The travels of Justin

Two days ago I received a text-message written in Chinese from a friend of mine who I know does not understand a lot of English. Since Spring Festival and the Chinese Lunar New Year is upon us, I figured I’d better work fast to understand the meaning of the message. After 2.5 hours of painstakingly translating each character, I finally understand that I’ve been invited to eat dumplings with her family. Now if only I could respond…

My First Translation

Feeling confident, I attempted to write a special new year greeting to my friends — in Chinese! Ha ha! I can only imagine how funny my bad Chinese came across, but here are some of equally well-intentioned and sometimes amusing responses I received:

“Oh, My God ,Justin .Your Chinese Are So Good That I Can Not Understand The Difficult Sentence !:)But Thank You For Your Message .”

“HAPPY NEW YEAR ©”

“On this special day ,I send you New Year’s greetings and may the New Year bring many good things and rich blessing to you and all those you love!”

It’s really important when you are travelling to put yourself out on the line, don’t be afraid of being misunderstood, and just practice what you learn at every chance you get. I’m sure that in 20 days my classmates will be asking me how I chose my words and having a good laugh. At the end of the day, I learn something new and we all have fun and respect each other for struggling through the process of learning a new language.

Already we’ve been listening to fireworks and firecrackers going off day and night, but the frequency is increasing as the new year eve (today) approaches. I had been warned when I first arrived that all night long the rapid popping of firecrackers would eventually blend into a single solid continuous noise. We’ve purchased lots of fireworks including a 3-inch mortar that should be particularly exciting tonight.

I asked a friend where would be a good place to watch other people’s fireworks, thinking that it might be extra spectacular in a big park or something. Apparently, residential areas are the most spectacular and I’m told to watch out for fireworks being launched from people’s balconies.

I’ll have my camera and tripod ready and hope to get lots of interesting pictures.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 28th, 2006 at 3:42 pm and is filed under Tianjin, China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.