Ten Reasons Why Mandarin Chinese Will Kick Your Ass

10. Mandarin is a tonal language.

If you say "hua hua" with a rising tone, it means "slippery".  If you say it with a flat high tone, it means "licentious" or "womanizing".  If you saying with a descending tone, it means "drawing".

If you are tone deaf, congratulations!  You are going to make a lot of Chinese people laugh.

Situation: A street vendor has asked you if you wish to buy a tiger claw (for medicinal purposes).
You meant to say: "不要.  Bu yao (descending tone).  I don't want it."
You have actually said: "不咬.  Bu yao (dipping tone).  Please don't bite me!"

9. It is very hard for foreigners to memorize proper nouns.

If I tell you my name is Max, all kinds of neurons fire.  Maybe you think of a dog named Max.  Maybe you call me Maximus and you picture me in the gladiator arena.  Maybe you just fixate on that sexy "x" in my name.  Or maybe you picture me in M.C. Hammer pants "taking it to the max".  Which, of course, I do on a daily basis.

If I tell you my name is Li Feng, no such images are elicited.  Not a damn one.  To you it's just a random string of letters.  Without those silly, fleeting associations to serve as subconscious cement, no memory is formed.

Situation: You run into me on the street after just having met me.
You meant to say: "立丰，你好.  Li Feng, ni hao.  Hello Li Feng."
You have actually said: "Um….. 凤梨，你好.  Feng Li, ni hao.  Hello Pineapple."

8. You will be tempted to translate directly from English and it won't work.

高 means "high".
潮 means "tide".
So 高潮 means "high tide", doesn't it?

Nope, it means "orgasm".  I found this out the hard way when I asked someone about surfing during high tide.

7. Hangman becomes a *lot* more difficult.

6. The bad dictionaries are worthless.

My electronic dictionary translates 发紫 as "empurple", 更改 as "rejigger", 品尝 as "degustation", and 荡漾 as "popple".  Which are really fancy ways of saying "to turn purple", "to update", "to try (food)", and "to ripple", respectively.

Who in Sam Hill wrote this?  Clearly someone who is more intimate with the Oxford Dictionary of Pompous Twaddle than he is with actual English-speaking human beings.

5. The good dictionaries are worthless too.

Look up 蛋 and you'll see that it means "egg".  Simple enough.

But it's wrong, wrong, wrong.  蛋 only refer to eggs that are similar to chicken eggs.  Try asking where you can buy fish蛋.  Chinese people will imagine that a sizable, oblong egg with a hard shell has come tumbling out of the fish's cloaca.  Then they'll laugh at your ignorance of basic aquatic reproduction.   And certainly don't use 蛋 to describe human eggs.

On a similar note, Kleenex is hard to translate because the same word is used for both facial tissue and toilet paper.  The word for "toast" refers to sliced bread whether it is toasted or not.

4. Chinese typos totally alter the meaning of the sentence.

Chocolate.  Chocolat.  Chocklit.  Chokomut.  Whatever.  They all mean the same thing.

Chinese is typed by punching in the romanization of the character.  An autosuggest program will then pick the best character among many homonyms based on context.

Your typos will not be shown an ounce of leniency.

Situation: I was IMing a friend once, inattentively letting the autosuggest do its thing.
I meant to send: "你有没有申请圣地亚哥的大学?  Did you apply to any universities in San Diego?"
Two mistyped tonal numbers resulted in: "你有没有深情圣地压歌的大学?  Do you have deep feelings for the Holy Land's university of squashed music?"

3. Idioms Gone Wild

Chinese is full of idioms that don't make sense when read literally.  For example, if your Chinese friends take you to eat the best dumplings in town and you can't taste the difference, they might say "Play piano for a cow!"

What they are really saying is that the art of the fine dumpling is lost on an ignorant cow like you.

马屁精means "brown-noser", but character for character it could mean "essence of horse butt".  Wow!  Is that by Calvin Klein?

2. The Chinese language reflects a difference in thought, not just a difference in expression.

How do you say "You got the check?  Are you sure?  Well then, thank you." in Chinese?

Answer: You don't.

Instead you say "NOOOOOOOOOOO!"  Then you steal the check from him forcibly.  Bat off his attempts to recover it and foist your cash on the waiter before he can.

1. You guessed it: it's the writing system!  The number 1 reason why Mandarin will kick your ass is that it has 6500 pissed-off, knuckle-dusting characters in common use.