Who are You? Names in China

If you ever decide to study Chinese, as a foreigner one of the first things the teacher will do is help you select a Chinese name. It is tradition that everyone who studies the language has a Chinese name. Students also learn to write their name in characters (hanzi), and the name will stick with you for as long as you study Chinese. I suppose it’s possible to change it, but I don’t know many people who have.

You might find it interesting to know how the teachers come up with the names. There are two parts to the name, and the family name is written first, unlike in most countries in the West. Some students, from Korea and Japan in particular, already have names that can be written in traditional Chinese characters. The pronunciation is different, but the meaning is the same. Park Junwoo becomes Piao Junyou, for example. For people from other countries, the teacher often takes the first couple letters of each of your first and last names and tries to find names that sound similar to those syllables and also have a nice meaning. For example, Jennie Griffen becomes Zhen Gui, which sounds like Jenny and means ‘really honorable.’

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I'm Crook (really!)

I've got one more quick story for the week, and then I’m headed out of town for the weekend. BLCU organized an optional field trip for us to the province of Inner Mongolia, and spending two nights in a yurt on the Mongolian grasslands is something that everyone should do at least once in their life, or so I’ve been told. One of the lessons from our reading textbook was about this particular excursion, which the school offers every year. It promised us blue skies, white clouds, green grassy plains and herdsmen singing traditional Mongolian folk songs. When we get back, I’ll let you know if they were telling us the truth.

The trip aside, today’s story is about languages. More specifically, it’s about English and the diversity within the language. My friend Roberta, an Italian who sits next to me in class, asked me if I would understand her if she said “I’m crook.” I told her no. You can say “I’m a crook” or “I’m crooked” (though who would ever say either?), but “I’m crook” doesn’t really mean anything to me.

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Holy Hanzi Batman! What'd she say?

Apparently, my Chinese placement test went pretty well. Either that, or the teacher who gave the test was playing a cruel joke on me. They put me in level C10, which is an intermediate level. Intermediate sounded about right to me. I imagined that the class would be hard but that I would understand what was going on.  I didn’t. Let’s just put it this way: the first class was hard. I don’t mean “run the Portland marathon” hard, I mean “run the Hood to Coast by yourself hard”. . . . .While carrying your sister on your back. . . . . . .Barefoot. . . . .Get the picture?

From the minute the teacher walked in , I knew I was in trouble. She began right away, welcoming everyone and asking us to introduce ourselves. That was no problem, since our teacher at PSU had drilled us on this a lot, but once we opened the textbook everything went to hell. I’ve spent quite of time studying characters (hanzi) on my own, but mostly without the context of a sentence or paragraph. When I started reading the text, I could not really understand the meaning. Reading the book out loud made my comprehension decrease even more. Our teacher would stop to explain terms to us (all in very fast Mandarin), often writing lots of characters on the chalkboard to make her point.

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Chinglish of the Day

There are plenty of interesting English translations in China. I won't criticize anyone's translations, especially as I spend hours each day trying to do my own, but I do think you'll find some of them humorous. I'm not sure that today's is really that bad of a translation, but it is interesting. I saw it on a restaurant sign as we were riding the bus back to Beijing after visiting the great wall (and it is great). 

COD: Donkey meat Dongquan Reservoir Fish

Mmmmm. Too bad we couldn't stop, don't you think?