ITS happening to I

BECAUSE I’ve been in a Chinese speaking country for so long, SO my English is starting to become Chinglified. ALTHOUGH I try hard to keep my proper English by reading lots and being a stickler for using appropriate vocabulary AND SO ON, BUT it’s hard to maintain American English while being so far removed from it. IN A WORD, HOW TO speak English correctly REALLY is becoming more difficult.

I realized that this was actually becoming a problem while walking home this afternoon after teaching a class; I said to myself “Because it’s such a nice day outside, so I decided to walk home” without thinking much of it. “Because…so…” (along with “although…, but…”) are both typical Chinicisms (ooh, yay for neologisms) and are actually just direct translation from the Chinese grammatical construction. But that’s not all that worries me.

Last night, while looking for a list of common errors of Chinese learners of English I came across a website Common English errors in Chinese, which is a list discussion by different English teachers about problems that they’ve found with their own Chinese students. As I was reading some of the items brought up by other teachers I kept on thinking to myself “Huh, that’s not correct?”

Case in point: “My city is a beautiful city!” It’s the way most any Chinese will describe her/his hometown when probed on the subject. Now, either I’ve been living with the Chinese for too long, or there is nothing wrong with describing a city as ‘beautiful.’ The poster’s argument was that he wouldn’t describe Detroit as a beautiful city…and I think I can agree with him on that point* (*DISCLAIMER- My only knowledge about the city of Detroit comes from Eminem’s masterpiece 8 Mile. For all I know it could be a lovely city.) However, I might reconsider on, say, Dunkirk (a town in northern France best-known for the famous French retreat at the beginning of WWII where English fisherman were rowing across the Channel to help bring French and British forces across), or Dubrovnik (so I’m told, and I’ll back up if it’s anything like Split and the rest of southern Croatia), or Dali (a smaller city in the Yunnan province—read only like 1 million people—and the capital of the Bai minority), or even maybe Denver (the mile-high city famous for the worst NBA team in the league :ob ). Am I just completely out of touch?

In that same vein, there’s also apparently a problem with saying “It’s REALLY a beautiful city” instead of “It’s a REALLY beautiful city.” I’ll admit that the meaning is a bit different, but, in my mind, they’re both correct sentences.

The one thing that I could agree on was one poster’s comment that “[he]'d like to get [his] hands on the person who first suggested the use of ‘and so on’ to [his] students!” If he could find that person, I’d be right there along with him. I think it’s a direct translation problem because in Chinese, when you’re making a list, you would end it with a “shenme de.” That would best be translated as “and so on,” but literally means something more like “and what else.” The problem is that they just don’t use the expression correctly. As far as I’m concerned, when you use the expression “and so on” in English, you need to be talking about a very specific category of things so that the listener/reader can quickly get a picture of what the “so on” might be. For example, if you like eating fruits, you might say that, “I really like eating fruits like strawberries, blueberries, and so on.” Obviously the point here was that you meant you like eating berries—of course you could have just said so in the first place. The Chinese usage is something more like “My favorite hobbies are reading, swimming, and so on.” To what, pray tell (is that the right ‘pray’ there?), is that “so on” referring?! Shooting small children with pellet guns?

And while we’re on misused expressions: “in a word” is, in a word, an offender. I suppose that technically there’s nothing wrong with it, but I don’t think that it’s used all the commonly in America. Plus, I’ve decided that they’re using it all wrong. The Chinese version: “In a word, I really like my hometown and would like to be your guide if you could come to visit.” It’s essentially used in China to mean something like “in summary” or “in conclusion” as the beginning of a concluding paragraph or sentence. I honestly have no idea if that’s correct at all, but I decided to make a new rule for my students: if you use “in a word” in a sentence, you only get one word to follow it.

In a word, it hasn’t worked yet. :o)