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Monthly Archives December 2007

Update: Mandarin edges out Fyem

An earlier post mentioned no tense in Mandarin as a bonus for the second language learner. It compared Romance languages and English. Now you can be happy you’re not learning Fyem, which I just came across here:
“Fyem, spoken in Nigeria, has, as well as a past tense, tenses for precisely yesterday and precisely earlier [...]

Posted 28 December 2007 † syz § linguistics ‡ Comments (0) °

A bird flaps its wings near 工人体育场

[Sound files are all at the bottom of the post]

Wallowing is a vile, unworthy habit. You inevitably get sucked into it from time to time. But too often and you become, as GB Shaw put it,
a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you [...]

Posted 25 December 2007 † syz § personal § street ‡ Comments (6) °

Did your holiday party sound like this?

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
OK, so the BJ office party makes free use of merry-making accouterments. Makes sense; they’re all made here.

This was my first Beijing holiday party, and my expectation was that, like everything else in the world, this cultural phenomenon would be heavily internationalized and sterilized, taking many cues from US [...]

Posted 18 December 2007 † syz § business § society ‡ Comments (2) °

Mandarin is easy; 中文 is a pain in the…

From the recent deluge of email*
Dear SYZ: Is it unfathomably hard to learn Chinese, or is it actually laughably easy?
- Tone-deaf in Dōngzhímén
Dear TD in DZM
I feel your confusion. Daily. The short answer is, Yes. Another common answer is “Go to hell” (if you happen to ask someone who has just misread 农 for 衣 [...]

Posted 16 December 2007 † syz § beijing-r § běijīnghuà § linguistics § érhuàyīn ‡ Comments (6) °

On knowing what to listen for

In your hometown, you pretty much know what everyone’s going to say before they say it. There’s really no new thing under the sun. In Eden Prairie, MN, the grocery bagger’s going to ask me about paper or plastic, the restaurant greeter’s going to apologize for my wait, and so on. It’s the [...]

Posted 12 December 2007 † syz § restaurant § speech acts ‡ Comments (3) °

Update: Mangled Mandarin

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 [...]

Posted 07 December 2007 † syz § MFL § zhonglish ‡ Comments (6) °

What would Beijingers say?

Ah, language learning. It’s one thing to try to get the accent right. You can work on that every day in Beijing. But it’s another thing to know what to say in particular social situations.Like when you’re introduced to your brother-in-law’s coworker.
In the US: Nice to meet you
Beijing: Nǐ hǎo… [and what else???]
Is there something [...]

Posted 02 December 2007 † syz § phone § speech acts § subway ‡ Comments (8) °