Chinglish

One of the greatest sources of comic relief in China is the large amount of Chinglish (Chinese-English) products. With everything from detergent to clothes, if it was made in China and has English on it it’s usually a little off. The best are the shirts and sweatshirts though. People here love English on their clothes, and they either don’t understand what it means or they don’t pay attention. Here has been some of the best I’ve seen:
“I’m going to knock some secret into you”
“Every little make a mickle” (a sign in my classroom)
“The best d*** green thing” (worn by a teacher at my school)
“Fake” (under a Channel logo)
“Verybody makes mistakes” (A Brittney Spears shirts)
“Kennedy Funneral Home” (Sweatshirt)
“NEKI” (With a Nike swoosh)
“Faint the town red”
“camp THE blue” (my new favorite sweatshirt I bought)

Speaking of Chinglish, I recently judged an English competition for Elementary students. Competitors were from all over Wuhan, and it was a huge deal. Kids at my school had been preparing performances, reciting stories, and writing essays for weeks. The competition was an absolute riot the first 6 hours…after that it got pretty mind numbing. These kids were under so much pressure from their parents and they were so nervous! Some of them, to get an edge of the competition, decided to “dress to impress.” Monkey suites, boys wearing makeup, and 5 year olds in wigs and fake eyelashed were not uncommon. It felt like something strait out of a Little Miss Sunshine pageant But I did write down my favorite answers to some of the questions I gave to 4th-6th grade competitors:
Question: Pick a number between 1 and 15 (so we could read them that number question)
Answer: No, I’m sorry I cannot.

Question: Describe what you see in this picture.
Answer: This boy looks sad. Maybe his mother bit him last night.

Question: What do American children do on Christmas day?
Answer: Maybe they go to the library

Question: What day is Halloween?
Answer: Maybe it’s September 13.

Question: What is your father’s job?
Answer: Can you say it in Chinese please?

Through my Chinese lessons and my interaction with my students, I have come to appreciate the vast differences between our languages. They are hugely different and therefore make it very difficult for one to learn the other. Most of the time, you can’t just translate the words directly from Chinese to English and have it make sense. For example, the other day my co-teacher came up to me and ask if it’s correct to say “I am so angry at you I could spit blood.” I looked bug eyed at her and said “why on earth would you want to say that?!” She told me that that is a common phrase used in Chinese, and she wanted to say it to the students when they’re being loud. I explained to her that we never use that phrase. I could go on and on with examples of these kinds of differences between the languages. The Chinese language is laced so tightly with their culture that it’s hard to experience one without the other. I’ve started to try and learn characters, because I feel that I am missing out on so much by not being able to read anything around me. I know that I won’t be able to get very far in the next 5 months, but I’m enjoying learning the common characters and then getting excited when I see them and I know what they mean. My goal is to learn 5 new characters a week, 100 by the time I leave. I’m still really struggling with learning the spoken language. I came here saying I wouldn’t use the excuse “Chinese is very hard” not to learn the language, but it honestly is sooo hard! Partly because of the reasons I just explained, and partly because our western tongues just don’t like to make those sounds! The tones are a killer…I can’t hear them and I can’t say them! Every other country I’ve visited…I’ve noticed that you can kind of say the words brokenly and people will understand what you’re saying. But not Chinese…if you have the tone wrong they won’t understand you! Sometimes I’ll hear my co-teacher say a word or phrase over and over in class. I’ll ask her about it after, and she’ll have no idea what I’m saying. I’m thinking “how could you not understand? You just said it like 10 times!” Then when she finally does know what I’m talking about, she’s repeat the word back to me. I’ll of course reply with “ya, that’s exactly what I said isn’t it?” After being here for almost 5 months, I can finally get a taxi driver to understand my home address about 90% of the time without having to wip out my hand notebook. I’m really trying to keep my spirits up when it comes to learning this language…I’m taking lessons and studying outside (that’s the key I’ve learned), and hopefully it will click very soon!