Beijing Sounds — 北京的声儿

On how English messes with even the kids’ Mandarin

After months of exile in Minneapolis, Siberia, the nominal proprietor of Beijing Sounds now has concrete plans to return to the main studio location in beautiful suburban Shàngdì in the northwest outskirts of the capital city. The mood surrounding this semi-permanent move, to take place around the beginning of April, is in great part exuberant: reunion with PBS and Mrs. BJS, many a good meal at YU, along with a little more coursework… But inevitably a bit of nostalgia will slip in: a job and coworkers so good that they are difficult to leave behind, a few friends who are far better than any socially stunted recluse deserves… And then there is two-and-a-half year old Cici, who has developed a fondness for this shūshu (叔叔 = lit. “uncle”, a form of address) that’s utterly endearing.

Lucky, then, that the studio recorder was turned on last night to catch her at a New Year’s party and give shūshu a departing gift of inspiration. Straight from the mouth of the babe…*

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Father:
中文怎么讲？”Where’s mommy?”
Zhōngwén zěnme jiǎng “Where’s mommy?”
How do you say “where’s mommy” in Chinese?

Cici:
“Where’s mommy?” [in English, obviously]

Father:
中文怎么说？
Zhōngwén zěnme shuō?
How do you say it in Chinese?

Cici:
哪里是妈妈呀？
Nǎlǐ shì māmā ya?
“Mommy is where?” [using the wrong verb -- shì, the equivalent of English "is" instead of zài -- as well as borrowing the English word order]

[laughter]

Father:
“妈妈在哪里”!
“Māma zài nǎlǐ”!
“Where’s Mommy?” [correcting grammar]

Cici:
妈妈在哪里？
Māmā zài nǎlǐ?
Where’s mommy? [repeated with correct grammar]

Father:
对！ 不是“哪里是妈妈”
Duì! Bùshì “Nǎlǐ shì māmā”
Right! It’s not “Mommy is where?”

Fantastic. Even Kingsoft 2002 couldn’t get you a better word-for-word translation.

So where does a two year old get this? You might guess her Mandarin is simply weak in general, or at least perhaps weaker than her English, and that’s why the English word order dominates.

Hardly the case. She does well with English, especially comprehension, but her Mandarin is more fluent. Her parents typically speak pǔtōnghuà** (普通话 = standard Mandarin) together, and her mother stays at home with her full time — no daycare.

Regarding English, exposure seems limited to a few playdates with English-speaking friends and watching some TV.

Given this background, you might think the English would be playing sorry second fiddle. Yet there it is, wreaking havoc with the vocabulary and word order of the simplest Mandarin sentence. If this is how hard a two-year-old has it, maybe the rest of us Zhonglish*** speakers should just pack up our Plecos and call it quits.

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* In keeping with the money-back guarantee in the sidebar, “All sounds are from real events and situations unless otherwise noted”, in-house counsel has strongly recommended noting a potential gray area. Cici, who is both mischievous and wise in nearly lethal doses, has made this grammar error before, presumably in good faith. In this instance, however, she is in a sense being asked to repeat it. As she is very in tune with all activities which cause her parents consternation and in fact relishes discovering such activities so that she can repeat them at will, it is within the realm of possibility that she is, in the vernacular, “hamming it up” for the crowd. In other words, knowing how concerned her parents are with this botched phrase, she might now be much more likely to repeat it even though she might know, on some level, that it’s wrong.

** Of possible linguistic interest is the fact that when she was one year old she spent several months in China near Shanghai and may have been exposed to more Wu than Mandarin. But I can’t see that it explains anything.

*** [update] Links to all Zhonglish articles