Catshanghai

In this earlier post I complained about the stress of living in a place where I am “doomed to waste time understanding and being understood.”

This is still an issue or I would not choose to resurrect such a gloomy old blog post. The difference these days is that I am enjoying my summer holidays. Thirty degrees celsius, a daily bike ride, all the time in the summer and plenty of sleep equip me with forgotten reserves of patience and tolerance towards all sorts of challenges and bad news.

Still, a couple of incidents have reminded me that I still have trouble understanding and being understood whether I am speaking Chinese or English.

People in this city like to speak Shanghainese or Shanghaihua. It is the language of family and back room deals. I live in a working class Chinese neighbourhood near Nanpu Bridge where Shanghainese is spoken almost exclusively. Of course all locals can speak Mandarin, but it is in a slurred accent that is supposed to be the Chinese equivalent of Geordie or Scots.

It seems that Shanghainese people over the age of 50 have great difficulty understanding foreigners mispronounce Mandarin. My spoken Chinese is still proto pidgin, but I know more than a thousand words. I can even string together multi clause sentences such as ‘Yinwei wo meiyou ya, wo bu hui chi tiandian’. (I can’t eat dessert, because I have no teeth). My wife and colleagues have no trouble understanding my laughable attempts at speaking Chinese. Unfortunately, this basic repertoire does not cut it with aging locals who just don’t understand my poor grammar and tone deaf pronunciation.

Today I tried to tell my wife’s aunt that I wanted to get a new key cut. The only way I could get her to understand was to show her a bunch of keys and get her to call my wife to translate my instructions into authentic Chinese.

It’s not just Chinese that is causing me trouble. I have started to use a phone transciption service called Jott . I tried using this service (in English) to create Google Calendar entries, E-mails to self, Remember The Milk tasks and new Evernote reminders. The Lifehacker set have been raving about this service for months, because it is free and makes use of Indian call centres to convert audio into text that is then used to update a plethora of aforementioned web services.

The idea is convenient and fascinating, although I am ethically ambivalent about a poor bugger from Bangalore transcribing my voicemail for $2 an hour. I have read the tutorials and followed the examples, but I can’t get Jott to understand my perfectly clear British English. When I tried to dictate ‘Introduction to Computer Systems’ Jott mistook my entry as ‘In seduction, that can take this.’ Maybe I need to improve my accuracy by dictating my Jott entries in the style of John Wayne.

Try it for yourself to see if you have more success with Jott than me. You need an American telephone number to start using the Jott service, but this is easy enough to setup if you become a Rebtel user, even if you are in China.

The nub of this post is that doesn’t matter if you speak good English or poor Mandarin. People will still struggle to understand so you may as well talk to your cat, which is a lot less trouble.

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