Mangled English - The Album

Throughout this trip, I have been continuously amazed by the terrible yet wonderful things that English can do in the hands of non-native speakers. Excluding our friend in Prague who was responsible for joylessness way (which, I fear, may never be topped), the Chinese must have some claim to be the undisputed masters of mangled English. Examples of their exquisite crafting of English sentences abound in Chongqing, and they run the gauntlet from the incomprehensible to the unintentionally genius. The best will still be showcased here, but I am - alas - far too lazy to devote a blog post to every double entendre or pile of garble that I come across.

It is thus with great pleasure that I invite you to peruse Mangled English: the Album. Yes, there is an album. On Picasa. That you can look at. The album will grow in time and new photos will appear on the interweb, but here is a teaser of the delights that lie in store if you click here:



These were spotted in our hotel in Chengdu a few weeks ago, and left us wondering just what do they do that is so uncomplimentary? Grow little spines to leave you with hideous cuts? Shout at you and tell you you're doing it all wrong? Laugh at the poor guy who's using it and tell him he should have bought a smaller size? Suggestions as to behaviours of uncomplimentary condoms are of course welcome.

Mangled Names

One of the many wonderful things about the language school where we are teaching is that all the pupils at the school are given English first names to use. This is an absolute lifesaver, as it saves me having to learn the near-identical sounding (but, alas, tonal and thus likely to be badly mangled by my foreign tongue) Chinese names of over 100 students.

There seems, however, to be very little consistency as to how our students acquire their English names. Some of the little kids who are just starting English classes are named by us, but many of our students arrive with English names intact. And some these names are wonderful. Absolutely, head-spinningly wonderful. Between us, Katie and I are currently teaching:

- Scrabble
- Derail
- Sharpie
- Moon
- Susie (boy)
- Tessie (boy)
- Uriel
- Sun
- Sago
- Ice
- Sesame
- Thunder
- GeeGeeBoy

Now some of these missteps I can understand. Some kids seem just to directly translate the meaning of their Chinese name into English, but whilst 'Little Cloud' might be a perfectly lovely name in Chinese, it is a rather less than wonderful moniker in English. Although, y'know,Sun,Moon, and Ice actually sound pretty cool. Others, however, seem to have just opened a dictionary and picked names out completely at random. Scrabble? Sharpie??? Derail???? Why on earth, when a child is looking for an English name, would anyone happen upon 'derail' in a dictionary and decide they want the little darling to be named after a train accident?

And finally, GEEGEEBOY????. There are quite simply not enough WTFs in the universe.

Speed Blogging / Mangled English III

Ah yes, so the blog died again. Oops. I did mean to do it, but somehow between eating huge amounts of dumplings (my trip is basically a tour of Communism and dumplings), learning to appreciate Sichuan spice, loving the fun that is warbling at the KTV bar and, oh yeah, teaching some people some stuff, it got rather forgotten and neglected.

As this blog has only just reached Beijing and is now officially a month behind true time, I have decided to give up any attempts at comprehensiveness, and as such the blog is just going to magically skip forward to today, March twenty-whateverth. The month in a nutshell: there was a very expensive teahouse, time spent wandering round Xi'an at four in the morning, a lovely apartment, some hotpot, a drunken training session in Chengdu, an ultrasound, pandas, some lost piss, and a shiny new permanent residency card. They were all supposed to be blog posts and some of them are even half-written, but, alas, apart from the oblique references above they are now sadly lost to the vagaries of time as I cannot be bothered to write them. Although in cryptic, abbreviated form my month does sound like one long drug-induced dream, which makes me feel more interesting than I actually am.

So anyway, this blog will now morph back into normal, Prague-style mode in which instead of posting tedious updates about 'places what I have been to' and 'stuff what I have done' I will just, as the fancy takes me, post tidbits and random musings about life in China. And where better to start than with a celebration of unintentionally prescient Chinglish? I happened upon this little gem today in Eling Park:



P.S. For those of you that care (Mum), I have just put a few pics of Chongqing up in my Picasa. This album will grow as I add more over the next few days, so stay tuned to see some pretty pics of neon lights etc.

Mangled English Part 2

And so to China, and where better to start than with some Mangled English. This series of posts has sadly lain dormant for over a month as there were no deserving successors to joylessness way, but predictably China has furnished us with some blogworthy examples of what English can do when it is chopped up, mashed to a pulp, and then stuck back together with kiddy PrittStick.

This first one is taken from the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, which is, in case you haven't heard of it, rather a major tourist attraction. Given that the Chinese government is supposed to have, erm, improved the quality of Beijing’s English signs in the run up to the Olympics, I dread to think what this read like a couple of years ago.


(Click on the photo to make it a readable size)

Alright then. So, even if you’ve remembered to ‘dress properly,’ have satisfactorily shown your ‘ticket, monthly ticket and year ticket when entering the park’ and resisted the temptation to bring in those nefarious watermelons, you’re not quite in the clear; those superstitious activities and other lavatorial behaviours are hard to avoid, kids. And remember, no leaking allowed.

Mangled English: Part 1

Apologies for the long absence - I imagine you've attributed it to laziness, but in actuality it's taken me days to wrestle back control of the blog from a pesky little bear named Gunther. He sits there crying, little furry paws tapping frantically on the keys, and I hadn't the heart to tear him away. He's also keeps giving me a real case of the side eye; I'm not sure he's forgiven me yet for the abandonment and for having been left with such inappropriate 'babysitters.'

Anyway, there will be a real post soon, I promise, but as I am going out in a few minutes I shall content myself for now with part one of what I imagine will be a frequently recurring series over the next few months: Mangled English.

As I'm sure you can imagine, we have encountered lots of, well, creative uses of the English language during our time in Prague, not least the strange purposes to which George subjects my poor mother tongue. Now, I am not being critical here; I understand that most Czech people's English is about a million times better than my Czech, which after four weeks here unfortunately still mainly consists of the rabid overuse of prosim, flagrant mispronunciation of the words nashledanou and děkuji, and the use of Russian numbers as I can't quite ever remember the Czech ones. So no, no criticisms from me. Indeed, I believe that the creative possibilities of English are best revealed when it is dragged through a hedge backwards by an over-enthusiastic learner, and as such I shall delight in sharing their nuggets of wisdom with you all.

Exhibit A in the mangled English freak parade is this genuine and unadulterated section of a restaurant review taken from the English page of Prague's free weekly magazine, which aptly demonstrates why some people should never be left unsupervised in the presence of a thesaurus. Unfortunately, this is the restaurant I'm going to tonight, and so I must admit I am a little concerned about the following:

'But why not spoil ourselves with a little bit of bliss at least through the digestive tract, when all the food speedily turns into joylessness way and everybody has got a headache from it? It's good to try in this case, when such bliss will cost you all the money that you've earned in the last month. The newcomer will probably be fascinated with the pleasant interior's conception....the whole environment is completed with other sensual adornments, because in the tearooms the taste is not the only thing that is important. The visitors would surely wish a little bit more from attentive waiters, whose laxity can be excused perhaps only by the temperament and habits in the latitudes, from where they come from.'