Students’ version of Chinese: 04 (Softening tone of voice) (London)

Example 4: A beginner student doing one-to-one lessons with me back in the late 80s was taught in Lesson 1 that one way of softening the tone of voice in Chinese is to reduplicate the utterance, e.g.,

谢谢 xièxie (“thank thank” / thank you) would often be 谢谢，谢谢 (thank you, thank you);

请坐 qǐng zuò (“request sit” / please sit) would become 请坐，请坐 (sit down, sit down).

Monosyllabic utterances would normally be said three times, e.g.,

来 lái (“come” / come on) would become 来来来 (come, come, come) when, say, urging the guest to eat more food or have another drink.

The following lesson, I taught him another way of softening the tone of voice, which is to add the suggestion particle 吧 ba to a statement so that it doesn’t sound like a command, e.g.,

再来一杯 zài lái yī bēi (“further come a cup-of/glass-of” / have another one) would become 再来一杯吧 (do have another one). 

A week on, I was trying to revise material already learned, so I went over the polite exchanges used in socialising situations, one of which was to urge the other party to have another glass of alcohol, a typical hospitality scenario at Chinese parties.

The student said, “再来一杯 zài lái yī bēi”, which was correct.

I then said, “How about softening the tone of voice?” expecting him to just add the suggestion particle 吧 to the end of it.  What I got was,

再再再来来来一一一杯杯杯 

zài zài zài lái lái lái yī yī yī bēi bēi bēi

Students’ version of Chinese: 03 (London)

Example 3:  Sixteen years after Denis, and a much younger student, Daniel, aged 28 (versus Denis’s then-50), but the same hilarious — if a bit macabre — outcome nonetheless.  

    In a Listening Comprehension piece, one section in the story said, “I’m the switchboard operator.  With so many employees, I sometimes have to take over 1,000 calls a day.  Some of the callers even want to leave messages.”  The Chinese for “to leave a message” is 留言 liúyán / “leave-behind spoken-words”. 

    Daniel, as with lots of student before — and undoubtedly after — him, didn’t distinguish the tones so clearly, and ended up hearing yán (言 / “spoken-word”) as yǎn (眼 / “eyes”).  

    So Daniel’s version has these callers wanting to leave their eyes behind!  Infinitely more fun (if gruesome)!

PS:  haha, talk about hilarious outcomes!  I was typing too fast, so “tones” came out as “toes” — “didn’t distinguish the toes so clearly”.  It’s getting surreal, this!  These linguistic misses are really catching!

Students’ version of Chinese: 02 (Getting up after the elephants) (London)

Example 2: Denis sent in some homework — a translation of Chinese sentences into English.  

His version said: “He only got up after the elephants got up.”  Maybe the sentence was about a lazy zoo keeper who liked a lie-in, but the source text was a mainland Chinese publication, which — in my experience — generally didn’t rise to that plane of wackiness.  

The original sentence turned out to be: 大家起床了以后他才起床 dàjiā qǐchuáng le yǐhòu tā cái qǐchuáng / He only got up after everyone had got up.  

Denis had mis-read 大家 (dàjiā / “big family” / everyone) as 大象 (dàxiàng / “big elephant”).  

Quarter of a century on, the recollection still produces a chuckle — and will for another 25 years to come, if my memory is still intact by then.  

A much more interesting and memorable perspective than the grain production articles that a particular teacher tried to foist on her students at different places where she put students of Chinese through the mill.  (Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun — and the meow).

Oxymoronic instructions (London)

Student Ed and I spent lots of our lessons in academic year 2012/2013 reading works by famous Chinese writers.  

A common Chinese literary device is to ask a rhetorical question, then go on to provide the answer.  Or, a statement would be made about something, to be followed by an expansion on the point.  

At the beginning, Ed would get to a point (rhetorical question, or just a statement), and immediately ask, say, “But why does she want to do that?” or “What’s the reason for that?”  I’d say to him, “You’ll find out if you read on.”  

After a few more times of this, it became: “Wait!  Move on and you’ll find out.”  

After that, it got shortened to: “Wait!  Move on!”  

Talk about oxymoronic instructions!

(London, 2013)

Overwrought imagination? (Singapore)

When I was at Raffles aged 17, I went to see a Japanese film with classmate Seok Leng.  As it was around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, we were the only 2 people in the cinema.

The story was set in mediaeval Japan. 

A powerful warlord (I think) had taken a fancy to a blind man’s sister. The warlord’s brother-in-law was worried about his sister’s position being threatened and wanted to remove the blind man. Invited blind man round for a game of Go, the black and white stone board game. 

Go (pronounced “gor”) is “圍 wei2 / to-surround” in Chinese. You win when you’ve surrounded your opponent’s stones, hence 圍.

The baddie removed one of the blind man’s stones (the blind man remembers every move in his head), then when the blind man put in the last stone for completing the surrounding, the baddie said no there’s still a stone missing. Blind man said there was meant to be a stone in that spot — the baddie said, “how dare you accuse me of cheating”, drew his sword and killed him. Dropped the body down a disused well.

The sedan chair went back to the blind man’s house empty. The sister suspected something, but being a woman she couldn’t go to the palace to find out why her brother hadn’t returned.

She went to the temple with a cat, prayed to the gods to help her find out the truth and avenge her brother, then told the cat to drink her blood and do the job for her as cats can climb over walls and enter places a young woman cannot. Then she killed herself. The cat drank her blood so her spirit entered the cat’s body.

The film then has the cat entering the palace and (after doing various things killing some people or something), the cat’s spirit then transfers to the body of the baddie’s sister. She starts to look and behave cat-like: her eyes, her sitting by the koi carp pond, sticking her hand into the water to catch the carp and eating the carp raw.

Seok Leng was getting more and more frightened, covering her eyes with her hands. Then she jumped up and said there was a cat in the cinema. I said, “What’s a cat doing in a cinema?! Your imagination is overworked!” She said she did see a cat. 

After a while, having told Seok Leng she was too wound up by the film, I saw the cat: it was weaving its way between the sections/blocks of seats, appearing in the aisle now and then, which was when Seok Leng saw it: a sort of “now you see it, now you don’t” way, teasing her.

(Singapore), 1971)

Letting students make a mistake 10 times (London)

I texted an ex-colleague about feeling exhausted after teaching a mature student, because she kept mis-hearing the sounds, so I had to shout down the WiFi line.  

The ex-colleague said to let the student make the mistake 10 times before correcting her — such is her own experience with teaching elderly students.  

I replied that I worry if I let them say the wrong thing 10 times, it might stick.  

The ex-colleague said, “Don’t worry, I found they can’t even remember the wrong version😂😂😂”

(London, 2021)

PS:  This same student used to live in Notting Hill until Brexit spooked her and she moved back to Paris where she has family to look after her, so I’m pleased for her.  A few years ago, I said to her, “I’ve got to the point in my life where it takes me about a day or two to recall something.”  She said, “At least it comes at all!!”  As an American student once said when I told him I was looking after my 84-year-old ex-teacher, back in 1996, “It’s tough getting old!”  Yes, I can certainly empathise now…

The brain works in wondrous ways: 09 (Being recognised from the back) (London)

Reproduced from a blog under another title: A teacher can run but cannot hide; posted 28 October 2011.

I was waiting for a bus around 11pm one warm summer’s evening last year when an apparition suddenly leapt out from behind me on the pavement, stood in front of me and said, with a big smile, “老师，你好，我是 Brenda! / Hello, Teacher, I am Brenda!”  It was a Taiwanese ex-student who’d done my MA Bilingual Translation course back in 1998(??), and I hadn’t seen her since, which makes 12 years.  Yet she recognised me, in the dark, from behind!

A few months after that, I was on the bus home from St Paul’s, seated upstairs just in front of the top of the steps, therefore had my back turned to the steps.  As the bus moved away from the next stop, I heard my name called out by someone who’d come upstairs.  It was another ex-student, David, who’d also recognised me from behind.