I think the problem is that people usually do not translate the joke into their own language, which is a good thing is not it? when i start learning english, i translated what i hear or what i read into chinese, and think, what i should say in chinese, then translate it into english, which takes a long time, especially, not many people have the patience to wait until i finish my sentence.

I do not know if i was taking the right way to learn english. After i realize this, i forced myself to think in english, just like a baby, to know the world all over again in another language. And now, I feel pretty cool to live in a english speaking environment although my accent is too late to change or it would take a long time to change.

by the way, there ARE shoes made completely by plastic in china. go to some cheap markets and look for sandals.

I just blogged is here: Learning Chinese & Culture Stress: the importance of playing mind games with yourself

Maybe some of them didn’t realize at once that you had tried to express xiàngjiāo in Chinese.
And some of them may understand it’s xiàngjiāo as soon as heard ‘bananas’. But what you said was bananas (or xiāngjiāo). Whatever, it’s like a funny mistake, isn’t it? They could imagine those unbelievable scenes. Your little joke works!

Jim and syz’s comments have emphasized the tone mix-up in language learning and given a clear explanation. Thanks.

Even though I’m an evangelist for teaching tones, I admit that people sometimes understand when I get them wrong (the latest Beijing Sounds post happens to cover a bit of this). The less context there is, or the more misleading the context, the more likely you are to be misunderstood when you get a tone wrong. The classic is when you’re asking for a particular item at a grocery store. If it’s one syllable and you get the tone wrong, you’re hosed.

I think @Jim is right about how mixing up tones is perceived by native speakers. It’s subtler than the difference between rubber and banana in English, cuz you’d never associate those words together. But it’s a lot like individual vowel sounds or certain consonants in English. A native Mandarin speaker would rarely think about how close xiàngjiāo is to xiāngjiāo unless, as with banana-shoe, you kind of force the issue. In the same way, a native English speaker normally doesn’t think about how close together “think” and “sink” are — until they’re put together in a bad pun. In other words, s and th are psychologically significant to English speakers just like tones are to Mandarin speakers — the exact definition of phonemic, of course.

My favorite getting-a-tone-wrong analogy comes from a dinner I attended many years ago. Non-native speaker (you guess the country, not China) was helping in the kitchen. All of a sudden he stood up and said, rather matter-of-factly, “I breed.” Again, the parallel to tones is the need for context. If he’d said “I cut my hand with a knife and it’s breeding,” we might not even have noticed the error. But given the lack of context, including grammatical context, it became an instant favorite.

Thanks as always for the great post, Albert.

Of course, English has its own set of subtle differences, not the least of which is the plethora of barely discernable vowel sounds. We native speakers seldom think twice about them, except perhaps as a fertile ground for puns. (Have you heard about the Hong Kong businessman who left a huge estate when he died? It was the great will of China.) They give learners fits, however. And then there’s “can” and “can’t”. Even native speakers sometimes have trouble with those two.