CHINGLISH, CHINESE LINGO 语言 & FUNNY PICTURES

There is a great myth the world over that Chinese is a difficult language to learn: It's simply not true. Speaking Chinese is by far the easiest of the four language elements. Listening and understanding tops the list for difficulty with reading and writing in between.

Once you've mastered the four tones of speech you'll be confident enough to butt into a conversation at dinner and ask if you can have the window opened instead of seeing if you can take the man's wife to bed!

One thing that grates me is that almost every learn chinese book you open will tell you that the word order is the same as in English. What complete and utter claptrap. In my 40 years I don't recalling telling anyone that, I on Saturday to shopping go.

Which takes me nicely onto the next point of verbs; there is no tense, no past, no simple future, past-historical-indicitive-post-immoral or pre-furture-impassive-misfortunate and all that other rubbish in English, French, German and Latin that simply leads to confusion for even native speakers. The Chinese have it spot on and use simple, everyday, teeny-weeny words like 'last' week and 'next' Tuesday.

Understanding is all about context. Once you know what's being spoken about you'll be concentrating on the keywords of the conversation and very soon you'll be putting two and two together and getting four-and-a-half. Same goes for when you're speaking. Once your listeners understand the gist of what you want, you can do away with perfect tones for each word (especially if you don't remember), they'll understand you.

Here's a typically common experience for any non-native speaker:(The chinese is in phonetic english to show the point)

Taxi driver: Chew nar?
You: Dow jee a whey shang dee en
Taxi driver: Chew shem mer?
You: Dow jee a whey shang dee en
Taxi driver: Shy ah?
You: jee a whey shang dee en
Taxi driver: (very confused look on his face)
You: jee a whey shang dee en
Taxi driver: Ji a whey shung dee en?
You: D'way, jee a whey shang dee en
Taxi driver: Ah! Ji a whey shung dee en
You: That's exactly what I f*****g well said you daft p***K

As I say, and in my opinion, listening and understanding what's being said is the hardest past of the language. For example, let's take the common word hao pronounced 'how' and most commonly means good or OK. There are forty other different meanings. Another example is cao, pronounced 'tow' as in towel and it rhymes with hao. This word is a common family name, used in markets and restaurants as it relates to grassy-things and is also the most obscene word in Chinese meaning (politely) 'copulate'! I'll come back to that character shortly. Imagine this huge hurdle combined with dialect, accent and, in many cases, little or no education. It's a mountain!

As I always tell my students: When you're speaking to an English-speaking person, they'll understand you, you may not understand them when they reply. Well the same is true for me and many just like me in China.

Chinese characters or hanzi 汉字 are something that baffle people from the west. I remember as a kid staring blankly at all those little 'shapes', marvelling at their beauty and thinking, 'how the bloody hell do they learn those things?'. Well now I know!

It goes without saying that the more exposure you have to them the easier they get. There is no shortcut to learning to write them; you must simply write it and write it and write it and write it..... You almost have to educate your muscles to remember the strokes for each and every character. But, pretty soon, you begin to see patterns. You begin to understand the components of each character; why it's there, how it shapes the character, why the character has a certain sound and so on.

I'll revert to the word above, cao, as an example. Before I start, you should know that this character is disabled from 99% of dictionaries, computer input software; chinese websites filter it out and change it to the non-offensive character 操 and it is completely banned from books and magazines where the authority has 100% control

Now the top character is ru which means 'to go in / enter' and the bottom character is rou which means 'flesh or meat'. Individually, that is what they mean and they're very common characters. Combine them like so, 肏 and suddenly you have 'go into flesh' and so we have copulate, to put it politely.

These are called pictograms. Many of the 83,000 (official last count I believe) characters are pictograms and so, if you understand each component and then you apply a little logical, or illogical thought to each character, you'll crack it.

A good example of a very common word is 坐 zuo which means 'sit'. This is a picture of two 'people' 人 and it looks like each of them is back-to-back on a chair.

So, as I say, after a year or so of seeing these strange symbols day in, day out you begin to read them for what they really are. To be honest, I have a passion for them. I love to delve into them and discover where they came from. It's akin to doing cryptic crosswords (my other penchant) where, once you understand the way the setter thinks, they become easy. Cracking the code, so to speak. That's why I've started learning calligraphy and another thing... This passion has led to a new business venture! More on that later.

Another huge problem when reading Chinese is that places and people's names are exactly the same as normal words. How many people do you know called 'Little Snow' or 'Field Field'? To complicate matters further, any 'english' name is transposed into Chinese characters using a nearest sounding fit; David becomes da wei, Geoffery would be Jie Fu Li and even the giant computer company HP leaves you scratching your head. I explain to my students that, unlike English where we give you a massive clue that it is a proper noun by using a capital letter, no such system exists in Chinese. They don't even have spaces between 'words'!