Grammar and Tones

This blog is not for you. It is not for anyone. This blog is just for myself. It is an opportunity for myself to reflect on a life that was defined by a seemingly never-ending odyssey of moves around the world, immersing myself in other cultures, and experiencing the good and the bad of it.

I have lived in 10 different places in 5 different countries, and travelled to more than 30 countries. Hence, this could have been a travel blog. It is not a travel blog though. Travel blogs are meant to inspire, to show you pictures of beautiful and exotic locations, to show you that life is beautiful. My phone is full of these sort of photos, trust me. But if you are looking for this, then I’m sorry to tell you: this blog is not for you. This blog is about the reality of life of life between the cultures: the good and the bad, the unexpected curveballs that are sometimes thrown at you, the understandings and misunderstandings of living in different cultures and countries and speaking different languages.

This blog is also about grammar and tones. Chinese, a language in which after almost five years of living in China I have become reasonably fluent in (yet nowhere near native), is a tonal language. Achieving this has taken me thousands of hours of hard work: I took daily 2-hour one-on-one classes in for most of my time in China. And yet: my tones suck. There are four tones in Mandarin Chinese, and my chances of using the right one are just marginally above 25%. This is actually not too bad, since when I listen to beginners of Chinese, I get the impression that most people use the wrong tones with such an astonishing consistency that I feel they must have achieved true mastery in order to mess it up so reliably.

The misunderstandings of tones

It is a common belief that in Chinese, getting the tone wrong invariably changes the meaning from a polite sentence to an outrageous insult. A typical example is the word for mother (mā, 妈) and the word for horse (mǎ, 马). Both are pronounced “ma”, but one sounds singing a constant note sounds like a vibrato. But this is not a problem: I’m sure I must have called my mother-in-law (who is Chinese) a horse a thousand times, but not once was she upset even in the slightest. This is because everybody knows that I’m a stupid foreigner who doesn’t know how to speak Chinese properly. And everybody knows that when you’re speaking in a friendly voice to a close family member, you’re not gonna randomly start insulting them as a horse.

The trouble with tones is much more subtle. Take the words for “to buy” (mǎi, 买) and “to sell” (mài, 卖). These are conveniently exactly the same syllable, bar the tone (the former is the above mentioned vibrato, the latter is best explained by angrily shouting at someone). Don’t ask me how a language could evolve in a way to seemingly maximise the confusion for such pairs of words! Now the all-time favourite topic of casual conversations in China (from my very subjective point of view) is about buying and selling houses (hello, housing market crash, I saw you come years before it happened, but that’s a topic for another post). One day, I was hence casually chatting to my horse-in-law, sorry, mother-in-law, if after acquiring her 7th house (yes, 7th, that is), it might be time to sell some, or buy more. So the conversation went something like this:

Me: If you’ve got 7 houses, and your neighbour owns 7 houses, and your middle-aged bridge-club auntie friends each own 7 houses, then I think it’s time to sell.

Mother-in-law: Do you mean buy or sell?

Me: Well, it seems like everybody is buying at the moment and nobody lives in there, so I would sell now.

Horse-in-law: Do you mean sell or buy?

Me: Look, the market is crazy right now, I think you should definitely sell and not buy!

Horse-in-law: Do you mean buy rather than sell or sell rather than buy?

Me: You know what? Forget it.

And here is the moment of the true insult due to wrong tones. It’s very subtle. A friendly light-hearted conversation ended with the frustration that mutual understanding didn’t happen today. It ended with the slightly bitter feeling that the light-heartedness faded and eventually turned into indifference. And the sad fact is that this very small insult of indifference was real: everyone knows, I would not call anyone a horse, but people don’t know if I am really a bit indifferent to them, or if I’m exhausted of the foreign language I’m trying to speak.

The misunderstandings of grammar

Chinese counts as one of the hardest languages to learn (for native English speakers), but we often forget that this conversely means that English is one of the hardest languages to learn for native Chinese speakers. This is because English (and most other Western languages) have an obstruse concept that Chinese largely hasn’t: grammar. We distinguish past, present, and future, active and passive, you, me, or they, hypothetical or factual, and a lot of other things, without even thinking about it by simply adding some consonant to a verb.

Many years ago, when I was a PhD student in London, I might have come home frustrated sometime when I had had a bad day where all my experiments went wrong my research seemed to be going nowhere and say to my then-girlfriend:

You know what? I’d really like to just quit my PhD and move to Spain to open a hostel. I’d meet interesting people every day, and could listen to their travel stories all day long.

My wife wouldn’t pick up the ‘d in “I’d” so quickly, but it has an important function in English. She would hear:

You know what? I just quit my PhD and now I’m moving to Spain to open a hostel. I’m meeting interesting people there, and need to listen to their stories.

And she would panic and wonder how I could leave her alone like this all of a sudden, and she might respond:

When are you leaving?

Now there is a whole spectrum of levels of seriousness from an off-the-cuff remark after a frustrating day to a specific executable plan. We never really mean anything 100% or 0%, the truth will typically be somewhere in-between. Gauging where this level-of-seriousness lies based on the linguistic nuances in a language that is not the native language of either of the speakers is extremely difficult. And this is the misunderstanding potential of grammar in intercultural exchange. Again, it is subtle. It is easy to clarify that I haven’t booked any tickets yet. But it’s not so easy to make sure that both sides have the same understanding of the level-of-intent. What might sound like a 5% to one person might sound like 25% to the other. If you have the same cultural background and speak the same language, your understanding of each other is gradually going to converge to the same value, but if grammar and tones separate you, you might eventually start to feel that you converged, when in fact all you did is get used to the way the other person speaks.