This list is based on my incidental observations and isn’t meant to be comprehensive (or scientific) at all. It’s simply meant to inform lǎowài learning Chinese in either the North or the South what variations we can expect to encounter in the other half of the country. My impression is that these vocabulary differences are best grouped into vague “how people in the North/South like to talk” categories but I have no idea where that dividing “line” would be. Also, I’d like to point out that all of these words (in both the North and South columns) are accepted as Mandarin (although my feeling is that Southerners would be more surprised to hear words in the North list than vice versa). Regardless, people haven’t seemed to have any trouble understanding me regardless of where I am or which of these variations I use.

Enough disclaimers, on to the list!

One of the big surprises has been how prevalent the “(ADJ) de hěn __ 得很” construction has been instead of “hěn (ADJ)” 很__. I’d seen it in books but I rarely hear it in the South. Up North here, on the other hand, it’s absolutely the default construction for such utterances as “it’s really sour” or “it’s very far” (“suān de hěn” 酸得很 and “yuǎn de hěn” 远得很, respectively).

• Nǐ hǎo 你好: A Very Fake Greeting
• Tomb Sweeping Festival
• Up North Chant
• Beware of False Friends
• bié 别 vs. bú yào 不要

Apparently, ChineseTeachers.com is doing a Christmas special offering unlimited Chinese lessons (voice chats with Chinese native speakers) until the end of this year (2009). But here’s the kicker:

After I wrote a review of ChineseTeachers.com, they hired me to do some consulting for them. So, as a thank you to you (the inexplicably loyal readers of this blog), they just informed me that anyone who mentions the name of this blog will receive a free $1 in your account, which is the minimum required to take advantage of the Christmas special. So that means that anyone who reads this little post can actually have totally free Chinese lessons (or as I prefer to think of it: informant Q&A time) for the next week.

If you decide you’d like to give it a try, just remember to type “Laowai Chinese” as the answer to “Where did you hear about us?” when you create your account. That’s apparently the magic mìmǎ 密码.

Enjoy shouting holiday cheer to everyone you meet (four 4th tones in a row, sheesh!).

• Free Gifts
• Book in Hand
• ChineseTeachers.com – My Review
• Receive Updates about my Book
• Beijing Sounds – My Review

Even though I live in China, it’s sometimes hard to find someone to speak Chinese with me.

I’m not talking about all the “duōshao qián” 多少钱  and “yes, I’ve eaten” exchanges.  I mean someone I can really stretch my vocabulary muscles with and speak with for a long period of time about some subject other than buying/eating stuff.

One of the challenges is that I’m always aware of problem 2: many of my Chinese friends want to practice English.  I don’t mean that I think my friends are only hanging out with me to use me.  But I still feel bad asking them to “waste” their chance to speak to a real live foreigner and improve their command of the lingua franca, the tool for future success.

So now I’m using what I call the “Chewbacca Method” that puts us in a shuāngyíng 双赢 situation:  I speak only Chinese, you speak only English.  If we want to practice listening comprehension, we switch roles.

If you’ve never seen Star Wars, Chewbacca is that “walking carpet” that growls and yodels at Harrison Ford for the whole movie.  Ford has (miraculously) learned to understand Chewie’s language, but can’t (or won’t) speak it himself, so he just replies in English.  Chewie (for some reason) has no trouble understanding English but is (perhaps anatomically) hard pressed to utter an English phoneme himself.

This is very much what the Chewbacca method would sound like to an outside observer.  Here’s a little snatch of a conversation between me and one of my Chinese friends.  For some reason we were just talking about pizza (which he pronounces like the Chinese word bǐsà 比萨).

[See original post to listen to audio]

(transcript for Chinese only)

nà nǐ xiànzài qù gànmǎ?
那你现在去干嘛?
So what are you going to do now?

chī shénme?
吃什么?
Eat what?

nǐ zìjǐ zuò háishì nǐ chūqù chī?
你自己做还是你出去吃?
Will you make your own (lunch) or go out to eat?

hǎo, zǒu ba.
好, 走吧.
Ok, let’s go.

I’ve got a few friends now who have agreed to be in Chewie mode pretty much all the time and we love it.

I have a feeling this is especially useful if you’re at an advanced level.  If you’ve found you’re default language with informants and friends really should be Chinese, but you know they still want to speak English, it’s an excellent middle road.

Oh, and if anyone has a sound clip of Han Solo and Chewbacca interracting, I’d love to add that to this post.

• Is China a good place to learn Chinese?
• Unlimited Wireless Internet
• ChineseTeachers.com – My Review
• Learning from Others’ Mistakes
• Stating the Obvious

1. Maybe the Chinese commentators are right.  Maybe he is an alien (wàixīngrén 外星人), and that’s why he swims so fast (he does have slightly webbed toes I’m told).

2. What a lot of work someone went to, translating ALL these people’s names into hanzi characters (there are over 10,000 athletes at the Beijing games).

As the only major world language that refuses to use an alphabet, Chinese requires that every single foreign proper noun (names of people, countries, films, etc.) be crammed into one or more hanzi characters.

Sometimes they try to translate the meaning of the original name.  I’ve heard from ever so many Chinese how proud they are of the translation of “Gone with the Wind” into a single character in Chinese: piāo 飘.

But most often, and this is certainly the case for these Olympics, names of people get pseudo-transliterated into Chinese based on the sound of the original name.  Phelps is pronounced: “fēi ěr pǔ sī” and the characters that go along with that are supposedly 菲尔普斯. (For the record, I don’t think that sounds very much like “Phelps”).

So, here’s what I want to know:

1. What’s the process for choosing the characters?  The countries have all been done for a long time, but you’ve got to imagine a bunch of people’s names came up for this session of the Olympics that no one had ever hanzified before (Hungarians, for example).  There’s got to be some governmental bureau dedicated solely to this sort of thing, right?  Anyone know how it’s done?

2. What about single letters? Is there a standard “pinyin” way of saying English letters?  Some are obvious, like “A” is pronounced “ei1″ in pinyin.  But what about other letters that don’t easily fit into the pinyin system?  Like CJ Bruton.  His Chinese name is “CJ·布鲁顿.”  What’s the pinyin for THAT?  Xī Jiē Bùlǔdùn?

They (whoever THEY are) didn’t hanzi-fy the “CJ” part of his name.  That means they’re just going to pronounce it like “see jay” (in English), right?  (Like CCTV, they alwasy say something that sounds like, “see see tee way.”)  Well, if they can learn to pronounce the “C” and “J” without having a hanzi-character holding their hand, why do they hanzify everything else?  What are the pinyin-izations for the 26 letters of the alphabet?  They’ve got to be codified somewhere, right?  I think they’re all first tone.  Anyone?

• Pinyin Chart
• The Pinyin Wall
• Stump the Chinese: Stunt
• Why Is It So Easy to Rhyme in Mandarin?
• Nciku.com – My Review

Me: zhè zhǒng yǒu méiyǒu zǐ? 这种有没有子?
Does this kind have seeds?

Lady: méiyǒu. 没有.
No

Me: nà zhǒng ne? 那种呢?
What about that kind?

Lady: nà zhǒng gèng méiyǒu! 那种更没有!
That kind has even less!

Can anyone explain this? I thought méiyǒu 没有 was none, nothing, zip. How can you have even MORE none (gèng méiyǒu 更没有)?

It was actually a little test for her. Although I’d never shopped there before, I know what kinds of oranges do and don’t have seeds. The first kind certainly DOES have seeds and the second kind DOESN’T.

My only explanation for this is cultural, something I like to call: “Sell him what he wants even if you don’t have it.”

I still remember when I asked a guy if he sold waterproof gloves (fángshuǐ shǒutào 防水手套) and he just pointed to a random pair of normal work gloves. I asked several times if he was SURE these are waterproof. He finally cracked and insisted that he could get some for me if I came back in a few hours. The shop was near my house so it was easy to check back. When I got back, he looked around nervously and then pointed to the same pair of work gloves again. He seemed to be afraid of saying he didn’t have something I was looking for.

That certainly doesn’t happen all the time in China, but I think that might have been what was going on with orange lady. I asked a question about something she was selling. She thought I wanted to hear “no” so she said “no.” Any other theories?

• Stump the Laowai: shànghuǒ 上火
• Stuff You Might Be Hearing: ATMs
• Which measure words do they really use?
• What’s up with Shower?
• Pinch Sounds Like It Is

Zhou Xiansheng, on behalf of all of us laowai who are learning Chinese: fēicháng gǎnxiè!

For more reading on Romanization systems of Chinese, the best resource I’ve found is here.

• Wanted: Cantonese Materials For Foreigners Who Already Know Mandarin
• How Old Are You on Mars?
• He/She Mistake in the News
• Stump the Laowai: wúnài 无奈
• How to type pinyin (pīnyīn) with tone markings

Chinese people often speak English as if it were Chinese, but with English words. This often causes mistakes (called L1 interference). If you have Chinese friends whom you are comfortable talking to about their mistakes in English, it can be extremely valuable for both parties. Here are some examples of what I’m talking about:

Vocabulary

Make a Dream

You can often just guess what the Chinese would be from the English mistake. For example, when my student said:

• Last night I made a dream

I asked if he meant:

• zuówǎn wǒ zuò mèng 昨晚我做梦

He looked surprised and said “exactly!” I was then able to tell him in English we “have” dreams instead of “making” them like you do in Chinese. What I didn’t tell him was that was the first time I learned how to say that in Chinese.

I used the same technique to learn that the part of the leg from your knee to the ankle is called:

• xiǎo tuǐ 小腿 [little leg]

A student said she’d hurt her “little leg” and I guessed she wasn’t just talking about her overall stature. As I’m sure you could guess, “thigh” is “dà tuǐ” 大腿 [big leg].

Survey = Investigation

Other vocabulary mistakes may come from something called “divergent concepts.” That means in one language there are two words for two different things, but in the other language there’s only one word for both things.

One of the most frustrating divergent concepts in Chinese has to be all the words for the English word “break,” depending on what kind of thing is broken (see here for a list–but not a usage guide). Conversely, there are words that have multiple English translations but are a single word in Chinese. Besides the classic “he/she” mix up, examples of mistakes that reveal divergent English concepts that are convergent in Chinese are:

• “I have a problem to ask you.”
  (wèntí 问题 = question / problem)
• “I was so mad when my mother let me do my homework.”
  (ràng 让 = let / make / ask)

A most unnerving example happed to me in my second week in China. The lady from the Foreign Affairs Office called to ask me some question for the “provincial investigation.” I immediately thought of police (remember this was my second week in China–I didn’t know what I’d done wrong!). The “investigation” turned out to be a one-question “survey.” I checked the dictionary and sure enough:

• diàochá 调查 = survey / investigation / poll

Whew!

Grammar

Although…but…

You can also learn about grammar from hearing mistakes. A classic example of a grammar mistake in English that shows how the Chinese language works is the sentence:

• Although it’s raining, but I still want to go.

That “but” shouldn’t be there in English, but when a Chinese person says the above sentence it should give us a clue about Chinese grammar. That “but” needs to be there in Chinese (and foreigners often leave it out when speaking Chinese). In Chinese the same sentence is:

• suīrán xiàyǔ le, dànshì wǒ hái xiǎng qù 虽然下雨了, 但是我还想去

How long have you bought it?

The other day I showed a student my new ping pong paddle. He asked me:

• How long have you bought it?

I immediately said, “Wait. We would never say that in English. Say it in Chinese.” He said:

• nǐ mǎi le duō jiǔ? 你买了多久?

Apparently that means “How long ago did you buy it?” which sounds a little awkward in English. We’d probably say, “How long have you had it?” I was able to use that strange English sentence to find out a useful construction in Chinese, and to tell my student a way to ask what he meant in English that would actually be understood.

The Point Is

There is a time and place for ignoring mistakes in the interest of accomplishing the communication task at hand. However, mistakes that our Chinese friends make can give us a clue as to how Chinese works. Also, the more we learn about the Chinese language, the more we have X-ray vision into the brains of Chinese learners of English and can help them understand the source of mistakes caused by L1 interference.

If anyone has an example of an English mistake that is caused by Chinese interference, or even a mistake foreigners make when trying to speak Chinese, please feel free to tell us about it by leaving a comment.

• Language Learning is Messy V: Celebrate Your Mistakes
• He/She Mistake in the News
• Language Learning is Messy I
• Language Learning is Messy III: Learn What You Need
• Language Learning is Messy IV: Goals are Bad

Since making mistakes are an inevitable part of this complex, tricky, and often magical process of learning to speak in a different tongue, what should our attitude be regarding mistakes?

I suggest the following approach:

People can’t laugh at you if you’re already laughing, because then they’re laughing with you.

My First Public Mistake in Chinese

Let me practice what I preach by telling you about a little blunder I made in my first couple of weeks in China. A friend and I were out buying some little “bǐng” 饼 things that came in spicy and non-spicy varieties. Because we didn’t like the spicy ones, we’d been saying a phrase we’d just learned:

• wǒ pà là 我怕辣 = I don’t like spicy food [I fear spicy]

But I got confused with those rhyming words when I decided to make my own sentence:

• wǒmen bú yào pà 我们不要怕 = We don’t want fear

The worker guy just kind of cocked his head at me. But my friend started laughing and said in English, “Ya, we don’t want any buns that are afraid to be eaten. Only the bravest ones for us!” I suddenly realized what I’d said, started laughing, and tried again to say what I meant.

My Achilles Heel

My most common mistake in Chinese is certainly worth laughing at. In a way like Chinese spoonerisms, I often switch around the syllables of two-syllable words. I’ve gone into a store and asked for “bees” (mìfēng 蜜蜂) when I wanted “honey” (fēngmì 蜂蜜) and inquired about someone’s “divorce” (líhūn 离婚) when I meant “wedding” (hūnlǐ 婚礼). After hearing a joke about someone with my problem, I refuse to call a “briefcase” anything but a “bāo” 包. I’m just too scared of not saying “píbāo” 皮包 (“briefcase”) and ending up saying “bāopí” 包皮 (“foreskin”).

Look on the Lighter Side

It goes without saying that cause for celebration will be significantly reduced the more frequently the same mistake occurs. For example, if nine out of ten times I say “bee” when I mean “honey,” it’s time to stop laughing and start looking for a cure. But in general, I think it’s good to learn to take ourselves, and especially our task of learning a language, a little less seriously. It’s going to be a dirty job, why not enjoy it?

What’s Your Story?

Now’s your chance to celebrate your own mistakes. Feel free to leave a little tale of your own language blunders in a comment so everyone can laugh with you.

See also the other posts in this series:

• Language Learning is Messy I
• Language Learning is Messy II: Talk a Lot
• Language Learning is Messy III: Learn What You Need
• Language Learning is Messy IV: Goals are Bad

• Language Learning is Messy I
• Language Learning is Messy III: Learn What You Need
• Learning from Others’ Mistakes
• Language Learning is Messy II: Talk a Lot
• Language Learning is Messy IV: Goals are Bad

Learning a language is not like learning other things. It’s a far more complex and sometimes even magical process that takes much more time and effort than most people have spent achieving other goals. Even learning a musical instrument is easier, in a way, because it is possible (though perhaps not preferable) to learn to play the piano by yourself, in a shack in the mountains without contact with other people. For language learning, especially listening comprehension, it’s impossible to do without human interaction.

Goalaholism

Of course, goals on their own aren’t bad. One of my goals was to write this post that you are reading right now (though it’s been the drafts folder for weeks). It’s when goals are too big, or too important that they become motivational poison or perhaps too motivating.

Stephen Shapiro in his book Goal Free Living talks about how people get addicted to goals and let their goals control their lives instead of the other way around.

For learning a foreign language I think it is also possible to sway to the other extreme and feel obligated to set a goal and then feel guilty for not focusing on it more.

A language learner may:

1. Set a goal that’s too big and get discouraged because “it’s never going to happen.”

OR

2. Sacrifice other important things just for the sake of accomplishing that goal.

Both are signs of being a goalaholic. If you can’t easily self-diagnose, Shapiro has been generous enough to make his “Are You a Goalaholic” quiz available for free.

I suggest the following treatments for goalaholism:

1. Bite-Sized Goals

At the beginning of every school year, scads of foreigners flood into China. Most start out with the goal to learn Chinese, at least enough to “get around.” Nadina, when she arrived at our college last September, was no different. But her attitude was.

Rather than feeling pressure to learn Chinese on any kind of time schedule, Nadina seemed to be able to relax and enjoy whatever progress she was making. She quickly learned what she needed, and then found every possible chance to say those words a lot. Then, as she wanted to learn something new, she simply learned it and started using it.

At one point, she said to me out of the blue, “I need more verbs! Ok, I’m going to learn ten new verbs by…um…Tuesday.” Not only did she learn those ten new verbs (by Tuesday), she memorized very useful sentence examples from Chubby that contained them.

By setting an attainable, short-term goal for herself, she was able to go above and beyond it and learn “bonus” sentences (one of which came in very handy at a critical time for her).

2. Celebrate What You’ve Done

Another thing Nadina does well is enjoying when her Chinese worked for her rather than focusing on what she doesn’t know. She’s thrilled when she gets a chance to use her new vocabulary in the real world. She should be proud. It’s really quite an accomplishment to apply what you’ve learned proactively when talking to a real live person.

I don’t hear a whole lot of talk from Nadina like, “I didn’t know how to say such-and-such and I know I should.” Although that “should” word can really motivate some people, I’ve found it’s most likely a source of discouragement rather than a motivator. Looking ahead at the whole rest of the mountain you’re trying to climb is OK, but don’t forget to look back and see not only how far you’ve already come, but also that you’re no longer at the bottom.

3. Know When to Quit

The first two tips address the problem of not being able to accomplish a goal. But what happens when you’re accomplishing the goal too well, even at the expense of something else? Let me give you an example of a student who’s goal seemed to be: “Shout English as quickly as possible especially at foreigners.”

I know he’s a product of Li Yang‘s “Crazy English,” but I don’t think even the guru himself would have done what this student did. After trying to be polite and figure out what he was trying to say, my patience was gone and I said to him in Chinese, “When you speak quickly I can’t understand a single word, so practicing like that is wasting your time.” The student replied by shouting the opening words of the “Gettysburg Address” (I think) at warp 5. I just walked away.

This was an example of someone who had such a vice-like grip on his goal that he sacrificed other things (especially common courtesy) just to hold on to it.

As extreme as that example is, I’ve had to make decisions about when to quit as well. My first year in China I wanted to get in as much speaking time as possible. Since that’s not always easy, I decided to talk to whomever I sat next to on the teachers’ bus to or from the new campus.

However, despite the friendly responses I got from my colleagues (all of whom were strangers), I quickly realized that at 8:00 AM, on a commute to work, most people would rather have silence than conversation. One of my first clues was when I saw two of the Chinese teachers, who clearly knew each other, sit together and not say a word to each other for the whole 20 minute trip. So, my new policy on those commutes was to speak only when spoken to and let the other person initiate conversation if they wanted to.

The result was that I rarely had a chance to speak Chinese on those bus rides. I gave up my goal, but I felt better about how I was treating the people. They were no longer Chinese practice robots designed to serve me, but actual people with feelings.

Goals are a tricky thing because we feel like we should have them. There are no formulas or rules for what your language learning goals should be and or when you should give them up. Maybe it’s enough just to have the goal of staying flexible and not letting goals get in the way of the really important things.

See also the other posts in this series:

• Language Learning is Messy I
• Language Learning is Messy II: Talk a Lot
• Language Learning is Messy III: Learn What You Need
• Language Learning is Messy V: Celebrate Your Mistakes

• Language Learning is Messy I
• Language Learning is Messy V: Celebrate Your Mistakes
• Language Learning is Messy III: Learn What You Need
• Language Learning is Messy II: Talk a Lot
• Unlimited Wireless Internet

“What words should I learn now?”

The Proactive Approach

One way to figure out what you should learn is to try to predict what situations you’ll be in and what vocabulary you’ll want to use. For example, Ben Ross described to me his way of learning Chinese in China:

“Say I needed to go to the bank to transfer money…I ask a Chinese friend all the words and phrases which might come up, learn them, possibly practice it out, and then go to the bank.”

That’s an excellent way to get useful vocabulary into your brain. I find this approach much more useful than following a book or teacher’s idea of what you should learn next. But it requires imagination. Even in the earliest days of learning Chinese, I was thinking thoughts like, “Ok, I’ll be in China and see Chinese people and I’ll want to be able to greet them or thank them when our paths cross.”

The problem with the proactive approach is, for me at least, that I often have no guarantee I’ll actually ever use what I’m learning. I have a tendency to get lost in the dictionary and start learning things that will yield very small (if any) linguistic returns in real life (like the word for “elbow”). This is bad because I run out of time and energy and sometimes movitvation.

The Reactive Approach

Another way to increase your Chinese vocabulary is to learn the words you just needed but didn’t have. For example, if you go out shopping and realize you wanted to say, “Can I have another bag?” but didn’t know how, you can write down the English phrase in your field notes and rush to your informant and find out how to say it in Chinese: qǐng zài gěi wǒ yí gè dàizi 请再给我一个袋子.

Or, on the listening comprehension side, if you have Chinese-speaking friends who are patient enough to stop every time you don’t understand what they say, you can write down those new words and come home and learn them. That’s exacty how I wrote the list of the measure words Chinese people really use. I didn’t memorize the list in the back of Chubby and then go looking for them being used in real life. I simply didn’t understand a measure word when I heard it, then learned it.

For me, the reactive approach is the best in terms of motivation. In other words, there’s no question of why I’m learning certain words. The downside is that uncomfortable time where I don’t understand what someone said or don’t know how to say something. But I’ll shake the hand of the language learner who can avoid those times completely.

On Feelings

Of course a combination of proactive and reactive learning is best. But how to balance the two and where to commit your time and energy has to be up to you. This is one of those messy bits of learning a language where there’s really no right answer. It’s easy to feel like you’re not being proactive enough, or simply not being active enough. The “should” phrases tend to crop up. For example you might tell yourself, “I should have known that” or “I should be better by now.” But as long as you’re learning, moving forward, and doing what you feel like doing, shouldn’t that be enough?

See also the other posts in this series:

• Language Learning is Messy I
• Language Learning is Messy II: Talk a Lot
• Language Learning is Messy IV: Goals are Bad
• Language Learning is Messy V: Celebrate Your Mistakes

• Language Learning is Messy V: Celebrate Your Mistakes
• Language Learning is Messy I
• Language Learning is Messy II: Talk a Lot
• Language Learning is Messy IV: Goals are Bad
• A Bit about Bù 不