Street intersections in Chinese

Two Chinese characters are commonly used to describe street intersections (路口; lùkǒu) on account of their shapes: 十 (shí; 10) and 丁 (dīng; one meaning is fourth in a series, e.g., company "D" when discussing 4 or more companies). When the character 字 (zì; character) is appended to each, their meanings become cross-shaped and T-shaped, respectively. We thus get:

• 十字路口 (shízì lùkǒu) A 4-way intersection (the normal American assumption for such being that the streets meet at 90 degree intervals).
• 丁字路口 (dīngzì lùkǒu) A T-shaped intersection, although in my experience Americans don't necessarily describe them as such, or as a "T intersection" (unlike "4-way intersection", which is common parlance). For directions, it seems more common to say or hear, "Drive down street 1 until it ends, then turn left (or right) on street 2." or possibly "Drive down street 1, which ends in a T. Go left (or right) on street 2."

I've never heard of the character 丫(yā; girl/servant girl) being used to describe forks in the road, even if it seems well suited for such. In truth, the typical fork in the road is more like the shape of a divining rod than the shape of a typical fork. Hmm, I guess sometimes people describe such as a Y-intersection, but fork is more common by far. Of course, the 丫 character, a divining rod, and the capital letter Y are all similar in shape.

Guillaume, aiguille; fille, ville

One of the challenges in learning French (or, probably even worse, English) is that the same combination of letters aren't necessarily pronounced the same way in all words. Spanish, thankfully, is a regular language in that respect, although I think I didn't realized that until several years ago.

The latest inconsistency I stumbled across, in a http://www.dailyfrenchpod.com podcast episode (one of my favored French podcasts), was aiguille (needle). Being already familiar with the sound of the name Guillaume (William) in which the gui portion sounds generally like the English "gee" in "geese", I was surprised that in aiguille it is pronounced "gwee", which I also confirmed with my Larousse English/French dictionary app.

Some words having a similar inconsistency, but which would typically be encountered rather earlier by French learners, are fille (girl), whose ille portion sounds roughly like English "ee", while the ille portion of ville (city) sounds roughly like English "eel".

Borrowing written shortcuts from other languages

If you are familiar with a foreign language, you may find a word or abbreviation therein that takes less time to write than its equivalent in your native language. It may be expedient to use that foreign word or abbreviation in notes to yourself, or perhaps even in notes to others if exposure to that foreign word or abbreviation is widespread.


Many years ago I received an incorrectly routed e-mail message which was for someone else. The short message was in French, and contained an abbreviation (pb) which I had not seen previously. I asked a native French speaker what that was, and after looking at it for a short time he realized it was an abbreviation for problème (problem).

Okay, the typical English abbreviation of problem is "prob", which is a mere two letters longer, but I've probably been using "pb" in English notes to myself for more than a couple of decades.


In Taiwan, I once noticed my Taiwanese cousin had used the Japanese character の in place of the Chinese character 的 (Pinyin: de; of) in a note whose other characters were all Chinese. I am quite confident that given Taiwan's proximity/exposure to Japan, a typical Taiwanese would neither be surprised nor confused to see such usage of the の character, which can be written in a single stroke, unlike 的.

Correcting my faulty pronunciation of école (& agricole)

I think it was about 20 years ago, when I was speaking French with a Frenchwoman (who was actually in my Mandarin Chinese class at that time), that she made a comment about my improper pronunciation of école (school).

Well, better 20 years late than never. I checked my Larousse dictionary app's audio pronunciation of both école and agricole (agricultural; another word having the same ending that came to mind), finally understood my longstanding error, and am trying to break my bad habit.

I think that I must never have realized that the circumflex accent in words like drôle (funny) and rôle (role) was changing the sound of the o, and was wrongly using that ô sound in école and agricole as well. Not surprisingly, that ô sound is more like the "long" o sound in English. I think it is common enough that, when learning new sounds in foreign languages, people mistakenly equate a sound from their native language with a foreign sound. After that, they may never notice the difference between the sounds, particularly if no one points it out to them. Even after having such pointed out to them, it may still take them 20 years to correct it....

The o sound in école is rather more like the sound of "ull" in English.


7/26/12: Today I realized that the o sound that I should have been making all these years in école is the same one I had already been used to making for the word folle (crazy; feminine form).

English subtlety: Turn right here

I was recently in a hurry guiding someone who is not a native English speaker to a spot on foot when we came to a four-way intersection. We needed to turn left, and I both moved physically and also pointed my finger in that direction, but I also quite automatically, simultaneously uttered the words "Turn right here."

Of course, my verbal emphasis was "Turn RIGHT HERE", not "Turn RIGHT here". In fact, my intention was not misunderstood, but I could certainly see the phrase being confusing for someone whose native language was not English.

French to English automated translation issues

For the French sentence:

Les pièces sont, sinon moins froides, du moins plus tranquilles.

Google Translate returns:

The parts are, if not warmer, at least quieter.

A more natural, and in this case correct, translation is:

The rooms are, if not warmer, at least quieter.

as I theorized that it ought to be, and which I subsequently confirmed with a native French speaker.  Of course, having translated the original French sentence (which did involve checking a dictionary) from my own original thought in English, I can be certain of what the translation (back) into English should be.  I was simply curious about an automated translation result.


Google Translate is likely hampered by the fact that "piece" (Google Translate used "part", which has an equivalent meaning) is the first definition of "pièce" in a dictionary.  At least that is the case in the Larousse French/English dictionary app, wherein "room" ranks fourth in the eleven definition possibilities for "pièce".

Beyond "The parts are", Google Translate offers the following additional translation options of the first clause ("Les pièces sont"), but those minor variations are wrong for this particular sentence as well:

• The pieces are
• Pieces are
• Parts are
• The coins are

Looking up "room" in French, the Larousse dictionary app gives different definitions depending on the context:

• in building or public place:  salle
• in house:  pièce
• in hotel:  chambre

Even those rules are not cast in stone, in my experience, but they're probably reasonable general rules.

In any case, the above peripheral perspective is not so easily incorporated into automated translation.  However, my French sentence's reference to "rooms" would seem to be relatively easily inferred from the rest of the content by a native or reasonably experienced (human!) French speaker.

The word "Chinese" translated incorrectly...into Chinese

A large technology provider recently revised one of its English language websites, on which it offered the following options for Japanese, Korean, and (simplified) Chinese:

Read this note in: 日本語 | 한국어 | 中国人

The first option, 日本語, is Japanese for Japanese as a language, inasmuch as the 3 characters (Japanese Kanji) are identical to traditional Chinese characters (for which i can vouch) having the same meaning (Japanese as a language).

The middle option, 한국어, would seem to be in the Korean language, and presumably means Korean as a language.

The last option, 中国人, is simplified Chinese for Chinese person, not Chinese language.  That error is presumably from some translation program whose use was not overseen by anyone with even rudimentary knowledge of the Chinese language.  Yes, the word Chinese could refer to a person or to the language, but for such a large and well-resourced company to have that mistake on such a prominent website seems rather embarrassing.  I informed the company of this error; time will tell if it will fix it (7/23/12: It's fixed now, to 中文).

The pronunciation of jaune (yellow) in French

A Frenchman mentioned to me today that the au vowel sound in jaune (yellow) is often mispronounced, even by native French speakers, like an English "aw" sound (as in awning), when it should be pronounced like an English long o sound (as in lone).  I realized that I have been making this same mistake for years, possibly influenced by a misplaced expectation for the sound to be like the one in the English word jaundice, which shares the same first four letters.

However, there are many French words wherein the au vowel sound is pronounced like an English long o sound, e.g.:

• au (to the)
• chaud (hot)
• gaufre (waffle)
• haut (high)

so it seems clear to me that the vowel sound in jaune should be pronounced similarly.

This Frenchman said that many people from the Marseille region in France use this "mistaken" pronunciation, although he would classify it more as a regional variant.  Personally, I will try to break my longstanding "mistake", since I prefer to emulate standard Parisian French, and I will make enough other mistakes trying to do so!

Chinese translation: tea; chess

These are a few examples I happened upon in casual conversations with native Chinese speakers.

On one occasion, Mr. A mentioned "red tea", which puzzled some other folks who were also present. He was referring to 紅茶 (hóng chá), whose two characters indeed represent "red" and "tea", respectively.  However, in English we call the same drink black tea.  I could see the color of the tea being considered red (it's typically not black, really), but context trumps piecemeal translational validity, so he would have done better to say either "black tea" or just "tea".

On a separate occasion, when referring to chess, Mr. B called it "international chess".  In China it's called 国际象棋 (guójì xiàngqí; 國際象棋 in traditional Chinese characters) where the first two characters represent "international" (probably in all other contexts) and the last two characters represent the game called "Chinese chess" in English.

Chess is known by a different name in Taiwan:  西洋棋 (xīyángqí).  The first two characters represent "Western", while the last character represents any "chess-like" game (Go, incidentally, is 圍棋 wéiqí in Chinese; the first character represents "to surround", which I gather is what you seek to do to your opponent's stones in the game).  I tried to clarify for Mr. B that in the English language context it doesn't make sense to call the game "international chess" and that he should just refer to it as "chess".  When I subsequently contrasted Chinese chess vs chess, I called the latter "Western chess" to further distinguish it.  Although I was perhaps influenced by the Taiwan name for chess, I was thinking along the common idea of describing Chinese things as from the East and, e.g., American things as from the West, e.g., Eastern religions vs Western religions.

Gender of spoken pronouns in Chinese

In English there is a clear spoken difference between he and she (and also between him and her), but the sound for both (tā) is the same in Chinese. In Chinese, pronouns also don't change if they are used as subjects or objects, so he=him and she=her.


On one occasion I was talking with a native Chinese speaker, Ms. A (甲小姐; jiǎ xiǎojiě). My understanding was that all of the persons she mentioned were also native Chinese speakers.

Ms. A was telling me about Ms. B (乙小姐; yǐ xiǎojiě), who had been entertaining her friend Ms. C (丙小姐; bǐng xiǎojiě) at home when Mr. D (丁先生; dīng xiānsheng) called. It seemed that Ms. B might have been interested in the possibility of exploring a relationship with Mr. D. However, he seemed to have become less enthusiastic about such a possibility after he learned that Ms. B's friend was there -- someone whose gender could not be determined from what Ms. B said over the phone, because 他 (tā) sounds the same both for a male and for a female (even when the female-only 她 (tā) is used for women -- which is only some of the time, in my experience).


On another occasion I was speaking with a native Chinese speaker with whom I periodically use a mixture of Chinese and English. This person was mentioning a transgendered person, and started with something like, "我不知道應該用 he 還是 she."
("Wǒ bù zhīdào yīnggāi yòng he háishi she."; "I don't know if I should use he or she.")

I said with a smile, "用 tā 吧!"
("Yòng tā ba!"; "Use the-Chinese-pronoun-with-the-sound-tā-from-which-gender-cannot-be-determined!")

Speedtest.net Mobile Speed Test

Check broadband speed with this free native iOS app. I had previously used Ookla's http://www.speedtest.net/ website from a PC browser to do the same thing, but checking broadband speed can often more conveniently be done on a mobile computing device. Their app stores results of your broadband speed tests, which you can export to CSV and e-mail.

My broadband speed is regrettably often erratic (both regrettably often erratic and regrettably often erratic), with recent high and low download speeds differing by more than a factor of 12. The Speedtest.net Mobile Speed Test app will help me keep an eye on my provider, who won't be my provider for long if they revisit that low end of broadband speed with any frequency.

You can get additional perspective by using the app to test broadband speed of any wireless Internet access to which you have access.

Difficulties in subtitling foreign language material

In the French language movie Queen To Play (2009), there is a sequence where characters recite chess moves.  One of those moves is Black's bishop to the g4 square, which is mistakenly subtitled "Bishop...j4", an impossible move.

To me that's a strong indication that the person doing the subtitles was not a native French speaker, and also did not know the algebraic notation of chess.  The sound of the French letter g is somewhat like the sound of the English letter j, so someone who was more used to English than French could easily have mistakenly chosen j, particularly if they didn't know that the algebraic notation letters for a square on the chessboard range only between a and h.  A native French speaker, however, is unlikely to write j if they have heard g, even if they knew nothing about chess algebraic notation.

In the French language movie Amélie (2001), one character is directing another character over the phone to a certain page in a book. The spoken French is "Page 51.", but the subtitle says "Page St.". That error seems like someone misread handwriting for 51 as St. I see now that this error (and others) are cited for this film at IMDB, under Goofs > Audio/visual unsynchronized, although my interest is more about the aspects of language underlying such errors, not the errors per se.

Subtitles in pirated works probably take even more of a beating.

In the movie Tape (2001), one character responds to another's question about what time it is with "It's quarter of.", without specifying the hour (i.e., quarter of what). The subtitle is "十五分" (15 minutes). There is no Chinese translation for "quarter of" if the hour is not specified, so this inaccurate subtitle is no surprise.

In Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999), a character says "They went down the ventilation shaft!". According to my memory, a pirated Chinese version used the subtitle "他们出去了" (simplified Chinese for "They went out!"), which lacks the flavor of the original sentence.


11/15/12: Translators rendering subtitles are always under text length limitations, and may be forced to make compromises. For example, not all languages have a single word for "siblings", as English does, and the character count is clearly higher for "brothers and sisters".

2+ iOS international keyboards

If you have two or more international keyboards configured, you can tap-hold the world globe key and then directly select one of the others. That's available in iOS 4.3.5, and may have been available in earlier versions. Tap by itself immediately takes you to the next keyboard.

I normally always have the Chinese (traditional) Handwriting keyboard configured. When I'm including bits of Chinese among English words, as opposed to writing longer text in Chinese, I normally use the English period instead of the Chinese period (。). The Chinese period takes up more space, presumably because within the Chinese context each character or punctuation mark should occupy the same amount of space as any other.

When I temporarily additionally configured the French keyboard, the order of keyboards was English-Chinese-French. I was mildly annoyed that I would have to tap twice to switch from Chinese to English, particularly because I'd be switching back and forth between the two languages frequently. Nice to learn that this is no longer an issue.
1/7/12: Even moreso since I recently added a fourth keyboard, Pinyin for simplified Chinese characters. I haven't devoted a great deal of time learning handwriting for simplified characters, so the Pinyin version of the keyboard for same is quite helpful.

French-English: colocataire, locataire

Years ago I was chatting in French with a Canadian fellow who rented an apartment with a Frenchwoman. I referred to her as his petite amie (girlfriend), whereupon he corrected me and said in French that they were colocataires, which I had always mentally translated as roommates (i.e., she was not his girlfriend).


Today when I was chatting about those folks in French with a different Canadian fellow, I wanted to first mention that they were renters, and I found myself coming up with nothing when searching my mind for the French equivalent. I explained in English my lack of sufficient French vocabulary, and my chat partner replied that the word is locataires.

I mulled this over and realized that while colocataire would probably most commonly be thought of in English as meaning roommate, an alternate translation is joint tenant (per http://www.wordreference.com/fren/colocataire, a great web resource for translation, which has a matching iOS app that I've used on my iPod for months).  From that alternate translation, it is "obvious" that locataire on its own means tenant/renter.

Merci, C.!

S like in sugar; 意義的意; C like in circus

Some years ago, I was talking with a (possibly overseas) telephone support representative, one who did not sound like a U.S. native English speaker. She gave me some sort of an identification code, like S777, and clarified the first character by saying, "S like in sugar". Since the s in sugar is actually pronounced like sh, sugar seemed an odd choice of word. Probably more common would have been to say, "S like in Sam".

---

Another time I was asking a native Chinese speaker for clarification of what the character was for the Chinese word which she had just spoken in some larger sentence context. The Pinyin sound had been yì.

I was rather surprised that she responded, "意義的意" (yìyì de yì; the character in 意義 whose sound is yì). The sound of the first two characters is in fact the same (yì), but a more precise translation is likely "the first yì-sound character in 意義 (i.e., 意).

In English, if somebody ever said something sounded like the c in circus, it seems the most natural interpretation would be that they were referring to the first c (which has the s sound), not the second c (which has the k sound).

(意義 means "meaning".)

The Name "Scott" Transliterated into Chinese

Some years ago I bought the X-Men 2 DVD, which has Chinese subtitles, so that I could watch it multiple times, possibly without audio, to practice reading Chinese characters. One X-Man's name is Scott, which is transliterated into Chinese as 史考特 (Shǐkǎotè). This is one of those instances wherein an English s sound is transliterated into a Pinyin sh sound, which always seems a tad odd to me. 蘇珊 (Sūshān) for Susan is another (okay, okay, that second s in Susan is pronounced like a z in English).

I found 3 additional transliterations of "Scott" in Chinese dictionary apps which used the Pinyin s sound instead of the Pinyin sh sound:

• 司各特 (Sīgètè)
• 斯哥特 (Sīgētè)
• 斯考特 (Sīkǎotè)

The Pinyin ka sound (e.g., 卡 kǎ) may have been a better choice for the second Pinyin syllable. However, the original transliteration might not have been into Mandarin, but into a different Chinese dialect, in which the sound of the character was indeed closer to the English sound.

Anyway, in Flushing, NY, I saw an office's large bilingual streetfront sign asserting wide acceptance of the Pinyin sh transliteration:

ScottTrade 史考特證券
(Shǐkǎotè zhèngquàn; Scott "negotiable securities", i.e., stocks and bonds)

What does an avocado have in common with an alligator?

The other day I looked up the Chinese word for avocado, which is 鱷梨 (èlí). As I stared at the first character (shown in large size above), I felt that from its component parts (the left side of the character is the fish radical) that it just didn't seem to be a "normal" character for a veg..., I mean, a fruit. Popular Internet answers indicate the avocado is a fruit, although I had long thought of it as a vegetable. Being mildly allergic to avocados, I never had much interest in them, until now (linguistically!).

I wondered if that 鱷 character was the same one which I could remember phonetically, but not visually, for alligator (鱷魚; èyú), and indeed it is. I was told that the avocado skin resembles alligator skin, which is understandable. I later realized that the right side of the character might be a stylized rendering of what an alligator's skin looks like.

The second character in avocado, 梨 (lí), means pear. Apparently "alligator pear" is a common enough name for an avocado, although that was new(s) to me.

9/22/13: In Taiwan, avocado is also apparently translated as 洛梨 (luòlí).

The proper Chinese pronunciation of Chen (陳)

Note that the proper spelling of pronunciation has no o before the u; pronounciation is incorrect. Pro - 嫩 (nèn in Pinyin) - ci - a - tion...

陳 (Pinyin: Chén）is a common Chinese last name, often spelled in English as Chen. The way that spelling is typically pronounced in English led me to pronounce 陳 incorrectly in Chinese for quite some time. In English, the "en" portion of Chen, is pronounced like "en" in ten, but that's not the way it's pronounced in Chinese, despite the English spelling being the same as the Pinyin spelling, save for the addition of the 2nd tone.

The "en" portion of 陳 is pronounced more like "un" in sun, as I tested with CED. That "un"-like English sound is the sound of most occurrences of "en" at the end of a Pinyin syllable, e.g., in 分 （fēn; to separate），門 （mén; door）, 很 (hěn; very), and 笨（bèn; foolish).

The only exception is when r precedes "en" in the Pinyin, as in 人 (rén, person). There the "en" portion is pronounced like "en" in ten. That R in Pinyin can be quite a tricky letter, another case of which I wrote about here.

I stumbled upon this 陳 pronunciation issue when a native Chinese speaker asked me if I was saying 陳 or 錢 (qián; money, but also a last name), making me aware of my having improperly carried over an English sound into Chinese.

English idiosyncracies

Did you ever notice that the stress is on the first syllable in preview, but on the second syllable in review?

Tone sandhi, particularly in names

One of the things that makes Chinese challenging to learn is the tone in which a syllable needs to be spoken in order to convey the correct meaning. There are 5 such tones; 4 primary ones, plus a "neutral" tone, the 5th (I will generally not put any number after a neutral tone Pinyin syllable).

There are also tone sandhi, rules which dictate if a tone needs to change to a different tone because of the tone of the following syllable.

And then, there are the inevitable inconsistencies. Here are some among names used to address people.

Bruce Lee's Chinese name is 李小龍. In Pinyin those individual syllables are Li3 Xiao3 long2, but tone sandhi dictates that two third tones in a row should be pronounced as a 2nd and a 3rd tone, respectively.  Thus, his full name is pronounced Li2 Xiao3long2.

That's the same tone sandhi rule that says that if you hear Xu2 Lao3shi1, you cannot know if that is, e.g., 許老師 (Xu3 Lao3shi1) or 徐老師 (Xu2 Lao3shi1), because both names are pronounced the same way due to tone sandhi effects on the former.

However, it seems to be that if a two-syllable word which follows a last name is already two 3rd tones, then you don't apply this tone sandhi rule.  So for 3-character names, you may have to know the tones of the second and third characters to know how you should pronounce the first.

The individual syllables of Yo-Yo Ma's Chinese name 馬友友 are each 3rd tones: Ma3 You3 you3.  However his "given name" of 友友 in some ways is a unit on its own, and tone sandhi already changes it to be pronounced You2you3.  For his name, that renders moot the idea of tone sandhi for 馬, which is now followed by a 2nd tone, not by a 3rd tone.

This same pattern repeats for President Ma of Taiwan: 馬總統 is Ma3 Zong3tong3, which is pronounced Ma3 Zong2tong3. This would also be the case for any random "Boss Ma", 馬老闆: Ma3 Lao3ban3 would change from tone sandhi to be pronounced Ma3 Lao2ban3. (Woo, I must have forgotten how 闆 is written, that feels a bit odd.)

Tone sandhi applies to the name of Confucius, 孔子, whose individual syllables are Kong3 Zi3, but which is pronounced Kong2 Zi3. Of course, when I first encountered his name that was not obvious to me, since most or all the words I'd encountered with 子 in it did not have it pronounced as zi3, but as zi (neutral tone), e.g., 孩子 (hai2 zi; child)，兒子 (er2 zi; son). I consequently mistakenly thought it was pronounced Kong3 zi. Probably 子 is always pronounced Zi3 when it is part of someone's name.

In English the indefinite article a changes to an when followed by a vowel, e.g., an apple. Tone sandhi is vaguely like that, but rather more difficult.  The tone sandhi rule I described above is one of the most striking, but there are other tone sandhi rules, too.