Let me just say that this is going to be a lot harder than I thought. First some back story: on one of our first nights here, all of the foreign teachers went out to a restaurant. We figured we'd order some nice cold beers with dinner, so armed with only a brand name (Tsing Tao - pronounced ChingDao), we tried to order. Our waiter stared blankly at us as we kept pressing for ChingDaos. We knew we were pronouncing it right, so maybe they just didn't have it or something. A quick dictionary check revealed the word for beer (Pi jiou). After asking for Pi jiou, the waiter nodded enthusiastically. Great success! But then of course, he wanted to know what kind we wanted... and asked us: "ChingDao?" Now... to this day, we can all swear that we said it correctly to begin with, but our waiter (Fu Yuan) would have disagreed. Apparently even though it sounded exactly the same to us, it was such an abomination of the language that he couldn't understand us at all.
And it's been a recurring theme here. If you mispronounce something even slightly, you're met with blank stares. Back home, if someone comes up to you with butchered English, you can usually piece together what they're trying to say. Not here. And no matter how hard we've been trying, whenever they've corrected us, its sounded exactly the same.
So back to our lesson. Beme introduced us to the various subtle tones in Chinese, as well as the nature of the Chinese characters. It's actually all very interesting, and I really believe that given time I'll be able to pick it up and use it. Maybe even understand it. Maybe.
Oh, and speaking of being tone deaf... after our lesson, most of the teachers (Chinese and Foreign alike) went out to KTV for Allen's, one of the staff members, going away party. KTV is what the Chinese call their Karaoke. Except it's not like a Karaoke place in the states. You don't get to see strangers butcher songs, it's just you and your friends in a private room, with booming loud speakers, crazy laser lights, and Santa Clause lights flying around on the floor.
Get ready to sing a lot of Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and Spice Girls, look like an idiot, and like it.
- S
Spice Girls - "Viva Forever"
Robbie Williams - "Angels"
3 comments:
Um...the spice girls had a second song?
Chinese karaoke sounds like a lot of fun!! And Jonah, they had many amazing songs.
NYC has that!!! There's this awesome place on 16th street where you get a room with a gigantic flat screen tv, and they just keep bringing you the booze. You and 10 of your friends just go nuts and noooo one can hear you scream. I mean sing.
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