Throughout my years of teaching Mandarin, students will come up with ungrammatical Chinese (wrong word order) or un-Chinese expressions (direct mapping from the English in their heads). I can often make sense of what they’re trying to say.
The most recent case is a mature student who sent me a WhatsApp message in pinyin (/ romanisation), but wrongly spelt (by standard pinyin conventions) for a lot of the words. When I responded, she expressed great surprise that I actually understood what she was trying to say.
My reply, “Mummies often understand the goo-goo-ga-ga’s of their babies.”
(London, 2023)
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