Phonetically Hopeless
Traveling gives me many opportunities to be reminded of my language ineptitudes. At least I’m no longer shy or nervous about it. I just throw myself into the situation and do my best—quite the opposite to the seven years I spent not learning French. Given time I can learn the words and grammar. However, my complete inbility to speak with accents regularly entertains Janet.
“Was that suppose to be Italian?”
After days of practice I can now do a passible impression of one of the characters of Little Britain saying, “Yea’ I Kno’.”
I haven’t quite been able to say “píji?”, beer, correctly in Chinese. We usually simply order our favorite beer by brand, Tsingtao, pronounced “ching-dow”. The label aptly states, “The Famous and Popular Beer of China in the World.” I had not heard of the beer before, but Janet tried it at a restaurant in Canada.
Our final destination in China is Qingdao, also pronounced “ching-dow.” Qingdao is known for it’s six beaches. The senior party officials have summer homes here. Many Koreans take the direct ferry from Incheon, which we will board for Korea. We came to lay in the sun for a few days before leaving China, but it’s been foggy, though the sun managed to burn a hole through the haze to color my legs and back an uncomfortable shade of pink. Qingdao was a German colony until World War II and German archiecture influenced many of the buildings in the city. We have theorized that this influence may have extended to the notion of making beer: did I mention that Qingdao is also famous for making Tsingtao?
At one time, I became entranced by transliteration, lecturing uninterested friends and dinner guests on why Peking is now Beijing. Transliteration is the process of writing a language in a foreign alphabet or writing system, such writing your name in Chinese or writing Chinese cities in Latin letters. Often many systems compete and new systems gain popularity. In China the official system for writing mandarin in Latin characters is called pinyin. Korea recently adopted a new system which removed the need to include accents on vowels. Such a system tries to balance the need for English speakers to read the words and the desire to convert the words back into the native writing system.
So this is why it took me two weeks to realize that Tsingtao is an older tansliteration of Qingdao. Tsingtao was originally a German brewery. A Canadian saying “Tsingtao” in a Qingdao restaurant is like a Chinese person asking for a “Canadian” (i.e. Molson Canadian) in Canada. “Um yes, but what can I bring you?” Fortunately, Jan can say “pijiu” (Mandarin for ‘beer’) with an intelligible accent.
In Qingdao cold kegs are delivered daily to the sidewalks in front of small shops. The locals can pick up a plastic bag full of foamy draft beer for four yuan, about 55 cents, on their way home from work.
