You can’t help but think that Chinglish speakers have it harder than Zhonglish speakers in the dumb-made-up-rule department. You know the category — the rules that are supposed to make your writing clearer or keep you from sounding like a dolt if you’re a native speaker, or keep you from sounding like a non-native newbie if you’re a non-native speaker.

These rules are mostly well-intentioned and merely ludicrous, not the kind of rule that good writers or native speakers follow, and not at all the kind that will improve your writing, but also not the kind that would render you unemployable if you followed them.

In this category there was one from an ESL listserv years ago, admonishing teachers to instruct their students not to begin sentences with “And so…” Useless? Sure. A rule that is followed by well-regarded writers of the English language? Of course not. Will it ruin the Chinglish writer’s prose? Probably not. Ergo no harm done.

But English is filled with the more insidious kind as well, the sort of rule that originated in some wicked wordsmith’s stewed eye of newt and toe of frog*. It charmed the self-styled language police, the guardians of all that is unimportant in language, then proceeded to spread its poison across the masses of diffident language users, sowing communicative confusion wherever it’s acidic scent wafted. To mention just one example: Language Log has documented ad nauseam the horrors of infinitive-splitting aversion, a “rule” that has led otherwise sane and reasonably literate souls to write nonsense such as:

David Rockefeller… has pledged $100 million to increase dramatically learning opportunities for Harvard undergraduates

Chinglish speakers have it hard enough just making straight sentences; imagine the pain induced by throwing this dope on the top. Does written Mandarin spawn such silliness among the shibboletherati?

Thankfully, the most recent Zhonglish non-rule to come through the Beijing Sounds Studios is of the former, benign type. Over at Chinesepod, Amber writes:

There is no ‘一点儿点儿’ (yi dianr dianr). Only ‘一点儿’ (yi dianr).**

As one of the instructors on the (generally very good) Chinesepod site, you can be sure that Amber’s intentions are good. But in this particular case, the head professor at YU begs to differ:

[Go to website or bottom of this post to listen to audio]

YU: Měiguó qiānbǐ ba¹ – bǐ Zhōngguó qiānbǐ xì yīdiǎnr
美国铅笔吧¹——比中国铅笔细一点儿。
American pencils ["y'know"¹] are a bit thinner than Chinese pencils.

SYZ: Shì ma?
是吗？
Really?

YU: Ná yīgè Zhōngguó bǐmàor Měiguó qiānbǐ bùnéng yòng.
拿一个中国笔帽儿美国铅笔不能用。
If you take a Chinese pen cap it can’t be used on an American pencil.

SYZ: Shì ma?
是吗？
Really?

YU: Xì yīdiǎnrdiǎnr!
细一点儿点儿！
A little tiny bit thinner!

Is “no yīdiǎnrdiǎnr” going to jeopardize your Zhonglish? Obviously not. Millions of native Mandarin speakers go their whole lives without saying it. Apparently, some of them don’t even know that millions of other native Mandarin speakers consider it a perfectly normal part of the language.

The more interesting topic is why good teachers continue to make up rules in the Internet era of easy fact-checking. As an erstwhile and not so good ESL teacher myself, let me hazard a guess: Daily, hourly, your students are begging you for guidance, some sort of rule, the harder and faster the better, that can help make sense of the anarchic cacophony of phonemes, morphemes, grammatical structures and social nuances they are expected to acquire and assimilate. In response, inevitably, you tell them things that end up being soft, “sometimes” rules at best — or just plain wrong at worst.

As a teacher (or someone who blogs about language), you can strive for “first, do no harm.” At the same time, knowing that you eventually will make a mess of things, the best solution is to accept the wisdom of imperfection and prepare for the inevitable mea culpas. If only the Strunks and Whites of the world had possessed such humility, the tone of conversation about English rights and wrongs might be yīdiǎnrdiǎnr more civil today.

——————

**Diǎnr is the Beijing and generally northern dialect pronunciation of 点 (pronounced as diǎn elsewere — and maybe something else altogether beyond Mandarinland). 一点点 or 一点儿点儿 means “a little bit”

¹What to do with that “ba”? It’s almost like a topic marker. I do remember YR Chao talking about Chinese as a topic-comment language, but can’t recall anything about “ba” being used like this. Of course the sentence would be perfectly subject-predicate grammatical without it… but, there it is. And now it’s late and the Beijing Sounds research staff, slackers all, have somehow deemed themselves deserving of a Friday night off…

[Update: hsknotes references an nciku explanation in the comments below]

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…*

[Go to website or bottom of this post to listen to audio]
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.

—————-

* 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