Tree, shù (Sounds like: sue.) Book, shū (Sounds like: sue.) Horse, mǎ.
Awesome things about Mandarin: there’s no verb conjugation and no feminine/masculine. Major challenge about Mandarin: it’s a tonal language.
Which Rich likes to remind me of, generally at moments when I’m making his ears bleed, clumsily repeating sounds to the point of making them other words.
Just after Emmy and I had mastered tree — sue — I saw Rich pointing to the books on her bookshelf and telling her: sue.
“What?” I stopped folding her clothes. “Are you kidding me?”
“You pay attention with a glass of wine, to find the nuance,” he told me. “You have to do the same with the words.”
Repeating that here it maybe sounds cute or super cheezy. But being told it was just annoying. Though I followed his point.
Tree, shù, is high and light. (Listen here.) Book, shū, is low and quick. (Listen here.)
Another trickster is horse: ma. A light, easy, ma. Sometimes when I take Em for a run in Prospect Park we pass a few lethargic horses dutifully toting riders along a path. Can ma, ma? I’ve started to say, knowing can is to see, ma (as you know) turns the words into a question and — since our recent trip to the Outer Banks, where wild horses did the gardening — that ma is horse.
Over dinner, I asked Rich about the awkwardness of the back-to-back “ma” and he laughed that there were actually five “ma” words — all different tonally, of course.
In high school I had a job involving a cash register and I used to think of giving $0.41 of change — one quarter, one dime, one nickel and one penny — as the jackpot of change.
Surely someone saying, “Ma ma ma ma ma?” is the jackpot of Mandarin translation.
Now, to sit tight and wait for the need for someone to ask: “Did the mother scold the horse?”
