On Learning Chinese (II) — “Hold Fire! Make a Call First!”
The U.S. Naval Academy has now switched from Russian to Chinese as one of its foreign language majors. Given the recent “elbowing” going on between the American and Chinese navies in the South China Sea, it is perhaps high time that our midshipmen learn some Chinese to prevent some disastrous misfiring and hopefully encourage better mutual understanding.
My previous post “Laowai, so do you really want to learn Chinese??” discussed the challenges with Chinese pronunciation. (Laowai means foreigners in colloquial Chinese). Now Chinese grammar is relatively simple: “subject + verb + object” for a normal sentence; and “subject + verb + object, + ‘Ma’?” for a question, and no verb tense change, etc. But of course, that would just be too simple, wouldn’t it? And Chinese grammar has many idiosyncrasies that will baffle many a “Laowai”. Here I will give you some quick examples.
Chinese set phrases or usage. I mentioned “Da” 大 (4th tone) means “big”. But another “Da” 打 (3rd tone) means something totally different: “Hit or Beat.” To further confound the matter, this “Da” 打 also has some very chameleon but nonviolent meanings in certain set phrases (“verb + noun” combinations), like “make”, “fetch”, “send”, and etc., etc. • With its primary meaning of “Hit or Beat”, it is fairly straightforward: “Da” somebody = hit someone; “Da” cannon = fire the cannon; “Da” battle = fight a battle. • BUT it gets very confusing very quickly: “Da” telephone = make a call; “Da” water = fetch some water; “Da” report = make a report, …, and we also have the Chinglish “打 kiss” = give a quick kiss! Now don’t even ask me why, just memorize the combinations, OK?
Chinese quantifier words. Chinese uses specific measure words when counting specific objects. Let’s say our naval midshipmen need to do some counting (again, no need for plural “s” in Chinese): one “sou” ship, two “jia” airplane, three “men” cannon, …, one “tai” telephone, five “ge” sailor, but two “wei” officer… And the same “Da” 打 above, with the 2nd tone, means “a dozen”. So our naval ship’s kitchen may need to find one “da” egg (a dozen eggs) to make some stir fried rice for a dinner meeting with the Chinese naval captain to patch up any “elbowing” bruises. Now there are over 150 such measure words, and there is often no particular reason or rhyme to them. So you’ll just have to memorize them (do I hear some heavy sighing here?).
Pronouns in Chinese. Chinese is also a very economical language. This is especially true in its parsimony with pronouns. Anytime you can get away with it, you can cut out the pronouns and just let the listener(s)/reader(s) figure out whether you mean “I, you, s/he, or who/whomever…” Imagine the following conversation between our midshipman and the captain using the word “Da” 打 — Midshipman: “Da? (Shall we fire at them?)” Captain: “No ‘Da’! No ‘Da’!! ‘Da’ telephone first! (Hold fire! Hold fire!! Make a call to them first!)”. Yes, it is all about the context in language and in real life…
OK, I still don‘t know why we’d want to sail straight into the murky island disputes in the South China Sea (they are not our islands, by the way). So pray our naval midshipmen have a quick and proficient mastery of Chinese very soon…
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