Mandarin... yo momma or your horse?

I mentioned before that Joe and I are taking Chinese (Mandarin) classes together. Last night ended week 4 - so we've had 8 of the 12 lessons. This post is starting out semi-boring, but I have a funny treat for you at the end (no, stop scrolling! wait for it!). (note: We're learning Mandarin, not Cantonese, but our teacher refers to it as Chinese, so I'll use that interchangeably)

First, a little about Mandarin (from my limited understanding <- that's my disclaimer).

As we're learning, we read and write Chinese in pinyin, basically a phonetic representation of the words (using the Roman alphabet). This is surprisingly not that helpful - for example "zi" is pronounced "dsuh" (you pronounce vowels very differently depending on their location in the word and what other letters are around it).

We also learn to recognize and write the Chinese characters. Each character is a whole word and there are no pronunciation clues within the character. That's different/unique as far as my language learning because sometimes I can look at a character and know exactly what it means but have no idea how to say it in Chinese.

Mandarin has 4 tones. This means you say the same exact sound in different ways to mean completely different words. Listen to this for an example. The word is "ma" and means (in the order he says it) mother, hemp, horse, and scold. I'm not sure about Chinese, but Thai is also tonal, and I've studied it some. With Thai, native speakers do not associate the words with each other since it's an integral part of speech, just as we would not associate words like grant and plant (except for you teachers who use word families). So if someone said "I would like to grant this tree," it would lead to some confusion. A native Thai speaker has the same problem understanding what you say if you use the wrong tone, and I would guess it is the same for Chinese. A quick funny story about how the wrong tone can create problems. In Thailand, our American friend Jeff was introducing an older woman, let's say her name was Pok (I can't remember). He meant to say "This is Aunt Pok" (aunt being a term of endearment/honor), but he accidentally said "This is crazy Pok." Thank goodness she had a sense of humor!

One especially nice thing about Mandarin is that there is no verb conjugation. If you've taken a foreign language, you've probably spend hours memorizing "avoir: j'ai, tu as, il/elle a, vous avais, nous avons, ils/elles ont" or something similar. It's great to only need to learn one word for a verb, and that concept actually makes sense! In French you even have to have different words (articles, adjective ending, adverb endings, etc.) depending on the gender (masculine / feminine) of the noun you are referring to... Chinese is such a relief!

Okay, that's probably more than any of you wanted to know about our language learning, but hopefully you learned something, too!

Now for the fun (if you scrolled down here without reading the rest, know that Santa's watching). Our teacher gave us all Chinese names to use in class. Chinese people say their family name first, followed by their given name (the equivalent of our first name). The names our teacher gave us are supposed to sound somewhat like our real name. My name is Pi Kai-xi ("Pee" (rising tone) "Kie" (rhymes with tie, lowish funky tone) "she" (high tone)). Kai-xi is supposed to be close to Kathy, which is close to Kathryn. The three words mean Skin Generous West. I kinda like my first name, since (relative to China) I'm from the West and I try to be generous. Here's the good part. Joe's name is Pi Jio ("Pee" (rising tone) "Gee-oh"(falling sharp tone)). It means Skin Vulture. Isn't that awesome?!? Joe said it sounds like a rock band. We found out last week that the same pronunciation (Pi Jio) with different tones is the Mandarin word-combination meaning beer! While that might be slightly cool, Skin Vulture definitely has a ring to it.

EDIT - SHORT RANT: Most of you know of my issues with spelling and frustration with the English language (I still strongly believe that if English were to make any sense, the correct spelling of "apparently" would be "appearently"). While writing this I repeatedly spelled "pronounce" and "pronunciation" wrong. Seriously - can we have some consistency? Either take the "o" out or leave it in! No wonder I want to be fluent in another language!