Learning Chinese is immensely difficult and the process often throws up its fair share of embarrassing mistakes. The fluent in Mandarin, former Liberal Democrat leader, Lord Ashdown tells a great anecdote about how he accidentally asked a “very proper Chinese lady at a dinner party if she had ever sat on a flying penis”. What he meant to ask, naturally, was if she had ever flown on an aircraft.
Now, for the first time, similar such errors have been compiled into a full book in comic strip format. When Chinese Goes Wrong, is a collection of outre things that purportedly happen in Chinese learning classrooms. Here are just a few tamer examples from this wonderful volume, being both a bit less sexual and much less likely to cause a diplomatic incident.
T: Marie, you’re looking very tired today.
M: Yeah, I didn’t get a good night’s sleep yesterday
T: Oh? Why not?
M: I had coffee yesterday-it was way too mighty！
T: Who can make a sentence with the word “accumulate”?
S1: My Dad’s a Merchant. He’s accrued a lot of wealth.
S2: Our teacher’s great. He’s accrued lots of experience.
S3: That guy’s a bit of a playboy; he’s accrued a whole lot of girlfriends!
M: Teacher, I want to kiss you…
T: Kiss me?
M: Yes. What does this character mean?
T: Oh you meant “ask”…really gave me a fright there!
(Note: In Mandarin, the words 吻 (wěn) and 问 (wèn), meaning “kiss” and “ask” respectively, sound quite similar to one another, but differ in tone)
T: Hey there, man, you’re not looking too hot today. What’s up?
F (sighing): My girlfriend broke up with me.
I really don’t understand why she blew me.
(Note: In Mandarin, if someone and someone were “blown” 吹了 (chuī le), it means they broke-up. Yet to say someone “blew” someone means something quite different…)
K: Aw man, this is great!
T: D’you know who built the Great Wall?
K: Qin Shihuang! I know him!
T: Ha! Yeah well next time you see the guy be sure to say hello to him from me.
(Note: The phrase 认识 (rènshí) does not mean to “know of” someone, but rather, in many contexts, it means quite specifically to know someone socially. For example, in this case, it would be more correct to say 我知道他是谁, or “I know who he was”.
You can buy a copy of When Chinese Goes Wrong here