “ming” like in Ming Dynasty, it’s more like “meeng.” However, since the next word is also a second tone word, you pronounce this like a 1st tone word, which is high and flat. (See how confusing this tone shit is?)
bái is spoken upwards, like you would pronounce the last word in a question sentence. Say out loud the phrase “Are you sure?” See how you said “sure” in a down-to-up manner? That’s how you pronounce second tone words.
The characters in the phrase míng bái means something close to “clear pure.” When taken together these mean “understand.” So, if I were to try to write this in phonetic English I’d say “whoa BOO ming bye,” and stress that the w is silent. (Put your lips in the position like you’re going to make a “whuh” sound, such as at the beginning of “whoa.” However, don’t say the “whuh,” just say “oaaa.” It’s sort of like the way the Rangers whooped in Black Hawk Down.)
One thing I find interesting is when I ask a Chinese how to say a word in Mandarin, and they respond with a multiple character word. When I ask what the individual characters mean they have to take a second and think about it. They don’t think of words like that, in terms of individual characters. Even though characters are words themselves they also group together to form words, so when the Chinese read characters they look at them in groups, exactly the way we do with compound words. A good example is “television.”
The English word “television"comes from the prefix “tele-”, which means “distance,” and the word “vision” meaning “to see.” Thus television means “to see from a distance.” In Chinese this is almost exactly the same. The Chinese word for TV is diàn shì, or 电视, pronounced “dyan shurr.” These characters individually mean “electric (to see).” So just like we don’t see the word “television” and think “to see from a distance,” the Chinese don’t see 电视 and think “electric vision.” The word diàn also means “lightning,” so if it was by itself they’d think “electricity or lightning.” But when it’s followed by shì they think “television.”
You can see the tones charted in the following graph. Think of the five levels as “do re me fa so.”
You can see the graph above, plus a lot more information about Pinyin tones, at this website.
Learning Chinese is as hard as you imagine it would be. You literally have to sing the language to make the words mean what you want them to mean.
