I
was chatting with a German friend of mine the other day. His daughter
is now 2.5 years old and she can speak German, Mandarin (The Mom is a
Cantonese speaking Chinese and the nanny is a Mandarin speaking local
here in Beijing) and English.
I was playing with her for about
an hour in a restaurant and this cute little thing was telling me a lot
about colours, animal names and fruit names.
All in a sudden,
the Dad said, "The Chinese language is amazing. Sometimes they are just
so meaningful in the way how they make up the phrases." (This poor
German dad has been really stuggling hard to learn Chinese ever since
he came to China).
Before I could understand why he made such a comment, he explained:
"See, in Chinese, the phrase for ANIMAL is MOVING OBJECT, for
GIRAFFE, it's LONG NECK DEER, and gosh~ I never knew the giraffes
belonged to the deer family only until I was quite old!......"
Humm...
that's so interesting! I've never thought of looking at my own language
that way. When I started learning my mother tongue, it all seemed so
natural: you hear a word, then you just relate it to the object /
concept and you use it for the rest of your life. A phrase is a single
concept, I've never thought of breaking them up to study each of it's
components this way.
When I went home, I started thinking of more examples:
China = Middle Kingdom
Computer = electronic brain / calculation device (this is the term used in China... so weird!)
gecko = 4-leg snake (any idea they are related to the snakes???)
elevator = electronic ladder / the going up and down device
the
brush for Chinese calligraphy = hair pen (yeah, for some reasons it's
just a pen, not really a brush. Maybe it sounds uncivilised or less
elegant to write with a "brush"?
If you are a learner of Chinese, would you find these tricks useful?
When I was learning Mandarin, I tried the theory above. This is what happened:
A
friend of mine and myself went to a restaurant for Peking duck. On the
table, we had the sliced duck meat, some chopped veggies and some skin
made by flour for wrapping the duck and stuff.
We were running out of that skin thing. So, we asked the waitress: "Hey Miss, could you please give us one more dish of that WRAPPING SKIN?"
That
lady tried SOOOO hard to repress her laughter and in a few seconds, she
was in tears, then she shook her head and walked away. When she came
back to our table with those wrapping skin, her face was still
extremely red.
Friends, any idea what "wrapping skin" could mean in local Chinese? The
ones who know, type the answer in the comment part, so that the others
can learn from you and from my horrible and embarrassing
experience...... sigh~
.: 
