Before I flew to Beijing, I practiced on a few words of Chinese, just what I learned off the internet. And boy, did I come up short! Apart from “Nihau”, not a single word I spoke was understood by my Chinese friends! They just stared at me and smiled politely. Much later I learned that a single word can have as much as five completely different meanings, just by pronouncing them differently. And these differences are far from obvious. They are extremely subtle. I felt like I had a fat tongue, making a complete hash of everything I said!
“Hi I poop walk dishwasher from here to India completely sleep horse walk surely smile!” This must be how I sounded to many of the Chinese I tried to converse with. Looking back, it’s funny as hell. I just wish a chinese tourist would come up to me in Amsterdam and talk to me like that. We’d be friends for life!
Jeroen Breukels
