Stephan Stiller says that my post on "Good good study; day day up" reminds him of "people mountain, people sea" (rénshānrénhǎi 人山人海), i.e., "crowded; packed; a sea of people". This is another fairly complex Chinglishism that has entered the vocabulary of many English speakers who know no Chinese. It was popularized by a Hong Kong music production company that took this expression as its name, and there was also a Hong Kong film that used this expression as its title.
In addition, Stephan raised the matter of the ubiquitous question "Want to play?" (in the sense of "Wanna [go out or hang out and] do something together and have fun?") as uttered by mainland-Chinese grad students in the US. He suspects that this phrase must be pervasive in Chinese ESL materials. There would seem to be no other sensible explanation for its high frequency, or perhaps it could be social propagation. But -– when mainland-Chinese grad students use English in English emails among each other — in which contexts does this question occur?
"Want to play?" is undoubtedly related to Mandarin (chūqù / lái) wánr (出去 / 来)玩儿 ("[go out {somewhere} / come {over}] to play"). Yet this is not to say that — when Chinese students talk in English –- all they say comes via word-for-word translation from Chinese. Somehow this particular phrase has gained unusual currency among mainland-Chinese grad students in America, but there must be many other expressions and phrases of this sort.
Incidentally, I have always been astonished at how many Chinese people (not just grad students and undergraduates) write e-mails to each other in English, or in Chinese that is heavily laced with English. When I ask them why they do this rather than use more Chinese, the usual answer is that "it's easier".
It is interesting that grad students from Taiwan have a noticeably different sort of English than those from the mainland, and, of course, the English of those from Hong Kong is of yet a another sort. Taiwan grad student English tends to be more American and Hong Kong more British, but mainland grad student English is, as my elders used to say, neither fish nor fowl (neither American nor British). Rather, it is sui generis, a thing unto itself.
A colleague of mine who grew up in China and was actually an English major identifies PRC standard English as having an RP (Received Pronunciation). He describes this as "a nondescript version of pronunciation no ordinary native speaker uses in the UK except for some trained language professionals (at that time those working for a language educational material company called Linguaphone, something like Rosetta Stone in the US)."
As for the vocabulary of mainland-Chinese English, a significant portion of it is drawn from what may be called "Xinhua English" or "New China News (Agency) English". I have touched upon this in a number of earlier posts, including "Protests, Complaints, and Representations" and "Xinhua English and Zhonglish".
Stephan is curious to know if anyone is aware of other unusual turns of phrase that are characteristic of English as it is spoken in China and by Chinese living abroad (of the actual-use variety, not the "funny mistranslation on a sign or menu" type).
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