Special Chinglish

I've begun a new adults class in the past two weeks and am still at the stage of trying to convince them not everything they've been taught is true. One of the common problems with teaching Chinese English students is trying to deprogram them of a lot of peculiar, misunderstood phrases and sayings, of which "Bye-bye" is the king. I can't speak for England, of course, but "bye-bye" just doesn't get used that often in the States. We say "bye-bye" when we're speaking to little kids, but not with adults: doing so would just sound cutesy. But everyone in China says "bye-bye"--everyone--and not just when talking to foreigners; they "bye-bye" us; they "bye-bye" eachother; they even "bye-bye" their pets. The word gets used so often here, it may as well be introduced into Putonghua dictionaries. Other words, like "beautiful," "lovely" and "pretty" also get used much too often, especially since many of the Chinese English-speakers don't understand that "handsome" is the masculine counterpart of "beautiful."

Other expressions I hear commonly include "Was it very dear?," "A billion thank-yous," "Warmly welcome" and the one that came up in class yesterday: "I couldn't agree with you more." It's not that the last one is incorrect; it's just that it's overused in China, and that if I say simply, "You can say that," then all of my students will use the phrase every time they want to express agreement. The student really wanted to know whether "I couldn't agree more" was the most common way to express agreement, so I tried explaining that most Americans would usually say just "Right," "Sure" or "Okay" to indicate agreement, just as most Chinese simply say "Dui" or "Haode." I mentioned that many phrases like this aren't as common as most Chinese seem to think, and that many of them are (or in many cases, were) Britishisms. Since they're all very insistent that they learn American (or "Standard" in their words) English, I said they may want to avoid using them, or at least use them very sparingly.

"Why are they in all the textbooks, then?" one student asked. This is normal--the assumption that if a sentence appears in a textbook, it must be extremely common. I explained how the Chinese goverment had started by trying to get everyone to learn British English, then changed to American English, and that it generally takes so long for language-learning books to get published that some of the expressions will naturally be outdated.

Then one student (whom I'll call Apple--her actual name is a different kind of fruit) decided that she couldn't agree with me less. "My college teacher say everyone say this. He very good teacher."

Since this student is a recent graduate, having earned her 4-year degree as an English major, I was sorely tempted to reply, "I couldn't agree more, Apple. Oh, wait, I could agree more; it would be possible, yes. If you were able to construct a sentence that made use of more than one tense, were able to remember that 'very' doesn't act as a verb in an English sentence, if your name weren't a kind of fruit, and if you showed even the slightest sense of amusement or embarrassment over the fact that your partner pronounces his 'English name' as a racial slur for Asians, then I would probably be unable to agree with you more. As it is, though, I can't say I couldn't agree with you more." I managed, though, to bite my tongue.

This is one of the strangest parts of teaching in China. There's this huge demand for "real American teachers" to teach "real American English," yet when they actually have someone in front of them who can tell them what "real American English" is, they immediately disregard everything he or she says, because their previous teachers (usually Chinese) said something else. So it's a safe bet that Chinglish will be around for a good long time.

"Chinglish Sop for the Soul"
Originally posted: 06:29, 2007-09-23

In order of least to most amusing, I've gotten the following over the last week.
On a xiaojie's T-shirt: "MY SHOES!!" repeated fifteen times, in concentric circles.

On the The Collection (a kafeiting) menu under Soups: French Onion Sop . . . Mixed Vegetables Soup Talian Style . . . and Cream Soup (Chichen, Sweet COrn, Mushroom Crap).

On the The Collection menu under Western Ric: Fried Rice Western Style (Sangage. Harm. Mixed Pea. Mushroom).

On a public sign: Green green grass, cherish it under the foot.

Again, on the The Collection menu, under Curry: Seafood Curry Rice (Squiel Crapmeat Fish Ball Garoupa).

Again, on a xiaojie's T-shirt, in two rows, writ directly across the chest (and this xiaojie was very Chinese in the stereotypical sense regarding morphology): Small Size Big News.