Omniglot - the blog

When I lived in Taiwan I was in a multilingual environment. The main languages I encountered there were Mandarin, Taiwanese and English. Sometimes I came across speakers of Japanese, Korean, Hakka or Spanish as well.

As a student I had friends from many countries and we tended to communicate amongst ourselves in Mandarin. In some cases this was the only language we had in common. With other students from English-speaking countries I generally spoke English, unless we were with people who spoke little or no English.

At work I spoke a mixture of Mandarin and English, with occasional bits of Taiwanese thrown for good measure. With colleagues who spoke both Mandarin and English fluently, I spoke a mixture of the two languages switching between them frequently, though some conversations were mainly in Mandarin, and others mostly in English.

Quite often when we were all be talking in Mandarin, I found myself talking Mandarin to the other Western colleagues, which felt a bit strange. When our boss was with us we all spoke English because his knowledge of Mandarin and Taiwanese was minimal, but I think some of my Taiwanese colleagues with limited English found this awkward.

I’ve heard that some people in Taiwan who speak Mandarin sometimes play the dumb foreigner and pretend they don’t. Apparently it can be quite an effective way of dealing with problems as locals don’t expect you to understand how things work and may be more helpful. Have you tried this?

成語 [成语] (chéngyǔ) are Chinese idioms usually consisting of four characters. They tend to pack a lot of meaning into those four characters and many have a story, myth or moral behind them from Classical Chinese literature, in which they were used extensively. If you’re not familiar with the stories, it will be very difficult or impossible to work out what the idioms mean. They’re still quite commonly used in modern written and spoken Chinese, and there are between 5,000 and 20,000 of them.

Here are a few examples:

一日千秋 (yírìqiānqiū) = “one day, a thousand autumns” - implies rapid changes; one day equals a thousand years

一日千里 (yírìqiānlǐ) = “one day, a thousand miles.”- implies rapid progress; travelling a thousand miles in a day

一日三秋 (yírìsānqiū) = “one day, three autumns.” - when you’re missing someone very much, one day can feel as long as three years.

From Wikipedia

A good place to find out more about chengyu is this site, which explains a number of them in Chinese and English. Another useful chengyu site is this one, which contains a dictionary of 13,000 of them with explanations in Chinese.

These idioms are also used in Japanese and are called 四字熟語 (yojijukugo) - four character idioms. They come mainly from Classical Chinese and have the same or similar meanings to the Chinese ones. A dictionary of Japanese four characters idioms, with explanations in Japanese, can be found here, while this site explains some of them in English.

An interesting site I came across today called the Chinese Pear Stories features material in seven Chinese languages - Mandarin (普通话), Cantonese (广东话), Hakka (客家话), Shanghai Wu (吳), Xiamen Min Nan (閩南话), Xiang 湘 and Gan 贛. The material consists of recordings and transcriptions of stories told by speakers of each of these languages. This is the first time I’ve heard the latter two and to me they sound a lot like Mandarin.

A researcher from the University of California made a short film, which can be seen on the site, called ‘Pear Stories’ about some children stealing fruit.The film has no dialogue and is designed to elicit samples of various languages, including the Chinese ones already mentioned and also English, German, Greek, Japanese, and one of the Mayan languages. People watched the film, then were asked to say what they’d seen in their language. The idea was to compare how speakers of different languages describe the same events.

One finding that emerged was that the structure of the stories was very similar across all the languages - there appears to be a common ’story grammar’. There were however some minor differences in the vocabulary used, and some people added moral comments about stealing.

Ecpod is a language learning site I found the other day that’s designed to teach you conversational English and Mandarin Chinese. It contains videos made by members, some of which feature everyday activities such as cooking, shopping or playing; others focus on particularly aspects of English or Chinese. There are also funny videos, cartoons, and a variety of others. The videos are vetted by language tutors commissioned by the site, who sometimes also add transcriptions.

It’s free, but you have to join to site to submit your own videos.

This sounds like a good idea. Do you know of similar sites for other languages?

Languages Quick Fix is a very useful site I discovered today. It includes words, phrases, and idioms in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, and German, plus a basic introduction to each language. There are recordings of the words, phrases, and idioms in all the languages - in the case of Chinese, the recordings are in Mandarin, Shanghainese and Cantonese. There are also links to news stories, dictionaries, and Chinese paintings (in the Learn Chinese - One At a Time section).

Another useful site I came across today is SmallMarble, a multilingual phrase book to which anyone can contribute. At the moment it has Spanish translations of most of the phrases, but few translations in other languages.

Imagine going from working in insurance in Liverpool, to becoming a pop star in China. That’s just what Barry Cox did, according to an article on the BBC News website.

He was bored with his insurance job and wanted to try something different. After a visit to his local Chinese chip shop, he decided to have a go at learning Chinese. So he made friends with the guys in the chip shop, and began to learn Cantonese from them, and also at the Wah Sing Chinese Community Centre in Liverpool. Then he went to work in a Chinese supermarket and a restaurant to work on his language skills.

One of the guys gave him a pile of Cantonese music CDs. Barry found the tunes quite catchy and learnt to sing some of songs, even though he had no musical background and didn’t listen to music much before that.

Before long he was singing regularly at karakoe nights around Chinatown, and eventually moved to Hong Kong to pursue a singing career under the name of Gok Pak-wing. After building up his reputation over a number of years, he was offered a residency at the biggest casino in Macau.

So there you have a slightly unusual reason to learn a language - to become a pop star!

Believe it or not the Chinese characters shown below are all variants forms of the ’same’ character.

The character in question is 壹 (yī) - the complex form of ‘one’, which is used on banknotes, coins and cheques. Well actually the first one is a version of 一, the simple from of ‘one’.

The first two characters come from this site, which includes a number of other rare and unusual Chinese characters. The only one of them I’ve seen ‘in the wild’ is the Shanxi noodle one (no. 2), which appears in many Chinese restaurants in the UK.

Is the current craze for learning Mandarin Chinese a misguided fad? An article in The Economist I found today suggests that it might be.

Mandarin is now taught at over 400 secondary schools in the UK, and the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust would like to see it made part of the national curriculum. Around the world there are some 30 million people studying Mandarin at the moment, and the Chinese government expects that number to rise to 100 million by 2010.

The article argues that for most people, a knowledge of Mandarin is unlikely to result in a better career. A number of factors are put forward to support this statement: the difficultly of learning Mandarin when compared to most other languages, especially European languages, which means that very few who study Mandarin attain a high level of competence in the language. The lack of regard among British employers for languages skills is another factor. Finally the fact that the Chinese are busy learning English means that British people doing business with China are unlikely to need a knowledge of Mandarin.

The article concludes with a comment from a representative of a Beijing employment agency, who says that:

whereas the value of compensation packages for expat executives has been shrinking over the past ten years, the number of Chinese-speaking foreigners she handles has been rising. Better language skills, she reckons, are a product less of market demand than of a general enthusiasm for China. Reason enough, perhaps, to learn the language.

By the way, I don’t agree with the article myself. Learning any language is a worthwhile endeavour, even if you only acquire the basics. While a knowledge of Mandarin might not automatically lead to a job, learning it certainly isn’t a waste of your time and effort.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been learning the Polish version of Silent Night (Cicha Noc). While trying work out how to pronounce the Polish, I noticed that some of the the Polish consonants are similar to those found in Mandarin Chinese.

For example:

• Polish c [ts] = Mandarin c, as in 次
• Polish ć & c+i [ʨ] = Mandarin q, as in 七
• Polish cz [tʂ] Mandarin ch, as in 吃
• Polish sz [ʂ] = Mandarin sh, as in 十
• Polish ś & s+i [ɕ] = Mandarin x, as in 西

Comparing the pronunciation of one language to another isn’t always helpful and can be misleading. In this case though, it gives me a better understanding Polish phonology.

I found an interesting website today called Tailingua, which provides a good, clear introduction to the Taiwanese language (Tâi-ôan-ōe). It includes information about the language, the numerous methods used to write it, and explains how to set up your computer to write Taiwanese using Peh⁸-oe⁷-ji⁷ (POJ), the most popular system for writing Taiwanese with the Latin alphabet. There is also a list of books for learning Taiwanese, links, and a blog.

Other sites with information (in English) about Taiwanese include Talking Taiwanese, Intermediate Taiwanese Grammar, and Glossika.