Vociferous Enthusiasm for Chinglish
You gotta love it when you get corrected for your chinese. Especially by a wrong-type-of-asian.
Here’s the actual email conversation:
Andrew and Dennis send out an invite for dinner:
bq. Hey guys and girl,
bq. Dennis and I were thinking about getting dinner tonight at Ay Chong, a noodle shop next to Maxim. We’re going at 7:45 if anybody would like to join us. Let me know if you can make it. By the way, this is an open invite.
I respond:
bq. ay4 ya2. ay chong. ne4 me2 hao3 chi1 ma2?
bq. thanks for the open invite !
which loosely translated is: “Oh boy. Ay Chong [the name of the restaurant]. Is the food that good there?”
Which elicits this response from Ruban:
bq. actually, “ay ya” is ai1 ya1… we just covered that yesterday.
bq. not really sure what you’re trying to say with “ay chong”
bq. the rest is: ni3 mei2 hao3 chi1 ma? (ma is neutral tone)
bq. if you’re gonna use pinyin & tones, get it right dude :-p
Here comes the fun part:
“ni3 mei2 hao3 chi1 ma?” doesn’t make sense. Translated literally, as I understand it, it means “you not good eat right?” Which I would loosely translate to something like “You have nothing good to eat?” which still doesn’t make sense in our context.
Firstly, ai ya. I’m pretty sure it’s 2nd tone. Kinda means “Damn!” No one says damn like their humming it. And secondly, if you’re gonna correct someone, at least figure out what they’re saying first.
We had a great hour of laughter at your expense on Friday, Ling2 Lu4 [Da4] Bien4. “Road side feces” (:
“If you’re gonna use pinyin & tones, get it right dude[!]”
Seriously though, we’re [semi]mighty proud of you in your progress of our secret code language. Maybe you can actually say “tsai” correctly now.
Happy Thanksgiving in China.