"I Am Murdered" aka The Perils of Technology

My Chinese name is Libeisha, which is three words combined: li (丽pretty) bei (蓓 flower bud) sha (莎 no real meaning, just used for the sound). But the word 'sha' with the character 杀  means 'murder.'  I sent an email to a student and was typing too fast and when I hit the keys for 'libeisha' the character string that came up first was the murder-sha 杀, not the sound-name-sha 莎. I chose the murder character, didn't notice, and sent off the email.

Hoo boy, did my student find that amusing! He wrote back immediately, "Are you okay? You have been murdered? Oh no!" And told me he had gathered up his classmates to his dorm room so they could see and laugh at my mistake, too. They love that I study Mandarin, but they got quite a kick out of their teacher calling herself  "murdered." Oops. Sometimes, your language skills are only as good as your typing skills.

I use Google Mandarin for my keyboard conversion program, btw. Google owns so many pieces of my life.

My other favorite Mandarin mistake was my students saying, "I am [name]" when they texted or called me. I told them so many times, "Not 'I am [name].' In English we say 'This is [name].'" But this was hard for them to remember and they made this mistake often. Flash forward to my Mandarin class this past fall, when a student stood up to do a dialogue and said (in Mandarin) "This is [name]." My teacher immediately interrupted: "Not 'This is [name]', in Mandarin we say 'I am [name].'"

It made me smile.

This Video Is Amaze-Balls

I found this link through Twitter; it's a short animated visual graphing of the rise of the wealth and health of nations over the last two hundred years. The Chinese breakout especially interested me; GuiZhou and the rural parts of China he mentions are where Peace Corps volunteers are mostly assigned; GuiZhou is the province just to the east of Chongqing. And yes, going to Shanghai was like going to Europe as far as wealth, cleanliness and public behavior were concerned.

If you like social science, you will probably love this. If you don't like social science, you will probably love it after watching this.

Clothes-es, and Other Chinese-isms

Chinese students almost uniformly make the mistake of pluralizing 'clothes' into 'clothes-es' and we are the kind of teachers that mimicked our students most common mistakes when talking to each other, so now I say 'clothes-es' all the time in my head. Other things we said:

Deeleeciours (delicious)
Advices
I wish you happy every day!

I miss speaking Chinglish on a daily basis. Luckily I still talk to folks in China so when they say things like this, I write them down. You think you won't forget, but you do!

Did you know in Chinese culture it is normal to wear the same clothes for several days in a row? (Not underwear, that I know of!) You wear them until they are dirty, then change into new clothes and wash the ones you've been wearing. It was really hard to get used to at first, but then I loved it. It's much easier than having to choose new outfits every day. My students thought it was really strange Americans change our clothes every day. I don't know if they thought we were showing off how many clothes-es we own, or being impractical, or just weird. But they definitely noticed the foreign teachers changed their clothes all the time. I started wearing the same thing several days in a row to fit in, and because: lazy. I miss it.

However, when I was in college, this was my favorite sweatshirt of all time; I got it for $10 at the GAP and wore it constantly. I was Chinese and didn't know it!

My students often told me that Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) was very special when they were growing up because it was the only time they got new clothes; now that people have more money, people own more clothes, and Spring Festival is not as special.