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?
• Learning from Others’ Mistakes
• Stating the Obvious
• Language Learning is Messy II: Talk a Lot
• They Don’t Understand My Chinese, What’s Wrong?

I have been working with (read: begging) MDBG for the past few weeks to develop and test something that will make self-hosted Wordpress bloggers’ lives better.

I’m very proud to announce the arrival of the MDBG wordpress plugin (fanfare please)!

My favorite feature is the automatic linking of all hanzi in posts and comments (!) to the MDBG dictionary.  This is especially useful for my “power pidgin” writing style when I often write a sentence with English and Chinese hùn zài yìqǐ 混在一起 and  I don’t want to have to explain every word.  But it also includes a pinyin tone converter that turns “hun4 zai4 yi4qi3″ into “hùn zài yìqǐ” (with an optional link to pinyin pronunciation files).

That reminds me of a question I’ve been wanting to ask everyone (not just you Joel):

What do you use to make pinyin tones on your computer?

Before this plugin I always used this.

As a final bonus, if you use the plugin on your blog, you get added to a special VIP list at the bottom of the plugin page!

If anyone else is using some sort of auto-linking dictionary plugin, let us know how this one compares.

Can anyone who has a self-hosted Wordpress blog think of a reason NOT to use the MDBG plugin at least for automatic linking in comments?

• Colored Tones on MDBG
• Pinyin Dictionary for Microsoft Word
• MDBG Online Dictionary - Tutorial
• Nciku.com - My Review
• Wanted: Chinese-Learning Blog List

(hopefully Firefox users won’t have trouble with these)

qù nǎlǐ 去哪里? = Where are you going?

[See original post to listen to audio]

Now by itself: nǎlǐ 哪里

[See original post to listen to audio]

It’s clearly a 3-3 combo, just like nǐ hǎo 你好:

[See original post to listen to audio]

If it were really nǎli, it would sound like other  3-5 combinations such as zǒu ba 走吧:

[See original post to listen to audio]

In a 3-5 combination the second syllable is basically a 1st tone (maybe a little shortened).  That’s not how nǎli sounds to me.  I’m not talking about the 3-3 turning into a 2-3, we know that.  I’m talking about whether the second syllable is up high (like a 5th tone would be after a 3rd tone) or down low (like a 3rd tone would be at the end of a compound word).  I can’t hear it as anything but a 3rd tone.

Ok, is everyone convinced?  It’s pronounced nǎlǐ (tones 3-3) and not nǎli (tones 3-5). I’ve never heard it pronounced with a 3-5 combination that I can remember.

Now let’s do a little research.  Check all your dictionaries and see how it’s written.  Here are my results:

• Chubby: Nǎli - WRONG!
  
• Lenny
  • “Where” (E-C): not present, only gives nǎr 哪儿
  • “哪里” (C-E): Nǎli - WRONG!
• Big Red
  • “Where” (E-C): Nǎlǐ - CORRECT!
  • “哪里” (C-E): Nǎli - WRONG!
• MDBG: Nǎlǐ  - CORRECT!
• Nciku: Nǎli- WRONG!

So my questions for everyone are:

1. What does your dictionary have for 哪里?
2. Has anyone ever heard nǎlǐ 哪里 pronounced with a 3-5 tone combo?
3. If so, where are you?
4. If not, why is it wrong in 4/6 places in my dictionaries?

I didn’t think about this until after my book had already gone to print so I’m sorry to say that it’s consistently written as “nǎli” throughout the pages of Chinese 24/7.  I thought the variations in the writing of the tones was due to the “secret tone” phenomenon.  You know, like cōngming 聪明 or péngyou 朋友, where everyone knows what tone that second character has (2 and 3, respectively) but some people will pronounce the real tone (especially if they speak slowly) and some people will pronounce it as a 5th (”light”) tone.

If I’d only really thought about it, I would have seen that’s not the case with nǎlǐ 哪里.  Why, oh why did I trust the majority opinion of the dictionaries?  Why didn’t I listen to my heart?  If we ever do a second printing, I’m definitely going with nǎlǐ unless someone can back me off the ledge and tell me everything’s going to be ok.

[update 3 June 2009]

I guess I should have included more examples of what I’m talking about.  Here are three different ways to say “nali” 那里 with three different tone combos.

Before we get distracted, the real issue is not my pronunciation of these three examples.  I’m not a native speaker and I’m not claiming these are the “correct” ways to say these combinations.  I’m just hoping I got close enough to give ya’ll a ball-park idea of what the differnet tone combos might sound like.  Feel free to criticize the zhonglish tones if I got them wrong.

But the real question is: Which of these have you heard native speakers say? (We’re going for descriptive rather than prescriptive rules here.)

Option #1: nǎlǐ (na3 li3)

[See original post to listen to audio]

Option #2: náli (na2 li5)

[See original post to listen to audio]

Option #3: nǎli (na3 li5)

[See original post to listen to audio]

My theory is that we’ve heard #1 and #2 but never #3.  If that’s true, then it is written wrong (as option #3) in many dictionaries.

• Tone Changes
• A Bit about Bù 不
• Nciku.com - My Review
• Banana Shoes
• Parrot People Help My Tones

rù xiāng suí sú 入乡随俗 = When in Rome, do as the Romans do

For me that means embracing piracy and actually encouraging downloading and file sharing of my music.  I’m sure I’ll never make a penny off of any of it (which would be more than some of it’s worth actually).  I’m letting people zìjǐ dòngshǒu 自己动手 to my songs for free!  Why so generous realistic?

Here’s exactly how it happened:

1. My friend Jason and I wrote a Chinese pop song called “Wǒ Bú Shì Dōngxī 我不是东西” during the October holiday in 2007.  We didn’t think anyone would care, but the students loved it.
2. I played the song at various shows and events around campus and even recorded a little demo mp3 in my amateur home recording studio.
3. On March 15, 2009 I was interviewed on a Radio Guangdong show called “Voice of the City” during which they asked me about the song and ended up playing the demo mp3 on the radio.
4. The students here at the campus radio station didn’t see any reason why a real radio station should play the song and not them, so they played my demo on the campus loudspeakers a few weeks ago.
5. Since then, I’ve had several students from each class ask if they can please have the song.
6. Some of the readers of my book have expressed disappointment that the “About the Author” section says I’ve “written a few Chinese pop songs,” but they aren’t available for download with the audio files.

So to answer these demands, I’m pleased to announce my new music website:

http://music.laowaichinese.net

(also available by clicking “Music” in the menu tabs at the top)

As a bonus (some would say punishment), there are other songs besides “Wǒ Bú Shì Dōngxī 我不是东西” on the site.  There are, in fact, three separate albums in process.

About half a dozen other songs for the various albums have already been written and will be released in the months ahead.

If you’d like to stay up to date on any new music as it gets recorded and released, you can subscribe to the music site in the side bar or by clicking here.

Enjoy!

• A Simple Song
• We Are Ready: Beijing Olympics Song
• Invisible Wings
• Watching the Sea
• Vote on the Book Title

But what ever does it mean to us learning Chinese? I’m not going to pretend I know the answer.  All I’m saying is the Chinese seem to associate flowers with girls and and grass with boys. Oh…um…and sometimes flowers with boys too.  Flowers and grass make appearances in the language of love (and it’s not always bāoyì 褒义).

A few examples:

• xiàohuā 校花 = prettiest girl in school [school flower]
• xiàocǎo 校草 = most handsome boy in school [school grass]

(apparently you can replace “xiào” 校 with “bān” 班 to mean “prettiest girl/boy in the class”)

• huā húdié 花蝴蝶 = social butterfly (girl) [flower butterfly]
• huāxīn 花心 = playboy / playgirl (but it’s an adjective!) [flower heart]
• huāhuā gōngzi 花花公子 = play boy [flower-flower prince]

Also, I think that if Chinese people see a written name of someone they’ve never met and it contains that flower character (huā 花), they’ll assume it’s a girl’s name.  Would the same be true of grass (cǎo 草) in a boy’s name?  (Where’s my Chinese name bank?!)

And one final use of grass and flower in an exceedingly, long two-line proverb/saying/idiom thingy:

tiānyá héchù wú fāng cǎo 天涯何处无芳草
= There is a lot of fragrant grass in the world

hébì dānliàn yì zhī huā 何必单恋一枝花
= There’s no reason why unrequited love should be a single flower

I’ve been told it means “There are plenty of fish in the sea” (you know, after someone has been rejected by a lover).

Are all of these pretty widely used in your part of China?  Anyone else know of any flowery/grassy idioms or phrases we can add to this list?  Please do share.

• Wanted: Chinese Name Gender Reference
• Tomb Sweeping Festival
• Which measure words do they really use?
• Why Is It So Easy to Rhyme in Mandarin?
• Invisible Wings

qiā 掐

[See original post to listen to audio]

Tell me it doesn’t sound like the action of pinching or maybe the cry of someone who’s just been pinched.

Qia! What are you doing?!

I kind of wish it were 4th tone, but then again that would be more severe sounding than a little pinch.

Stump the Chinese Bonus

This came up in a class when a student asked me how to say “qiā” in English.  The demonstration she performed on her classmate was a pretty good clue, and I realized this is the first “qia” I’ve ever learned (I know now that there are more).

I wrote “pinch” on the board for everyone else and explained it means “qiā.”  I saw heads nod in understanding and then the nervous looking around at classmates’ papers started.

I chuckled and said, “If you don’t know how to write qiā,  you can just write niē 捏 if you want,” and that students nodded gratefully.

I’ve got a lot to say about the hanzi roadblock that prevented my students from getting out of their own pinch and just writing niē 捏 without getting permission from me.  But instead I choose to end this post feeling good that, back when I first learned niǔniǔ niēniē 扭扭捏捏 (documented here), I clicked the scissors icon at MDBG (giving me the individual characters’ meanings) so I could offer the students an alternative to this fun little word.  I can’t wait for Saint Patrick’s Day!

• Stump the Chinese: Hard Hanzi
• Tangerine Luck for the Niu Year
• Gesture Phobia
• Stump the Laowai: shuǎlài 耍赖
• Is China a good place to learn Chinese?

I’m convinced the hardest thing about speaking Mandarin is getting all those darn tones right.  I’m constantly fighting tone wars in my head to try to stifle the natural, feeling-induced tones I’m used to using in English to get the meaning-dictating Chinese tones right.  I’m not ashamed to admit that English often wins and my Chinese tones are broken (enter zhonglish).  That’s where “parrot people” can actually help.

Restaurants

The fúwùyuán 服务员 actually have a good reason for repeating back what I order: they want to make sure they got it right.  Since I often go many months (years) without using some of this vocabulary, it helps to hear it again right away to confirm whether I got the tones right.

Me: suànmiǎo chǎo ròupiàn 蒜苗炒肉片.
Garlic seasoned greens and pork slices (see here)

Waitress: suànmiáo chǎo ròupiàn, shì ba? 蒜苗炒肉片, 是吧?
Garlic seasoned greens and pork slices, right?

Me: duì duì duì 对对对.
Right, right, right.

The first duì was for her getting the order right and the next two were for my realization that I’d said the tone for “miao” wrong. (Those 2-3 combos will get ya!  The way I said it made it sound like suànmiao.)

It takes some careful listening, but once you know it’s coming (and it usually is), you can prepare for the instant replay and use it.  I now purposefully choose words that I’m not sure about just so I can get instant feedback on whether my tones were correct.  Of course, the assumption here is that a native speaker will not say it wrong even if I did.  I think that’s a pretty safe assumption (usually).

Not-land

Before I knew the rules for tone combinations, and before I’d memorized exactly how to pronounce the name of my country, I would often say I’m from méiguó or mèiguo or méiguǒ rather than měiguó 美国.  Those mispronunciations could be hanzi-fied as 没国, 妹国, and 没果 meaning “not country / not-land,” “younger sister country,” and “no fruit,” respectively.

The good news is: no Chinese person would ever talk about “Not-land” or “Sisterland” so I was never misunderstood.  The context was very much in my favor to allow a Chinese person to understand me despite the wrong tones (not always the case at all!).  But I noticed people would often (dare I say always?) repeat the name of my country back to me like this:

Stranger: nǐ láizì nǎli? 你来自哪里?
Where are you from?

Me: méiguó.
Not-land.

Stranger: měiguó 美国.
America.

Me: duì 对
Right.

Now I say it right most (dare I say all?) the time, but the repeating hasn’t stopped.  That’s the last point I want to make: parrot people don’t mean you’ve said it wrong.

They Do it to Each Other

I often have the treat of listening to two Chinese teachers here on campus meat each other for the first time.  The conversation goes something like this.

A: nǐ shì nǎge xì de? 你是哪个系的?
What department do you work in?

B: kuàijì xì 会计系.
Accounting.

A: o, kuàijì xì. wǒ shì wàiyǔ xì de 哦, 会计系. 我是外语系的.
Oh, accounting.  I’m in the Foreign Language Department.

B: wàiyǔ xì. nǐ jīngcháng lái zhèlǐ dǎ qiú ma? 外语系. 你经常来这里打球吗?
Foreign Language Department.  Do you often come here to play ball? (pingpong, basketball, whatever)

A: bù jīngcháng 不经常.
Not often.

B: o, bù jīngcháng 哦不经常.
Oh, not often.

If I were really on the qiú 球, I’d get some recordings of this sort of exchange so you don’t have to take my word for it.  But trust me, there’s a whole lot of repeating back going on even among Chinese people.

I always get the feeling that it’s more common between strangers or from a xiàshǔ 下属 to a shàngsi 上司.  That makes me think there’s something curtural going on like: repeating what someone says is polite or shows that you respect them and what they’ve said.  Can anyone shed some light on (guess at) some of the curtural factors behind instant replays?  Has anyone else even noticed this?  Chime on in.

• What Foreigners Like to Eat in China
• Why Is Nǎlǐ 哪里 Written Wrong?
• Tone Changes
• Tone Wars
• They Don’t Understand My Chinese, What’s Wrong?

This will most likely serve as my final communication to the book updates news letter, for a while at least.

But there are a few final bits and pieces to tell you about:

1. If anyone in China who ordered the book via Amazon actually receives it (and I have no doubt you will), would you please let me know how long it took to get here from the shipping date?  I’m curious about that.

2. The publisher has told me the most helpful thing anyone can do (besides actually buying the book) is to write a review on Amazon.  Apparently, those are the real currency of online book sales (whatever that means).  If anyone who has the book finds it useful, would you consider typing out a few kind words and clicking a few golden stars here?  You have to register an account with Amazon, but that’s pretty easy to do.   I’ve also added a “Write your own review” button to the sidebar for easy findability later.

3. If you’d like to see the “audio companion site” for my book, it’s here.  The MP3s are all free, but you’ll need to get the book to see the transcript and translation (and sometimes the excuse) for what’s being said.  Doing it this way saved us from having to press CDs and shrinkwrap them with the book.

4. Last and certainly least: because of peer pressure from MDBG, I’ve created a Facebook page for my book.  I have no idea what that means or what it’s for, but I have a feeling that someday I could post book-related news on there as well as here.  If anyone can explain what in the world a Facebook page is good for, I’m all ears?

Thanks again to everyone for the support during this process.  It finally feels like this project is over.  Now I can get back to work on those 45 draft posts that have been glaring at me for so many months.

• Book Printed and for Sale on Amazon Again
• Book Update: Proofing done. Book at Printer.
• Will Amazon Sell Chinese 24/7?
• Book Contract Signed
• And the Title Is: Chinese 24/7

Judging from the great success of the previous episode (just LOOK at the fruits of our labor!), I’m confident this student will not have suffered in vain (see what fun the Chinese could have if they too had a future perfect tense!).

Inspirational Story

A student suddenly started choking in my class. So I stopped everything and pointed straight at the poor girl and said, “Are you ok?” No, of course I didn’t say that.  Why would I put my student’s well-being above a teachable moment?  I pointed at her and asked the class, “How do you say that in English?”

Before I get sued for negligence or abuse or excessive pointing let me just say she was fine withing a few seconds.  It was just a matter of a little kǒushuǐ 口水 going down the wrong guǎnzi 管子, or so I thought.

I wrote “choke” on the board.  Then, as typically happens, a blizzard of Chinese sprang forth as the students debated and “bu shi” bashed each other over which hanzi to write next to the English word in their notes.  I just stood in awe for a few seconds and then asked directly how to say it in Chinese.

Qiàng 炝, yē 噎, and even késou 咳嗽 each had advocates until the choking girl herself raised her hands and silenced the masses and then did sit down and spake to the multitude saying:

“Shànghuǒ 上火.”

An “Ooohhhh” rose up from the crowd and the debate was finished.

New Definition Needed

An irresponsibly literal translation of those two characters yields, “on fire.”  But look at the definitions in the dictionaries (click the icons):

shànghuǒ 上火

You’ll see that they both disappointingly have “get angry” as the only definition. However, the sentence examples in nciku start to approach what we want.

I’m constantly asked, “Teacher how to say in English, ‘I don’t like fried dumplings because they will make you shànghuǒ’?”  I’m sure they’re not talking about jiaozi rage.  It’s some sort of Chinese medical philosophy thing that I don’t know how to translate well.  In a pinch, I usually go with, “Just say ‘will give you a sore throat’.” But now that I’ve seen shànghuǒ induce choking, I’m having to re-think my advice.

Any suggestions for a better translation of shànghuǒ 上火?

• Stump the Laowai: shuǎlài 耍赖
• Beware of False Friends
• Stump the Chinese: Velcro and Boombox
• How to Find Chinese Medical Terms
• Less Than Zero Seeds

1. Minimal pairs (only one difference)

The other day I was invited to a colleague’s house to eat some home-made, zhèngzōng 正宗 Chinese food (as if the rest of the food available at Chinese restaurants here is all jiǎde 假的!).  While I was in the kitchen not helping, the chef asked if I had a better apple.

Me: Apple?  Why do you need apples?

Chef: No! Not an apple.  A flat-bottomed pan silly!

Check out the minimal pair:

• píngguǒ 苹果 = apple
• píngguō 平锅 = flat-bottomed pan [flat pan]

I was tricked because “apple” is a much more common word and when listening to the chef’s rapid-fire speech, I didn’t have time to analyze all the tones.  It just sounded like “apple” to me.  Also, I’d never heard “flat” and “pan” put together like that before (although it makes perfect sense).

2. Actual homonyms (sound exactly the same)

The list of single-syllable homonyms is endless.  Here’s one example:

Soldier 1: I don’t want another arrow stupid! Give me a sword!

Soldier 2: What do you mean you don’t want another sword?  Let’s use measure words, maybe that will help. Or better yet, write the hanzi.

Single-syllable homonym:

• jiàn 箭 = arrow
• jiàn 剑 = sword

Chinese gets away with way more of those than any other language I’ve ever encountered (Spanish) because they’ve always got that hanzi safety net to fall back on.  Also, I’m almost certain that measure words arose (at least partially) to help people differentiate between homonyms (the measure word for arrow is “zhī” 支 and the measure word for sword is “bǎ” 把).

But occasionally you’ll get snookered by a multi-syllable homonym.  That’s when it really gets fun:

• shōufèizhàn 收费站  = tollbooth [receive fee station]
• shōufèizhàn 收废站  = trash dump [receive waste station]

It makes you feel sorry for the poor guy who explained to his girlfriend that he works in a tollbooth, but when she told her parents they assumed it was a trash dump.  How homonyms killed a blossoming romance.

Or:

• yòuguǎi 诱拐 = kidnap
• yòuguǎi 右拐 = turn right

I can just imagine some gang leader giving directions, “…and then, turn right at the tollbooth.”  Later that night, his minions walk in with some ragamuffin in handcuffs.

Boss: What’s this?!

Minion: You told us to go kidnap at the trash dump.  This was the only kid there.

Anyone else know any multi-syllable homonyms or minimal pears…oops…I mean pairs?  Do share.

• Reductions: Missing Sounds
• Top 10 measure words to know
• How Hard Is Chinese to Learn, Really?
• Why does Chinese have measure words?
• What’s that “zi” 子 thing?