There’s a neat distinction in Mandarin, between food and drink, when saying something tastes good. If it’s food, you say hau hau tzuh. (Literally, good, good eat.) When it’s a drink that’s delicious, it’s hau hau huh (good good drink).
This green tea ice cream, handmade specially for a dinner party by my lovely and talented friend Mina? Mmmm. Hau hau tzuh!
*Italicized bold words are totally phonetic and made up by me.
Harmonica, kouqin. (Sounds like, koe-cheen, with an ever-so-subtle n).
Emerson, her koe-cheen, a subway platform and a cuter outfit than longjohns? We’re thinking this kid has potential to be our household’s highest earner.
Today’s featured word: putao, grapes. Because what’s a picnic without them — and a passed-out tuzi (sounds like toodzuh), rabbit?
The husband’s sesame-paste-filled tang yuan — glutinous rice balls — from our Chinese New Year post-dinner festivities. There were of course also tangerines, noodles and dumplings (recipe here). There are more in the freezer, in anyone still needs a tang yuan fix, friends…
Bus, gōnggòng qìchē. (Sounds like: goong-goong-cheetz-uh.)
Unlike bird, which is the short-and-sweet nyoh, bus gets replaced with a mouthful —goong-goong-cheetz-uh — knocking it from the list of words I expect to be among my daughter’s firsts, despite the fact that she points out every one she sees. Did I mention there’s a bus stop outside our front door?
If I had a dollar for every goong-goong-cheetz-uh we greet and wave away from behind our opaque first-floor windows, it would begin to seem possible that I might pay off my student loans in time for my 1-year-old to start college.
But I digress.
I’m learning Mandarin alongside Emmy in a completely conversational way. Basically, Rich introduces a new word when we come across it, and then I try keeping it inside my little grab bag of words. They slip out with extraordinary ease.
Last night we bought a Christmas tree and brought up the boxes of ornaments, and so when Emmy entered the living room this morning there was not only a decorated Christmas tree but a a jingle bell on the front door handle. Amazingly, she was much more interested in banging and ringing the bell than she was in investigating the tree. (Are trees passé, since she sees them in the park?) When Rich woke up, we learned that bell is liing — think ling, with a little roller-coaster dip in the middle. By the time we pack the ornaments back up, God help me if liing isn’t securely in the bag. (Pun not intended, but why not.)
I’ve been thinking about the other languages I’ve tried to learn from “conversational” lessons. An Italian tape taught me to greet friends and ask the price of a yellow skirt in the window. And thanks to a French tape I used to listen to while sitting in Los Angeles traffic, my brain has retained, all these years later, just please, thank-you, elevator and “The lamp is broken.” La lampe est cassée.
Maybe if I were learning Mandarin on my own I’d be able to say, “Waiter, the check, please.” But since I’m learning it alongside a 1-year-old, the Mandarin in my odd little grab bag instead consists of:
How are you?
It’s time to eat!
Would you like to drink water?
Monkey.
Frog.
Bird.
Cow.
What does the ___ say?
Apple
Blueberry
Strawberry
Wash hands.
Bus
Airplane
Ball
Tree
Book
Dog
Cat
Hair
Head
Legs
Feet
Toes
Hands
Fingers
Nose
Ears
Belly
Butt
Where is it?
There it is!
Socks
Shoes
Where did it go?
Don’t eat that!
Dirty!
Come here.
Take a bath.
Wait.
Be careful.
Sweet little treasure.
I love you.
Bird, niǎo. (Sounds like, nyow.)
Like dog (goh) and book (sue), bird exchanges one short, simple sound for another:nyow.
It was a word I grasped quickly and used easily until I learned cow — nyoh — and suddenly my brain wanted to mix up the two. It’s a very humbling thing to realize, a beat too late, that one has pointed to the sky and told a toddler, “Look! A cow!”
I’ve since started thinking of nyoh more like nyohhhhh, with a drawn-out o at the end, mentally linking it to a cow’s moooo. Which actually works. Most of the time.
Not a whole lot of actual news in today’s New York Times piece about “hearing bilingual.” I’ve read that the link to language is social, so kids don’t learn it by watching TV; that infants favor the languages they heard in the womb; and that bilingual speakers are better executive decision makers. What’s new, it seems, is the idea of “neural commitment” — that monolingual babies stop registering words in other languages at around 10 to 12 months.
Also kind of neat, in studies where babies were shown silent films in which people spoke different languages, 4-month-olds could tell when the language being used changed, but around 8 months, monolingual babies stopped reacting, while the bilingual kids stayed engaged. The bilinguals, the thinking goes, registered that information was still being conveyed.
Now, if someone could release data on the thinking processes of bi-sippy-cup babies, who insist on toting around twice the necessary plastic…
Tree, shù (Sounds like: sue.) Book, shū (Sounds like: sue.) Horse, mǎ.
Awesome things about Mandarin: there’s no verb conjugation and no feminine/masculine. Major challenge about Mandarin: it’s a tonal language.
Which Rich likes to remind me of, generally at moments when I’m making his ears bleed, clumsily repeating sounds to the point of making them other words.
Just after Emmy and I had mastered tree — sue — I saw Rich pointing to the books on her bookshelf and telling her: sue.
“What?” I stopped folding her clothes. “Are you kidding me?”
“You pay attention with a glass of wine, to find the nuance,” he told me. “You have to do the same with the words.”
Repeating that here it maybe sounds cute or super cheezy. But being told it was just annoying. Though I followed his point.
Tree, shù, is high and light. (Listen here.) Book, shū, is low and quick. (Listen here.)
Another trickster is horse: ma. A light, easy, ma. Sometimes when I take Em for a run in Prospect Park we pass a few lethargic horses dutifully toting riders along a path.Can ma, ma? I’ve started to say, knowing can is to see, ma (as you know) turns the words into a question and — since our recent trip to the Outer Banks, where wild horses did the gardening — that ma is horse.
Over dinner, I asked Rich about the awkwardness of the back-to-back “ma” and he laughed that there were actually five “ma” words — all different tonally, of course.
In high school I had a job involving a cash register and I used to think of giving $0.41 of change — one quarter, one dime, one nickel and one penny — as the jackpot of change.
Surely someone saying, “Ma ma ma ma ma?” is the jackpot of Mandarin translation.
Now, to sit tight and wait for the need for someone to ask: “Did the mother scold the horse?”
This mother horse could barely be bothered to guide her baby toward the downier patches of lawn, or around the neighbors’ crushed beer cans. Nevermind find the energy to scold it. If she had, can you imagine? The Mega Millions of translation!
(Confused? Please to note the dorkiness of my earlier post.)
