Chinese homophones: Taboo number

 

The Chinese (and the Japanese; maybe the Koreans, too) have taboo numbers that they'll try and avoid.

    The biggest-taboo number is 4 (四 sì), because it sounds a bit like "死 sǐ / die, death" -- just a difference in the tone.

    An obvious situation to avoid it is when it appears in a car registration number.  Most Chinese people would not want to tempt fate by driving a ton of steel around with "4 [/ death]" on it.  They'd get it changed, even if it's at great expense.

    In Japanese, the number 4 is read as よん / yon, as well as し / shi, which also sounds like "die / 死ぬ / shi-nu, death", so (from googling) Quote is mostly avoided in daily life, though it is still used in certain fixed phrases and formal contexts Unquote.

    For my SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) BA degree course Special Subject, Japanese, one of the set texts was A Topical History of Japan.  In one of the chapters, mention was made of four men (in medieval Japan), with the reading for "the four men" being yo-nin / "four persons", because shi-nin sounds like "dead persons".

    Given my love of punning, I remember thinking at the time, "Well, if one were to read it wrongly, it wouldn't make any difference anyway, because they are indeed all dead."

Learner-friendly language in some ways: 00 (An introduction)

(This is my simplistic summary, not a serious pedagogic thesis.)

The Chinese language has a fearsome reputation in general, with so many seemingly insurmountable hurdles in the way of the learner who is brave enough to venture into its realm.

    The script is unique (the overlaps with Korean [pre-1970s] and Japanese [post 4th/5th centuries AD] are borrowings by those languages).  A lot of European languages share the same alphabet, which generally makes it easier for people from one European country to learn the language of another European country.

    The sounds:  Chinese is a tonal language, which most non-Chinese people have trouble managing.  (I'm only thinking of Mandarin which has four main basic tones [vs, say, Cantonese which has six], and standard readings [not tone changes when uttered in combination].)

    The grammar is not unique (in some ways, it's similar to German and Japanese, e.g., with the main verb coming at the end of the sentence -- my simplistic summary from my own limited knowledge), but it does vary quite a bit from English, the language that has been the global language.

    Now for the good news before you decide to give up on the language altogether:  there are elements to the language that make life much easier for the learner of Chinese (than for the learner of English).

Osmosis: 01 (Unintentional product placement)

Valerio, old friend and avid reader / supporter of my blogs, posted a comment on my British understatement blog (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/03/british-understatement-letter-to-school.html), reporting on how his own clever turn of phrase had netted a sympathetic response from an ex-employer who might not have forgiven him for deserting them for a different university -- my words.

    He thinks he might've made a British understatement on that occasion, which he's attributed to his four years in London.

    To do him justice, you'll have to read his full comment yourself at the bottom of the British understatement blog (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/03/british-understatement-letter-to-school.html).

    I concur, calling it osmosis, something I myself am very prone to.

(from googling)

Quote

osmosis

noun

1. 1.

   Biology•Chemistry

   a process by which molecules of a solvent tend to pass through a semipermeable membrane from a less concentrated solution into a more concentrated one.
2. 2.

   the process of gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas, knowledge, etc.

Unquote

    An ex-student had very kindly shared his Netflix account with me a few years back, so I started watching a lot of Korean dramas on it.

    Quite a few of the modern ones feature scenes of people dining out in restaurants which have a cooking ring in the middle of the table for grilling pork -- a common practice among the Koreans, it seems.  I then found myself eating marinaded pork for the following weeks.

    I have now switched to YouTube, having lost the Netflix share.

    The series that I was watching a little while back (Romance in the Alley, set in the China of 1977–1992, which had given me loads of blog material) has quite a few noodle-eating scenes, so I started eating noodles after that.

    Talk about being impressionable...

(from googling)

Quote

Product placement:  A practice in which manufacturers of goods or providers of a service gain exposure for their products by paying for them to be featured in films and television programmes.

 

Unquote

Party drinking Oriental style

The Japanese do not pour alcoholic drinks for themselves at a social meal.

The Koreans apparently go by the same rule, as I discovered at first hand.  A group of 14 Koreans from the Korean Housing Board had come to London to study the UK’s housing policy.  

When they were going back to Korea, they invited me and their English language teacher to their farewell party.  I was the only woman.  

The Korean chap on my left poured out my drink for me.  After a sip, I put the glass down, but the chap urged me to finish it as the glass was needed.  This is unhygienic enough as it is, but to be pressured into finishing off one’s wine in order to free up the glass for one’s fellow diners is not my idea of fun.

The Chinese way of party drinking is for one person (from the host side) to raise his glass to the guest(s), say something like “Here’s to our friendship”, then down it in one go.  Some people will turn the glass upside down on their heads to show it’s empty.  Some will tilt the glass forwards to show the other person it’s empty.  Then, it’s the turn of the guest(s) to follow suit — not only to drink, but to drain the contents in one go as well.  

If you are at a banquet and make the mistake of going along with the first person’s invitation to drink, you will then need to do the same for the other eight diners at your table.  (A typical banquet table is for ten people, with ten courses.)  If you don’t, you will make them lose face (see blog entry Chinese hospitality etiquette 01*), so you’ll be forced to do it for all nine fellow diners.

When they’ve all individually proposed a toast to you, it’s then your turn to return the toast to each of them in turn.  This means that they’ll each down their drinks twice (once when they propose a toast to you, and once when you return the toast), whilst you will down yours 9 x 2 times.

Linguaphone, a world famous teach-yourself-language-course company, sold some English language course to China in the 1980s, then sent two employees out a bit later to find out what the Chinese thought of the course.  Let’s call them John and Robert.  It was John who told me the story.  

John and Robert were treated to a banquet, and the usual toasts, of 茅台 máotái (54%–55%, made of wheat and sorghum), were proposed, individually and in turn by  the eight Chinese.  

Robert was a 14-pints-a-night drinker, and thought the little glasses of the clear liquid that looks like water would be most innocuous.  After 16 rounds of this fiery liquid, Robert started to eat the flower arrangement in the middle of the table.  The Chinese just love to get someone drunk, so they were nudging each other and laughing, “Look how red his face is!”  Stone drunk, Robert was a deadweight and had to be half carried back to his hotel room, by two men trying to prop him up with a hand under each of his armpits, feet dragging along the ground.

My boss, Dr. Page, Chief Geologist at Conoco Taiwan, was once invited, alongside the Vice President, Mr. Bolleter, to a Chinese banquet-style dinner by the state oil company, our partners in our exploration for oil.  Both men are American, drink bourbon, and 6’ 6” and 6’ 4” respectively, so the Chinese expected them to be serious drinkers.  

The toast was first proposed to Mr. Bolleter as Vice President.  The drink served, kaoliang (高粱 gāoliáng), is made of sorghum, looks like water but is 54%–63% — its nickname is “Firewater of Taiwan”.  When the proposer of the toast downed his (spirit drink size) portion of kaoliang and tilted the small glass forward towards Mr. Bolleter, the latter thought, “That’s a small portion,” and downed his too.  Then, a flush spread from his neck up his face to his forehead, and his eyes were bloodshot.  The host side exchanged knowing looks and smiled.  The big tall American bourbon drinker was beaten by their kaoliang!

Dr. Page noticed that there was a potted plant next to him, so he chucked his kaoliang into the pot and replaced it with water.  When the toast was proposed to Dr. Page and he downed it in one go, the host side looked carefully for signs of the flush — none came.  Everyone was impressed.  A lot of machismo is attached to the ability to drink alcohol (equally to chilli eating).

Throughout the rest of the meal, Dr. Page matched each proposer glass for glass, and gained a lot of kudos.  

I don’t know what happened to the plant.  Undoubtedly had a huge hangover the next day…

(The Orient)

* Chinese hospitality etiquette 01:  https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2014/10/chinese-hospitality-etiquette-01-china_25.html 

Prosopagnosia: 01

My friend Valerio taught me this word only a few months ago: prosopagnosia, which my computer dictionary says is: 

“an inability to recognise the faces of familiar people, typically as a result of damage to the brain”.  

The Chinese for it is 臉盲 / 脸盲 / “face blind”.

I used to have an almost photographic memory when it came to telephone numbers and directions to/from places, even places in foreign countries where I’d be able to direct the local taxi driver after only a day there (cf. Caracas in 1986 — see blog entry A day in at the Caracas Airport, posted July 2011).  

If I saw a telephone number over a shop selling some commodity I wanted and I had no pen and paper with which to note it down, I’d close my eyes and burn the image of the number onto my brain screen.  Later, I’d retrieve it by closing my eyes again to see the number light up on my brain screen.  

For directions, I’d note landmarks without even being conscious of doing it, and be able to retrace the way in the opposite direction.

Yet, I have difficulty telling Oriental faces apart.  

Year after year, if I had more than one overseas Chinese student (of the same sex) in my class, I’d get them wrong.  

One year, I had four!  One day, two of them turned up, so I took a surreptitious look in the register to see which two of the names had been signed against for attendance.  One was sitting on the window side of the classroom; the other on the door side.  Pleased with myself for coming up with this solution, I went for Name X when asking a question, looking at the student on the window side as I was sure it was her name I’d called out.  The answer came from the student on the door side, which made me jump!

Fast forward 20 years and I’m no better.  My Cambodian friend brought back from Hong Kong a 50-episode Korean DVD of a story set in the 1400s and 1500s, with a lot of intrigues and corruption among some of the officials at the imperial court.  

It is confusing enough when they refer to people sometimes by their name in full, sometimes by their surname followed by their court title, sometimes by their full court title only, so that one is never sure, at the first (or even second or third) sitting, that they’re actually the same person.  Some of the court titles are three characters, which makes them look like names — like Chinese names, the format of Korean names is: one character for the surname, followed by two characters for the personal name.

It gets trickier, however, when one’s prosopagnosia makes one unable to tell apart the goodie and the baddie — two high-ranking officials (same rank, therefore same costume).  (It doesn’t help either that later even the goodie turned against the hero, thus making him a baddie as well…)  

Another pair, both buffoon in looks (the stereotypical representation of buffoon features: eyebrows sloping downwards on the outside, a permanent drop-jaw open-mouth expression on the face, drooping outer corners of the mouth, a jutting lower jaw with only the lower row of teeth showing) and in behaviour, are, first to appear, the military man in charge of the exiles on the island to which the heroine was dispatched — he rather fancied the heroine; and later, one of the medical practitioners at the imperial court — who also worshipped the heroine.  My immediate conclusion, therefore, was that the military man had re-trained in order to be close to the heroine.  It took me four more viewings of the whole series before I realised they were actually not the same man. They both treat their immediate underling appallingly, shouting and beating them with the nearest object to hand.  Admittedly, the different underling in each case was a different man, but it was a minor observation to my prosopagnosiac mind.

My prosopagnosia got so bad that I even found the assassin looking exactly like the hero, and thought perhaps there was a sub-plot, i.e., intrigue within intrigue, with the hero maybe moonlighting as an assassin in order to penetrate the corrupt network of the baddies, etc., etc..  I had to go back over the (separate) scenes that featured them, freeze-frame or play frame by frame, to study the physical features to see what the difference might be: the assassin had two vertical frown lines between his eyebrows, the hero had horizontal ones in the scenes I looked at — that could’ve been deliberate disguise, though — but in other scenes he had four vertical frown lines; the assassin’s face was more elongated; the hero had crow’s-feet; and so on.  

I have now watched the DVDs at least five times but still cannot confidently distinguish the baddie official from the goodie official.  Luckily for them, I’m only watching them on disc, because if it was a live performance on stage, I would be pelting the wrong chap with rotten eggs and tomatoes!  Performance after performance after performance.

(London 2012/2013)