Was that Bo Ke or Bo Ke?

The other day I turned on the TV (a rare occasion) and tried to listen to the news in Mandarin. It felt like a slap in the face. As decent as my Mandarin is, I’m still struggling to get where I was a few years ago.

At one point, I was fairly fluent in Mandarin Chinese. About 6 or 8 years ago. When I lived in Taiwan I spoke Chinese almost 24 hours a day. However I wasn’t very literate. When I got back to the US I took a Chinese writing course and by the end of that I had command of somewhere between 1500 and 2000 Chinese characters. But then I didn’t keep up with my language skills, so being back in Asia is a constant reminder of how much I’ve forgotten.

Being in Hong Kong doesn’t help all that much. English is just as prevalent as Mandarin here, probably more so. At the very least, I do get many more opportunities to read Chinese, which is what I need to practice most anyway.

As has been stated before, Chinese is hard. Some of the most difficult Chinese, for me at least, can be foreign proper nouns— names of people and businesses. Let me give you some examples.

Say you’re reading an article and you come across the name of a business è°·æ­Œ, pronounced “goo geh” (gu ge in pinyin) and meaning “song of the grain harvest.” If you can’t tease out the English name from the context, then you’re left wondering if this business is in the food industry or simply sounds like “Gu Ge”. In this case, the business is Google so the transliteration guess would have been correct.

But that’s not the case for 微軟, pronounced “way ruan” (wei ruan), and it means “Small and soft or pliable.” Could the name be “Wayland” or “Wayrun” or maybe they sell cotton balls? In this case, it’s Microsoft

Now, these two cases are actually pretty easy. They’re well known companies, the names might be in some dictionaries, and the context of the article will almost assuredly give away the identity. But that’s not always the case for many other names of people, businesses, and rather specific and technical vocabulary. Let me give you one more example:

I’ve seen blog translated as 網絡日誌, 網誌,and 博客. The first is really web journal and the second is just a concatenation similar to the English weblog to blog. The last is bo ke which is way too close in my mind to 播客 or bo ke which means podcast. The difference between the two? The first character. For blog the first character has a second (rising) tone and means “broad and abundent” often with respect to knowledge. For podcast the bo has the first (steady and high) tone and means “to broadcast.”

And if you think that’s crazy, wait until you delve into the writing system more. Mark Rosenfelder’s <a href=”http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm”>If English was written like Chinese is a great exploration of Chinese characters.

In case you’re wondering how you too can learn Mandarin, I recommend the Chinesepod podcast. That alone may not be enough, but it’s a good start or great supplement to other study material. I find the advanced lessons just about right for me— sometimes I follow perfectly and sometimes I get lost.

Update— I had some trouble with the chinese character encoding for this article. Apparently it has something to do with the Python Textile markup I was using, or at least the Textile plugin for Pyblosxom.