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Happy Chinese New Year! Yeah, I'm a day late. Tonight's moon was a beautiful Islamic crescent, with a little red tinting at the end of dusk.
Language is fun. On a few blogs yesterday I spotted Gong Hey Fat Choy. I was mentally scratching my head when my Chinese coworker got in. She put out some candy, embarrassedly mumbled something about the new year, and dove for cubicle cover. The cheer jumped into my head and not really recalling what it mean I hollered "Gong xi, gong xi!" over the wall. The response was a "oh, OH, yes, yes, thank you, Thank You!"
Gong Xi Fa Cai is Mandarin, which I dimly recalled. Gong Hey Fat Choy is Cantonese, of which I know nothing. All Mandarin speakers I've run into advise against Cantonese for sanity sake.
The Taiwanese woman who taught me gong xi didn't even know what it meant, "it's just something we say." You actually get that a lot from native Chinese speakers. I'm not sure if they don't know how to get it to English for me or if something else is going on.
Gong Xi means something like congrats or joy to you. The Fa cai is wishing you wealth. It's also real tricky to say correctly, the cai is a particularly funky monosyllable. Gong Xi, on the other hand, is dead easy for an English speaker, which is why I remembered it.
A lot of folks at work dropped by to wish the poor Chinese lady in the next cube some form of happy new year in various forms of mangled Chinese. I only know a handful of Mandarin phrases, but I know how they should sound.
I resolved to try to give her a proper Mandarin well wishing on the way out. I looked it up, found an audio and listened a few times. I mumbled a few times, trying to pitch a couple of the tones right. I couldn't really speak it or I'd ruin the surprise.
I was with someone else when people started clearing out and I nearly missed her. As everyone was saying their good evening, I caught her eye and belted out my best Mandarin. "Xin Nian Kuai Le!" Literally "Happy New Year." It's got few challenging bits and that "le" took particular care.
There was a confused pause and she leaned forward with a "what you talkin' bout white boy" look. I was sure I'd botched it. Then, as my heart sank and I prepared to give a second, doubtless, futile attempt, her look of confusion turned to shocked surprise.
She rocked back and looked flustered. "Good, good! Very good! Happy new year!" This was punctuated with a huge smile and, of all things, a thumbs up. The reaction convinced me I'd nailed it. There was happy confusion, and a kind of a, "did he really say that" look.
Of course, I forgot the phrase on the drive home. Mandarin is one of those many things I've tried and will never really master. Still, for a single perfect instant, it worked.
Language is fun. On a few blogs yesterday I spotted Gong Hey Fat Choy. I was mentally scratching my head when my Chinese coworker got in. She put out some candy, embarrassedly mumbled something about the new year, and dove for cubicle cover. The cheer jumped into my head and not really recalling what it mean I hollered "Gong xi, gong xi!" over the wall. The response was a "oh, OH, yes, yes, thank you, Thank You!"
Gong Xi Fa Cai is Mandarin, which I dimly recalled. Gong Hey Fat Choy is Cantonese, of which I know nothing. All Mandarin speakers I've run into advise against Cantonese for sanity sake.
The Taiwanese woman who taught me gong xi didn't even know what it meant, "it's just something we say." You actually get that a lot from native Chinese speakers. I'm not sure if they don't know how to get it to English for me or if something else is going on.
Gong Xi means something like congrats or joy to you. The Fa cai is wishing you wealth. It's also real tricky to say correctly, the cai is a particularly funky monosyllable. Gong Xi, on the other hand, is dead easy for an English speaker, which is why I remembered it.
A lot of folks at work dropped by to wish the poor Chinese lady in the next cube some form of happy new year in various forms of mangled Chinese. I only know a handful of Mandarin phrases, but I know how they should sound.
I resolved to try to give her a proper Mandarin well wishing on the way out. I looked it up, found an audio and listened a few times. I mumbled a few times, trying to pitch a couple of the tones right. I couldn't really speak it or I'd ruin the surprise.
I was with someone else when people started clearing out and I nearly missed her. As everyone was saying their good evening, I caught her eye and belted out my best Mandarin. "Xin Nian Kuai Le!" Literally "Happy New Year." It's got few challenging bits and that "le" took particular care.
There was a confused pause and she leaned forward with a "what you talkin' bout white boy" look. I was sure I'd botched it. Then, as my heart sank and I prepared to give a second, doubtless, futile attempt, her look of confusion turned to shocked surprise.
She rocked back and looked flustered. "Good, good! Very good! Happy new year!" This was punctuated with a huge smile and, of all things, a thumbs up. The reaction convinced me I'd nailed it. There was happy confusion, and a kind of a, "did he really say that" look.
Of course, I forgot the phrase on the drive home. Mandarin is one of those many things I've tried and will never really master. Still, for a single perfect instant, it worked.
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From:
no subject
GSK had a celebration at work yesterday, in which there was a calligraphy demo as well as a demo by a dancer from the Hunan province, and a Tai Chi demo...plus we all learned to say 'Gong Xi'...
...it was very neat!
From:
no subject
I'm not a real speaker either, actually, but my mom is and my dad was also, even though he was tone deaf. The main spoken language in Hong Kong is Cantonese, and about a 1/3 of the meetings his workplace had were in Cantonese so he decided he really needed to be able to speak and understand the language, even though they assured him they weren't leaving him out of any information loop -- things can be missed though, no matter how well-intentioned people are. He had to learn by repetition and feel -- my mom would listen and have him try saying things different ways until he got it right, and then he would memorize the feel of it since he couldn't hear the difference.
But it is more complex than Mandarin, because it has more tones.
Good on you though, getting the greeting right for your co-worker :) That's what I call community-building!
From:
no subject
I took a course in Mandarin offered by a local church, mostly Taiwanese congregation, but any Chinese expats welcome. I was amused by the grammar and logic of it, and thought I had a chance of learning it. Unfortunately, it became increasingly clear that no romanization would ever be a substitute for hearing it. I assume if I knew enough of the sounds already, there would be a point where pinyin would be useful. However, I'm not sure what the tipping point would be.
While at the church, one of the folks asked if we, the students, were learning Mandarin or Cantonese. When we said Mandarin everyone nodded. All agreed, regardless of the languages they spoke, that Cantonese would be the harder of the two. Mandarin speakers had little good to say about Cantonese. There was a lot of local ribbing, of course.
From:
no subject
It's harder to learn languages as an adult, and also when we don't use the foreign language regularly.
The tonal thing adds something to the Chinese culture in some unexpected ways... there's one dialect called Haka, which has only two tones. In Hong Kong there was saying about simple and/or boring stuff being as being like the Haka language (in other words, not very interesting or challenging). But on the other end of the spectrum is Fukien, which has 12 tones. Now _that's_ a challenge!
Re: Mandarin and Cantonese, there is also the matter that Mandarin comes out of the north, and Cantonese from the south, so there is a history (however good-humored in America) of differences in region and culture. Mandarin is the official language of China, but I think part of the reason for that happening is that the capital is in the north.
In America, the majority of the first people to come here from China spoke Cantonese (starting in mid to late 1800s). The Mandarin-speaking people mostly came much later, like in the past couple of decades.