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Thursday, March 3, 2011

Chinglish Part 2

As promised, today's post is some more examples of great Chinglish.  Our apartment complex is constantly posting notices inside of the elevators and this post mostly came about because they recently decided to try to translate them into English.  I'm guessing that is because they suspect us foreigners are mostly the problem on some of these things (for good reason, but that's another post).  Anyway, they've been bringing great joy to Tom and I and have even been adding to our battery of common phrases.  Unfortunately, I realized as I uploaded these photos, I missed some of the very best ones, but these ones are pretty good too.


As a result of this one, if one of us is being too loud at night (usually me) we'll shush the other and say, "soften the situation!"  Another common thing we say is, "you're disturbing the abatement!" because one of the ones I miss said something about that.  Yet another common nighttime phrase from one that I didn't get a picture of is for us to say, "stop using the drag approach!" when one of us drags a chair.  I also particularly like the iron stock quarreling line.


This one isn't so bad but I like the last line, "A taste of home life...We need to work together!!"


Short and sweet, but this one has stuck with us.  We are constantly telling each other not to "simultaneously cry out two elevators."


This final one is actually from a sign posted at a rest stop I saw on our way to Taipei last weekend (look for a temple/Taipei trip post later).  I have no idea what they're trying to say, but it sure sounds nice.

While these are all hilarious and I love them, I want to stress that I'm enjoying the hilarity of it, not making fun of whoever wrote it.  I can't even write, "hello" in Chinese.  English is dang hard.  I know this because as I teach I realize that even though I speak English fluently I can't even begin to explain why it works the way it does.  It has so many quirks.  In fact in (maybe) my next post I'm going to talk about teaching and I'll show you one student who's English skills (among other things) seriously impress me.

I feel the need for closure at the end of my posts, but don't feel like saying things like, "so long!" or "til later!" so for now I'm just going to say:

The End

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