भाषा प्रशस्ता सुमनो लतेव केषाम्न चेतांस्यावर्जयति।

DISCLAIMER: Might be a little boring...

I may have mentioned before that where I am living, people speak Cantonese. Cantonese, or 广东话 = Guǎngdōng huà is VERY different than Pǔtōnghuà which is the 拼音, (or Pīnyīn) for Mandarin Chinese (or Common people's language). I know I cannot do justice to explaining the language differences and comparing them to something we’re all familiar with, but basically Cantonese is not just like a dialect of Mandarin, but actually like a different language (in you ask me).

When people speak Russian I can pretty much understand what they are saying because I speak Polish and although Polish uses the Latin alphabet (with some additions) and Russian uses Cyrillic, both are part of the Indo-European language family and in the Slavic group (Russian is East Slavic and Polish is West Slavic). In essence, this is NOT how the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin can be explained. Mandarin speakers, if never previously exposed to Cantonese, cannot understand Guǎngdōng huà. Note that the word"Cantonese" translated into Chinese means language of GuangDong or something like that (this is my own translation; don’t take my word for it). Wikipedia states that Cantonese is a “prestige dialect”, not a different language. The only reason I can think why is because it is spoken in China and it is not the language most Chinese speak (even thought it does create language barriers because the two are so different, spoken and written). I hope I didn’t confuse you there…

Henceforth, shopping and speaking with people here is a challenge because some ONLY speak Cantonese and some speak Mandarin. I have made friends with a lady in the market who sells me vegetables and she asks me if I speak Chinese (I can understand that) and we communicate with hands, smiles and me saying “I don’t speak Chinese” or “I don’t understand” or “no”. When Chinese people are around me I’m spoiled because I rely on them, but when I’m by myself (shopping or getting food) I can pretty much get my point across, and kind of figure out what they’re saying. In the event that a person who speaks Chinese is with me, I shut up. For example, two days ago a few of us went to dinner and then went walking around Beijiao. I saw something I wanted to buy and started talking to the lady, but then relied on Alex (who speaks Chinese) to help me bargain, although I know I could have done it myself… I was embarrassed in front of a native Chinese speaker. That’s why it helps to be drunk, because then words flow out of your mouth even if they’re wrong (for example one time after the club I was screaming “Wǒài zhōngguó” outside…look it up and learn something hehehhe)

In any attempt, I’m going to try to learn some Cantonese too (because Скільки мов ти знаєш - стільки разів ти людина).

The point of this post was to talk about something I’ve noticed lately… just HOW difficult Chinese is. This is NOT my excuse by any means, but I wanted to point out some things. There are about 47,000 Chinese characters, but a fully literate Chinese person knows between three and four thousand only! “Only”, you ask? Yes only in comparison to the almost 50,000 characters there are available! I think I only know ONE. Equally important, people here use the computer or their cell phone to figure out characters for a word or phrase. For example, they start writing a word with the Roman alphabet, then pinyin options come up (with many different tones) then they click on the word they are looking for in pinyin and the Chinese characters pop up! This is how all my coworkers write, because obviously there ARE NO Chinese characters on keyboards (or are there and I just don’t know about it?) I’m not talking about a few characters on your laptop keys, but I mean a full keyboard of Chinese characters.

Subsequently, pronunciation of words also leads to misunderstandings. A different tone could make a world of a difference. The four tones are: ā á ǎ à and even a (ahhh how is this different than the first tone?!? So confusing). Not only are the tones confusing for NON NATIVE speakers, but as is the vocabulary (even for native speakers). For example, yesterday I had dinner with two Chinese friends. One said something in Chinese and the other could not understand. So he kept repeating and repeating and slowly repeating again… until finally my other friend figured it out and said another word, which I’m assuming just means the same thing! So as you can see, misunderstanding people and mispronouncing things is very common here. To be more concise, a mispronunciation could just be a way you’d pronounce something in your hometown or in your province, and the person you’re speaking to does not say it that way, or it sounds a little different.

What I don’t understand is that while to me, two phrases (pronounced differently) can sound VERY similar and almost the same, but to a Chinese person, they understand what the heck the other person is saying because it’s not pronounced EXACTLY as they pronounce it… You’d think people with so many tones would have their ears and brain trained to be super flexible, but I guess you have to get it JUST RIGHT to communicate fluidly (for example if I said I love you without any tones, using all flat tones instead of Wǒ ài nǐ [there are two DIFFERENT tones here] people wouldn’t understand me… at least MOST Chinese speakers wouldn’t). I, on the other hand, understand when people mispronounce and butcher the hell out of English… and the other languages I speak fluently. This happens mostly when people TRY to speak Polish to me, which is one of the hardest languages to pronounce for native English speakers.

Chodzi mi o to, aby język giętki

Powiedział wszystko, co pomyśli głowa:

A czasem był jak piorun jasny, prędki,

A czasem smutny jako pieśń stepowa,

A czasem jako skarga nimfy miętki,

A czasem piękny jak aniołów mowa...

Aby przeleciał wszystka ducha skrzydłem.

- Juliusz Słowacki