Re: Help with Chinese character

On 2009-01-27, Dominic T. <dominictiberio@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The frustrating thing is when native speakers act like because you are
slightly mangling the word they have no idea what you are saying. If
I'm in a tea shop or actively discussing tea and my pronunciation
isn't 100% I think it is safe to say they could easily figure it out.
When a non-native English speaker is mangling words left and right I
can still manage just fine. That's one of my pet peeves about talking
tea in person.

I can share the frustration of not being able to get what seems (to you)
to be a simple idea across. But I think in a lot of cases they
*honestly* have no idea what you're saying. This is for several reasons:

1) There are just plain a lot of sounds that are difficult to make for
English speakers or other non-native speakers of Chinese[1].
2) Even if the sounds are (phonetically) exactly right, if the tone is
wrong, most English speakers would understand what you mean, but to a
native speaker, it's a completely different word. And understanding a
single Chinese word is sometimes difficult even for native speakers when
the word is by itself and...
3) ...without context, which is the other thing that makes it hard to
understand. It's like if someone was speaking to you in a foreign (to
you) language and then used one English but completely mispronounced it,
and didn't give you that much context about what they mean, other than
that it had to do with food.
4) There are a lot of different dialects and regional differences of
pronunciation (as well as differences in tea terminology) in China and
the Chinese diaspora. The person you're talking to might not be a native
Mandarin speaker or a Mandarin speaker at all, or they might be used to
the word being pronounced differently from the "standard" way.
5) Just because a specialized word is common in the online tea community
doesn't mean that's the exact word that everyone uses to express the
same idea.

Now if it's a native speaker who deals with a lot of other western tea
lovers, they might be able to guess what you mean. But I think it's a
little ridiculous to assume that the person is just pretending that they
can't understand what you are saying. Other people whose native language
is English (or Chinese people who speak English at that level of
fluency) will probably be able to guess what you mean because either
they mangle the pronounciation of the word themself, or because they
know how the pinyin would sound if pronounced phonetically.

And by the way, I have certainly been on the opposite side of things,
where someone is mangling an English word to the point where I have no
idea what they're talking about. Plus, I assume that in your example (of
someone mangling English words left and right), it still involves
someone who is speaking entirely English, not speaking a language that's
not your first language with a single English word mixed in, out of
context. And someone who speaks English well enough to have a
conversation in it probably comparatively good English (mangled or not),
to the Chinese of your average tea loving Westerner who's not a native
speaker of Chinese.

I have had a lot of situations where Mandarin-speaking friends,
co-workers, members of my girlfriend's family, etc. simply do not
understand the word I'm saying, even though (in my head), I'm saying it
absolutely correctly, with the correct tone, etc. Even if I repeat it,
or try to explain. It's of course very frustrating for me, but I am 100%
certain that these people are not just pretending not to understand me
to teach me a lesson; it's just that I'm saying it wrong.

[1] And when I use "Chinese" to refer to a spoken language in this post,
I am talking about Putonghua / Mandarin, though I know that
"Chinese" isn't an actual spoken language.

w

.

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