Fuddland

This category is a subcategory of China.

I quite often have to talk to students about Western dining habits—the differences, the etiquette, and so on—and one of the phrases that appears in their vocabulary list is, “going Dutch”. The phrase always requires an explanation, after which the students generally nod and say that in China it is called “AA”.

The term “AA” has puzzled me since I first heard it, being made up of English letters as opposed to Chinese characters, and no-one seemed to know what it actually stood for. In fact, most of them had never even thought to wonder.

“What does ‘AA’ mean?” I would ask.

“Go Dutch,” the reply would come.

“No, I’m not testing you on something you just learned. I mean, what does it stand for?”

“Oh … we don’t know.”

They wouldn’t even guess, and I was similarly stumped. [I could see no obvious connection with alcohol or automobiles.] Until, that is, yesterday, when a student was finally able to put me out of my misery.

As anyone who has learned a language while living or working alongside its native speakers will testify, one’s vocabulary can have some fairly eclectic entries. I knew how to say “mobile phone charger” in Chinese before I learnt the colours of the rainbow, simply because buying a new one was more of a priority than shopping for oil paints. [And when I do get around to building up a palette, it will probably conspicuously lack a purple, because I have immense trouble pronouncing that particular hue.]

And so it was that, somehow, a student who earlier in the class had no idea what “to go on a date” meant, was able to inform me why “AA” means “to split the bill”: it stands for “algebraic average”, which is what most people mean when they say, “take the average”, but in the world of maths is more commonly called the mean.

This of course answers another question that I frequently get asked, namely why—given my background—I’m not teaching mathematics in China. Any country that adopts a mathematical phrase into its everyday language clearly doesn’t need any help from me.

Here’s a quick tip on how to impress the Chinese with your knowledge of their language: learn how to write the character for die [as in the singular of dice]. Some of the classroom activities I like to do involve use of a die to introduce an element of excitement into the lesson [this sounds sarcastic but believe me, telling a group that the next person to roll a 6 has to give a one-minute talk, then watching as the tension mounts on each throw is quite amusing].

Invariably someone will point at the die and ask what it’s called in English, and I have now learnt to lean back and wait for them to make a note of it, because when they come to writing down the Chinese word, it suddenly occurs to them that they have no idea how to. They know how to pronounce it all right, “shǎizi”, so whispers go around the group, but generally, hardly ever is there someone in the group who knows how to write it.

Now before we all leap on our herd of high horses and moan about how difficult the Chinese language must be if the native speakers can’t even remember how to write it, there are currently over ten million pages indexed by Google that say “calender” not “calendar”, to cite just one of the 100 most commonly misspelled words.

So you might imagine that the character for die is one of the more complex ones, but in fact the “shǎi” contains only 14 strokes of the pen, the “zi” only 3, and its overall appearance is “modular” enough to make it quite easy to break down and memorise. So here it is: 骰子. I really don’t have any insights as to why it’s so hard to remember, beyond the explanation I generally get from students: “Oh, we don’t like to gamble.” Learn to write it and amaze your Chinese friends—at least until they challenge you to write anything else.

[Aside: the most stroke-laden characters I can find are 龘 [tà] and 齉 [nàng], both of which are made up of 36 individual strokes. The former means, “the appearance of a dragon walking”, and the latter means, “to speak with a nasal twang”.]

After arriving in China and starting to converse with a few of the English-speaking locals—whether it be for teaching or a real job-type job—you will, without any doubt, be greeted with a variation on the following phrase:

Hi, how about your weekend?

Variations obviously depend on the day of the week and the time of day [“How about your lunch?”]. It’s as if they are continuing an abruptly-ended chat that you were having at some point in the past. You are seemingly greeted with, “How about you, recently?” and all you can think is, did I just ask her a question and then have my memory erased? Is my name Leonard?

What they really mean is, “How was your weekend?”, “How was your lunch?” or, “How have you been?” The problem lies in a deep-seated mistranslation of the Chinese phrase “zenmeyang”, which has various meanings depending on the context, such as:

• Your weekend zenmeyang? — How was your weekend?
• The weather in London zenmeyang? — What’s the weather in London like?
• Watch a film this evening zenmeyang? — How about watching a film this evening?

Only one of these can legitimately be translated using, “How about…?”, but more often than not you’ll be asked, “How about the weather in London?” [By the way, having grown up on Sherlock Holmes novels, they already expect you to answer: “Foggy. All the time. Can’t see a thing. And yes, all men wear bowler hats and open doors for ladies.”]

For some reason, at some stage of their English learning, people are taught that zenmeyang should always be translated as “how about”. So, in a bid to reverse this bad habit, at some point during a course all of my students get a stern lecture about the correct uses of “how about”, and any incorrect usages from that point on are dealt with a my-fist-your-nose-zenmeyang? approach.

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.

Not yet owning a decent carry-case, as well as not yet being aux fait with the inner [and outer] workings of it, I decided not to venture out with my new camera on New Year’s Eve and capture the fireworks—as it turned out this was a fairly wise move as it was too cold to be fiddling with unfamiliar buttons, and the show by the lake was pretty similar but slightly less impressive than when I saw it two years ago—with the exception of moving images of dancers being back-projected onto a “screen” of water from a fountain.

It’s been nice to see students and friends embracing the pun-friendliness of the Year of the Ox: the Chinese word for cow/ox is pronounced níu, so I’ve been receiving more than a few messages wishing me a “Happy Niu Year”. They’re really milking this pun until they can come up with an-udder one, and repeating it helps to butter up the locals, so I’ll keep churning it out for a few more days before moo-ving on.

For my Chinese homework last week, I had to write out one of my favourite recipes from my home nation. Seeing as though the lack of an oven out here prevents me from enjoying a good old home-made Shepherd’s Pie, let alone a Sunday Roast, I thought I’d introduce my teacher to the delights of my delicious chilli, which of course is a traditional British dish first cooked by Sir Jeffrey Chilli of Chilli-on-the-Wold in 1423.

大卫的墨西哥辣味牛肉

原料：

绞细牛肉500克
一半洋葱 （剥皮的）
三~五瓣大蒜 （剥皮的）
一罐四季豆（420克）
红辣椒（按口味）
枯茗子
三~四西红柿
一罐浓缩番茄酱（150克左右）
盐

准备：

先把蔬菜洗干净，把四季豆洗净。把洋葱、大蒜、红辣椒切成小块儿。

方法：

把火点着，把锅放在火上，马上把牛肉放进锅里。 是对的，没有油！所以， 很重要你立刻用铲子炒一炒。在炒一炒以前牛肉变成褐色的。把洋葱、大蒜、红辣椒放进锅里， 炒一炒。 把切好的西红柿放进锅里，把枯茗子、盐倒进锅里， 用铲子搅拌均匀，把锅盖放到锅上。 等5分钟左右。

把四季豆、浓缩番茄酱放成锅里，搅拌均匀。把锅盖放到锅上，煨30分钟左右。偶尔搅拌。

跟米饭吃。

The Chinese is by no means perfect, and I’m relying heavily on the dictionary giving me the correct translations for cumin and kidney beans, so I’m accepting no responsibility for any culinary disasters that may result from any Chinese-speakers following the above recipe. For non-Chinese speakers, you should have no problems at all following the Google automated translation of this page.