How slips of the tongue make me mean and dumb

I've become both an idiot and a jerk since I started learning Chinese. This degeneration in my demeanor stems from this fact: By raising the bar on my Mandarin level, I've increased both my capabilities of communication and miscommunication.

A Chinese friend who speaks impeccable English recently offered me some wise advice: I was too shy to try, and this was the greatest obstacle to my language learning. So, he said, I needed a "thick face" and must "be OK with sounding a little stupid" to make real progress.

But I've found that I'm not the only one who needs a "thick face" when I speak Chinese. Because for a native English speaker like me, it just takes a small slip of the tongue to become a rude dude in putonghua.

For example, for more than a year, I would tell people who spoke too quietly: "Ni shuo shenme? Wo bu ting ni." Word by word, these sentences literally translate as: "You say what? I no hear you." So, it seemed to me as if the meaning would be pretty close to: "What did you say? I didn't hear you."

But that would be: "Qing zai shuo yi bian (Please again speak one time). Wo ting bu dao (I hear no arrive)." What I had been saying instead meant: "What (the heck) are you saying? I don't want to hear what you have to say."

It's somewhat like when I would ask unidentified callers: "Ni shi shei?" Again, according to a literal, word-by-word translation, it would seem to mean: "You be who?" But upon overhearing one of my phone conversations, a Chinese friend informed me that it would be more polite to say: "Ni shi shui?"

Apparently, using shei - a colloquial term that Beijing people often use - instead of shui for "who" changed the sentence's connotation to: "Who (the heck) are you?"

But it was for about six months after I came to China that callers were telling me "who the heck" they were.

A potentially embarrassing social situation caused by my muddled Mandarin happened recently when I told a table of chain-smoking Chinese chums: "Wo zhidao hen shao Zhongguoren xihuan Zhongnanhai, yinwei ta bu tai lie." The intended meaning was: "I know few Chinese people like Zhongnanhai, because they're not very strong."

I was talking about the cigarette brand; they thought I was talking about the Communist Party of China's central headquarters - a metonym of the national leadership.

Sensing the sudden awkwardness among my tablemates after my declaration, I started tapping a pack of Zhongnanhais on the table and slapping my flexed bicep to clarify my intended meaning. Eventually, they got the point.

There are countless other examples, mostly involving innocent confusions of tones resulting in unintended vulgarity against innocent Chinese; surely, my linguistic foul-ups have sometimes made me foul-mouthed.

And so, I'm hoping to take this as my opportunity to say, on behalf of my rude, crude self for my past and future Mandarin mistakes and resultant discourteous demeanor: "Bu hao yisi (I'm sorry)".

And I'll just have to hope that means exactly what I think it does in this context.

(China Daily 11/30/2007 page20)