“Your Chinese is pretty average.” (in Mandarin: biao-jun)
<shaking head in self-deprecating manner> “Oh really?!”
“Yes! When you speak, I can understand!”
“You’re too kind.”
This exchange may need some translation. It would be hard to imagine its equivalent in Europe. Picture a scene in Paris, with someone attempting to speak grammatically-imperfect but reasonably-accented French with a local:
“Your French is pretty average.”
You’d be more likely to say “Oh I’m sorry! I’m just learning!” instead of “You’re too generous!”
Compared to Taiwan, a Parisian would also be more likely to dismiss your French, or castigate you for incorrect use of the subjunctive tense. A Londoner would impatiently complete what you were saying. But in Taipei, an encouraging response happens almost daily.
Yesterday I took a taxi and, as usual, gave the address in Mandarin, followed by a suggestion about which route to take.
“WOAH! I understood every word! How long have you been here? Only two years? The way you said ‘please take Song-Gao road’ was perfect! You rock!”
A New York cabbie would argue with me about my choice of route, not praise my diction and grammatical control. So what’s the deal?
At first glance the Taiwan cabbie’s response might seem like damning with faint praise. But it’s much more like a magic eye picture, where the hidden image is the highest linguistic complement it’s possible to pay.
The clue is in the Mandarin words ‘biao-jun’, which lose something in the English-Chinese dictionary translation of ‘average’ or ‘standard’. A more full translation of the meaning would be ‘unaccented’, so “Your Chinese is really unaccented”.
For a tone-deaf foreigner attempting to speak a language with four tones, this is high praise indeed. It’s not that foreigners can’t hear the different tones (although some might dispute that): it’s just really difficult to remember the rise and fall of each syllable, appropriately unite the distinct syllables with one or two mates, and associate the words and timbre with the right meaning. (Don’t get me started on how sentences can be written from left to right, right to left, or top to bottom in either direction, on a whim.)
Take ‘jian-dan’ for example. This little gem could mean either ‘omelette’ or ‘simple’ or, if you don’t get the tone right, nothing at all.
And that’s before people start losing syllables (or characters, if you insist) in their day-to-day conversations.
‘Ni yao tong-bian ma?’ (do you need a tong-bian?) asked a cashier when I bought a pair of socks recently. I looked up ‘tong-bian’ to see if I needed one. ‘Remedy for constipation’ was the only thing in my dictionary that came close. How to explain in the middle of Muji that all I need is this pair of socks, but thank you for your concern (and by the way, do I look uncomfortable?). My Mandarin doesn’t stretch that far.
When two makes four
Later, I discovered that the cashier had shortened a longer phrase ‘tong-yi bian-hao’, which has four characters, meaning ‘government uniform invoice number’, a commonly used tax ID for claiming expenses, into the well-known local slang that only uses two characters.
The appearance of semi-fluency can lead us astray in other ways too, as we discovered when a simple administrative procedure turned into a bit of an off-road mystery tour.
Shortly after we arrived in Taiwan, and before moving into our new apartment, we arranged for an engineer to set up the internet connection. The appointment was pre-arranged in person, in the telecoms shop, and at the agreed time, we sat, waiting, on the floor of our new, empty apartment. The time passed, and no-one came. Eventually (and reluctantly because my Mandarin was still limited to a few stock phrases and certainly wasn’t up to a face-less telephone call) I phoned the company.
Back and forth we went with the call centre employee, who helpfully patched in a translator, who connected us with the engineer, who said in Mandarin, as I listened, “yup, I called the customer to reconfirm the appointment and she said ‘Ni da cuo le’ [you’ve got the wrong number]”.
Oops.
I confessed my guilt to the call centre employee, the translator, the engineer, and to my puzzled husband who at that time spoke even less Mandarin than me.
“Ni da cuo le” was one of my stock phrases, used whenever I was faced with an unknown, Mandarin-speaking caller. Most people calling me in those early days would speak English, so this was usually a successful strategy, cutting short marketing calls and genuine wrong numbers and leaving me unburdened by that most fearsome of new-language quagmires: the foreign-language phone call.
Only this time it had backfired.
As a result of my confident verbal dismissal, the engineer had not only cancelled our appointment, but the entire internet contract.
Of course, this being Taiwan, the situation was immediately remedied by the company, with diplomacy and kindness, and a few days later our internet line was connected. They even went a step further and assigned us a dedicated English-language ‘carer’ so I can’t put my foot in it again.