As Expo 2010 opens in Shanghai, The New York Times on 05/03/2010 reported on signs provided for foreign visitors, translated from Chinese into a version of English: Chinglish.
http://tinyurl.com/27hsh54
The signs are meant to be helpful for English speakers navigating daily life in China, but sometimes they can be very amusing. One sign reads 小心滑倒! Slip and Fall Down Carefully! What it really says is “Be careful! The floor is slippery, you might fall.”—a cautionary warning.
According to the article, some think that Chinglish provides a window into the Chinese mind, which is interesting to me: Hmm…I should learn more Chinglish and speak it to my husband to help him look into my Chinese mind, I thought. My personal experience tells me that communication between English-speaking people and Chinese is not always easy. I don’t speak much Chinglish, but to convey my thoughts to my husband still takes a lot of work since he often says that he can’t read my mind.
In Panda Land, many Americans on the North Shore of Boston are taking Chinese lessons from me. For Americans, learning Chinese goes beyond just learning to speak, listen, read, and write as with many other foreign languages, such as French. The use of a language conveys the thought patterns of the people who speak it. From my experience, English and French basically convey similar thought patterns, while English and Chinese convey quite different thought patterns and processes. This difference cannot always be represented by simple grammar rules. For an example, last Saturday in our adult class, we were learning how to say “where is the bathroom?” This question is very critical when you visit China. First of all I taught the Chinese word for bathroom: 厕所, cè suǒ. Then the students said it is very hard for American to pronounce the word. I am not surprised at that. I remember a Canadian French woman told me when I was living in Paris about her embarrassing experience in China when asked for the bathroom in a restaurant since she couldn’t pronounce the word quite right in the perfect tones. I then mentioned several other ways to say the word bathroom in Chinese. We talked about what kinds of bathrooms one could encounter in different situations, and how to ask the question in different situations.
To teach Chinese to Americans, I try to teach many aspects including the thought process, history and culture, as well as everyday life situations that are associated with the use of language. In this way, it is very intriguing for adults to look into a totally different world. They will feel more comfortable when they communicate with Chinese or visit China some day. For children, they learn something quite different which could enable them to see different ways of thinking, develop more flexible minds, and spark creativity within them.
