PUNtonghua 文字游戏

Chinese is viewed as an inaccessible language by most people, as Scandinavia and The World explains:

Source: http://satwcomic.com/it-s-all-greek-to-me

Once you manage to overcome mandarin's tones, measure words, literary references, and tens of thousands of characters that reveal little about their pronunciation, you still have to face the truth that every province speaks a dialect that sounds as different from mandarin as English is to French. Luckily mandarin, called Putonghua (the common speech), can get you around most places well enough and is the standard language of China.

'Please speak Mandarin, then it's easier for all of us'

How do I face the formidable task of tackling this beast of a language? By finding the funnies. Or things that help me remember characters, for example, the word for 'monopolize' is 垄断 (longduan). The first character is 'dragon' on top of 'earth', which makes me think of Smaug, hoarding his piled up treasure. However, it's highly impractical to come up with a mnemonic for every character.

Here's some Chinese you might not even realise you speak. Next time you say the word 'manly', you may be saying 蛮力 (mán lì), which means 'brute force'. Is somebody you know staying up all night partying? Awww yeah, or in fact, 熬夜 (aó yè), which translates as 'to stay up all night'. If O2 is thinking of entering the Chinese market, it may want to consider rebranding itself, as 呕吐 (oŭ tù) means 'to vomit'.

If you've ever listened to Chinese people speaking, you might have thought you heard the infamous, racially exclusive 'N word' repeated several times. What is actually being said is 那个 (nei ge), meaning 'that'. People end up repeating it if they can't remember the name of the thing they are trying to say, the effect being 'nei ge nei ge nei ge'. You know you're learning Chinese properly if you end up saying this and don't feel uncomfortable.

As a student of Chinese, I end up reading scores of articles related to learning Chinese. In most of those articles, the only example people seem to provide to demonstrate tones is 'ma' - 妈 (mother, first tone), 马 (horse, third tone), 麻 (hemp, second tone). But to be honest, these are pretty hard to get confused; mother is always said as a compound 妈妈, and horse should have a measure word, e.g., 一匹马. And 麻 is pretty vague as a stand alone character, lending itself to compounds such as flax, anaesthetic, sesame, and even pins and needles. My personal favourite tonal confusions are 手机 (shŏu jī) and 首级 (shŏu jí), the first being 'mobile phone', and the latter 'severed head'. Another sinister mix-up is 迟到 (chí dào), meaning 'to be late', so imagine your teacher's surprise when you announce "对不起老师，我持刀(chí dāo)了" (I'm sorry, Sir, I'm wielding a knife). My classmate recommends caution when shopping for mirrors, as the reflective surface, 镜子 (jìng zi), may be accidentally spoken as sperm, 精子 (jīng zĭ).

Before I studied it, I tended to believe most of the interesting facts regarding Chinese that circulate around. I was disappointed to learn that many of these are simply misnomers borne from a lack of understanding. Take for example, a fact provided by Lisa Simpson, who claimed, "the Chinese word for 'crisis' is the same as 'opportunity'". It is a nice idea, but a quick trip to the dictionary reveals there is no such word, only two separate words 机会 (jihui opportunity) and 危机 (weiji crisis). My guess is that someone saw both words contain the character 机 and assumed they were the same word. The shared character 机 is a bit of a compound whore, and can be found in anything from 'airport' to 'mechanic' to my humble 'soy milk maker'.

Another thing that bothered me before learning Mandarin was what 'ching chang chong' actually meant. In fact, it's bothered me ever since primary school, when it was used as the standard response to telling someone I was mixed race. Even my sixth-form maths teacher greeted me with this phrase when I told her my degree choice. I could go off on a rant about how East Asian people put up with racism passed off as socially acceptable humour, but instead, I'm going to try to salvage this phrase that non-Chinese speakers seem to think encapsulates the Chinese language. In modern pinyin (today's prevalent form of Chinese romanisation) there is no such word as 'ching', the closest being 'qing'. So, mission 'translate qing chang chong' begins.

情场 (qingchang) affairs of the heart, 情场冲 a rush of affairs of the heart.
清唱 (qingchang) to sing opera, so 清唱虫 the opera singing worm.
清偿 (qingchang) to pay a debt in full, 清偿重 to pay off a debt again.
青长虫 green long worm (where 'long worm' is actually spoken phrase for 'snake'), green snake.

I think this is the best I can come up with without taking too many liberties. Although getting a Chinese person to understand the above phrases would still be difficult; they sound as ridiculous in Chinese as they do in English. Thus proving that 'ching chang chong' is the refrain of the culturally illiterate.

'Stinky' Chang?

And finally, I don't know how many people wondered what Cho Chang, of Harry Potter fame, means. I did. Let's take Chang to be 常, a common Chinese surname, rather than 娼 meaning prostitute. For a country of 1.3 billion people, it has surprisingly few surnames, so much so that the hoi polloi are referred to as 'the old one hundred surnames' (老百姓). So, Chang 常 it is. Leaving us with Cho as her first name, yet another sound that doesn't actually exist in pinyin, so it could be read as 'chou' ('ou' as in 'low'), 'chu' ('u' as in 'soon') or 'qu' ('u' as in... this isn't dipthong used in English, it's like 'ew' but with more 'oo'). It is usual for a Chinese person to have two characters comprising a first name, although there are plenty of famous Chinese with a one character name: Yao Ming, Liu Xiang, Ang Lee.

Chou would be quite an unfortunate name, as it could be any of the following; 仇, 愁, 丑, 臭: enemy, anxiety, hideous, and stinky, respectively. The best of the bunch is definitely 绸, meaning silk. The interpretations rise exponentially when you look up 'chu' and 'qu'. Perhaps the reason why I find Cho's name so distasteful is because it smacks of the 'ching chang chong' factor. That is to say, Rowling created a Chinese character for her books, and created a name that she thought sounded like Chinese, without consideration of traditional naming customs or sounds that actually exist in Chinese. Seeing that Harry Potter has a huge Chinese fan-base, it would be interesting to know what Cho Chang has been translated into, considering that her name is essentially a foreign construct. If I find out, I'll let you know.