Lost in Translation: Learning Chinese Phrases

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 08:00:00 +0000

When I sent my child to a Chinese school, I didn’t realise how steep the learning curve would be.

And I didn’t mean for him.

It’s calmed down now, but for the first two months we parents were subjected to reams and reams of daily text messages detailing what the children had done at school, what we had to buy for them, what after school clubs there were available, and yes, what the dreaded homework was for that day.

With the school text books came yet more Chinese that I, as an adult learner of a second language, had never come across. My teacher at Live the Language does not have the time to explain primary school lingo. Her unenviable task is to try and get me through the HSK.

Somehow my teacher got me to understand, “The financial dependence of his family bolstered his immune system so that his internal defences were able to overcome the illness.” But it was now left to me to get over the challenge of how to say “join the dots.”

This is the register of primary school Chinese, that had I not had a dwarf in the house, I would never have faced.

Every language is made up of different so-called registers, whereby a different set of unwritten usage rules is used depending on context. The language in a court of law, say, would be carried out in a totally different register from that in a prison cell.

Knowing how to bargain fluently at Yashow Market is not going to earn you respect if you are trying to discuss the necessity of irrigation trenches in arid regions. Nor vice versa, come to that, but it would be handy to know how to do both and apply them where relevant.

And this was the problem. Where I had learned the character for “irrigation trench,” I hadn’t learned those for “draw a circle around the odd numbers,” or “draw a smiley face on the animals that can jump.”

In fact it should help my woeful attempts in the long run, as I am always being told that one of my many major problems is trying to make things far too complicated.

I am slowly learning that it is not necessary to say, “In order to maintain consistency, select blue and complete the sphere to its perimeter with the selected utensil” when in fact I could just say “Color the circle blue.”

So while I plough my way through the mud that is adult Chinese, and try and navigate through the subtleties of when you can say “after all,” and when you have to instead say, “at the end of the day,” I thank my teacher at Live the Language for patiently supplying endless examples of when to use the right phrases.

I also thank my son’s teachers for the opportunity to learn how to say, “Match the number on the basket with the little rabbit that has munched that many carrots.”

Debbie Mason has lived in Beijing for more than ten years. She thought her Chinese was okay until she realized she could not understand her son and his Chinese playmates. In a bid to try and keep up with her 7-year-old, Debbie is taking Chinese classes at Live the Language. Follow her progress with her blog posts on beijingkids.

Photo by Renato Ganoza of Flickr.

Lost in Translation: Raising a Bilingual Child

Sisi_Chen — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 04:56:52 +0000

Bringing up a child in a foreign land has many advantages. To me, the major one is that they grow up learning another language without trying to.

My child was born here, has been to Chinese schools since kindergarten, and at nearly 7 years old speaks Chinese and English equally well. His Chinese is, of course, far better than mine, his tones are spot on, and he has no trace of a foreign accent. While I can still stamp my authority on him, I find myself constantly reminding him that my English is still better than his.

At the moment, I can just about understand everything he says, though it gets tough with a Chinese friend in mid-play.

But what I hadn’t bargained for was a shift in the balance of power that comes with the ability to not only speak the language, but to speak it like a native.

In the depths of winter, it’s cold walking back from school. One afternoon, we stopped to speak to a neighbor I’d known since I was pregnant. She was with her toddler.

No sooner had we stopped to say hello than the conversation was simply snatched out of my mouth.

– “Boy or girl?” piped up my 7-year-old.
– “Boy.”
– “How old?”
– “A year and a half.”
– “Nice and fat, isn’t he? I should think he eats well.”

And so the conversation went on, from general chitchat about her son to my own son’s school, the food, the teachers, and so on.

After ten minutes on the sidelines stamping my feet, I heard myself whine, “I’m freezing, can we go home now?”

“In a minute, I’m just talking,” chided my meter-high master.

A week later, we passed a classmate of his on the back of her grandmother’s bike. She is picked up from school every day by her grandparents. On this particular day, her grandfather had been too busy to come.

I was just about to call out to the little girl, “See you tomorrow!” when a voice rang out from the child seat behind me:

“Her grandfather hasn’t come to pick her up today, then?”

He didn’t address his own peer; it was Grandma he spoke to, who simply answered, “No, not today.”

In this simple greeting, he showed how he knew exactly how a Chinese greeting would be made.

Where I called out the Western “See you tomorrow,” he stated the obvious – just like when you bump into a neighbor, they are likely to ask “Come back then?” when it’s obvious you have just returned home.

Last week, a toothless old man smiled at him in a park.

“What happened to your teeth?” immediately piped up my little boy.

“Oh, they just fell out,” said the old man, with no trace of offense.

If a Western child had said that to a Western old man, his mother would have scolded him for being rude, but here my son had already worked out that as he meant no offense, the old man wouldn’t take any.

I started feeling quite grumpy about this talent as we got home.

Then, suddenly: “Mummy, I can’t open the door, and I’m hungry, and I want some milk, can I have a lollipop?’

Well, at least between ourselves I still have the power.

Photo by ernop via Flickr

Debbie Mason – Beijing Kids

Lost in Translation: Learning Chinese Phrases

Lost in Translation: Raising a Bilingual Child