Fuddland

A colleague sent me the following message via IM earlier today:

藕买达零, 买低儿, 爱辣无油, 脒死油, 脒死油馊麻雀, 爱旺特吐磕死油, 爱你的油, 嗷, 抗氓被逼! 抗氓抗氓情人节哈皮!

There are plenty of characters there that I don’t recognise, and of those that I do know, the context made absolutely no sense whatsoever, so I lazily ran it through an auto-translator that usually produces helpful results, which output the following:

Lotus of zero, buy, buy low love spicy oil, oil, acetamidine hydrochloride from nitrile over death death acetamidine hydrochloride from nitrile over oil Sou sparrows, love, ke dead spit flourish oil, love your oil, oww, Mang forced! Mang resistance against Mang Valentine’s day, leather!

As you can imagine, I was all the more confused. I thought perhaps something was wrong with my trusty translator, so I double-checked with Google’s:

Tatsu zero coupling to buy, buy low abuse, love spicy oil-free, die Formamidine oil, rancid oil Sparrows die amidine, Turpan special love wang knock die oil, love your oil, sound of wailing, anti-vagrant forced! Anti-anti-vagrant vagrant Valentine’s Day happy!

Giving up, I asked my colleague what on Earth her message was all about. “Say it out loud,” she said, cryptically. Turning once more to automated tools, I converted the characters to phonetic Pinyin:

ǒu mǎi dá líng, mǎi dī r , ài là wú yóu, mǐ sǐ yóu, mǐ sǐ yóu sōu má què, ài wàng tè tǔ kē sǐ yóu, ài nǐ de yóu, áo, kàng máng bèi bī! kàng máng kàng máng qíng rén jié hā pí !

Reading this fairly quickly with the correct pronunciation, it became clear at last:

Oh my darling, my dear, I love you, miss you, miss you so much, want to kiss you, I need you, oh, come on baby, come on come on qíng rén jié [Valentine’s Day] happy!

Believe it or not, there are actually books you can buy here that teach Chinese people to speak English via this method of pronunciation—which explains a lot.